Abir Almajed

Abir Almajed is a text-based artist who has exhibited in Europe and the Middle East. She describes her textual works as “a space to allow her grief to be present, by visualizing elegies or inner-dialogues; she is unafraid to show her vulnerability by intentionally adding elements of imperfections to her work in order to embrace the works, inviting viewers to sit with what is usually unspoken”.

These text-based compositions in Abir Almajed’s portfolio are created with paint (with sometimes an appearance of ink) but are not so much paintings in a conventional sense. Rather, these fragments are documentative and fluxus in nature and are essentially about script as visual substance, rather than pure image-making. In Abir Almajed’s works, we will find whispers and fragments of emotions, inner-dialogue and discourse which is not meant to be shared, but rather, hinted at. We will find the script to be almost unreadable, as the texts are blurred with black and white pigment. This intentional ‘erasure’ and concealment reveals a sense of privacy and intimate reflection to just offer hints and clues as to her state of mind to the audience.

Like a fine silk veil, the text-based works are a concealed disclosure of past and future instances. These compositions document the artist’s state of mind in textual form and offer more clues in the smears and blurs of the texts, as opposed to the texts themselves. The intense ‘electrical interference’ we will find in the texts is meant to convey a sense of disturbance and haunting nature. The audience is guided towards these planes of dialogue as if an apparition were trying to communicate to individuals, only to be silenced by the dimensions of actuality. 

Untitled V. 3 (pictured above) depicts a monochromatic plane. The texts are distanced and spacious within the breakup of the lines and intense streaks of black underline each phrase. This dichotomy between accentuation and silence reveals a discourse based in seeking to be heard, only for the barriers of communication to be broken down.

With an investigative approach, Abir Almajed uses texts as a means of visual purpose and meaning in contemporary art. Her thoughtful approach to convey silenced and disrupted emotional impulses through intent-driven forms of pigmented interference communicate, or rather miscommunicate, between texts as aesthetics and symbols of intention. We are left with a realm of vivid distortion based on the concept of texts as visually substantive which portrays drama and theatrics through how textual contexts is composed rather than purely read comprehension. Abir Almajed’s imagination is based on deconstructing the meaning of communication through texts as whispers and haunted imagery, a ghostly presence which hints of fragments conveying mystery and enticing the viewer to investigate.