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Alqumit Alhamad Foreign Object painting January 10 – 31
Opening Saturday January 10, 12-16
Foreign Object brings together photography, watercolor, painting, and sculpture created during Alqumit Alhamad’s residency in Vaasa, Finland, in 2025. The works depict Nordic places, fields, frozen lakes and the changing light of dawn and dusk, with each motif broken by a dark pyramid-like shape. This geometric body appears as an alien presence in the landscape: dense, opaque and materially resistant to its surroundings.
The series began in 2023 as a response to Alhamad’s own experience of moving through the Nordic environment as a person marked by alienation. The dark shape entered the work almost involuntarily as a recurring disturbance that refused to blend in. It is both a figure and a state, unassimilated, out of place but undeniably present. Its existence disturbs the stillness of the landscape while affirming its right to be visible.
Rather than illustrating emotions or identity, Foreign Object treats alienation as a spatial and material condition. The tension between landscape and form reflects the distance he feels within systems that require adaptation and comprehensibility. The work explores what it means to coexist without dissolving, to inhabit a place as something untranslatable, fixed and unresolved.
* This project is supported by the City of Gothenburg
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Alqumit Alhamad
Alqumit Alhamad is a Syrian artist (b. 1992), born in Jordan and raised in Cyprus. His work is shaped by experiences of war, migration and queer life, and by a constant movement between places. In his practice, he works across disciplines with textiles, scent, illustration, sculpture, drawing and installation – often in combination with archival materials and traditional crafts from northern Syria.
Through these materials, he explores how history is preserved, how the body remembers and how what is in danger of disappearing can be retained. His work moves between the personal and the collective, and is characterized by a sensitivity to both change and vulnerability. Resistance, memory and care are recurring themes.
Alhamad holds a master’s degree in fine arts from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and has received several awards, including the Vera and Göran Agnekil Prize from the Academy of Fine Arts and the Ung Svensk Form Award for the project War Trauma. He has previously been awarded working grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and has been nominated for the King Carl XVI Gustaf Young Leadership Grant and the Bror Hjorth Prize.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the British Museum in London, SOAS University of London, Liljevalchs Konsthall, OnBoards Biennale in Antwerp, Dunkers Kulturhus, Gallery Platform (Finland), Blå Stället konsthall, Steneby Konsthall and Museum für Fotokopie in Germany.
Alhamad’s works are in both public and private collections in Sweden and internationally, including the Homografiska Museet in Fengersfors, Sta. Demonia Queer Art in Stockholm, Tobison Foundation in Gothenburg, municipal collections in Västerås and Skurup, as well as in collections in Syria, UK, USA, Germany, Bulgaria, Denmark and Turkey.
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