With an Algerian father and a Norwegian mother, Hans Hamid Rasmussen spent his early childhood in Algeria, Hungary, and Norway. The question of identity has been important to him from his first art works in the early 90’s.
Hans Hamid started to use embroidery as a technique to transcend a conceptual idea, but he soon experienced that embroidery had its own ‘sense of being’. The shift from talking through, to talking with embroidery formed a phenomenological artistic method. Works made in the 90s as Full Moon with Stars were developed over one year questioning the principle of holding on to an idea related to experience of time. Desert Storm came as a reaction on the war in the Gulf.
Since Hans Hamid brought both the Occidental and Oriental cultures with him, the war marked a shift in his need to formulate his past experiences in Algeria. The embroideries slowly became a way of thinking in the world, and embroidery on textile allowed him to question linguistic experiences formed within diverse cultural contexts. Both the experience with hand and later digital embroidery became important tools to reach new visual works of art related to the artistic research project Homage to the Hybrid done at NTNU in Trondheim.