ARTIST DEVELOPMENT
MAJID ADIN
Majid Adin is an artist and animator from Iran, now living in London. He spent several months in the Calais ‘Jungle’ where he first met Good Chance, before arriving in the UK in 2016. He has been commissioned by and collaborated with organisations and individuals across the world making beautiful and powerful art.
Re-imagining Elton John’s Rocket Man.
In 2017, with the support of Good Chance, Majid won a competition to produce the music video to illustrate Elton John’s song Rocket Man, powerfully re-contextualising the lyrics as a refugee’s journey across continents to a new home in England and now seen by more than 138 million people worldwide.
Majid has gone on to work across the UK and internationally including at the House of Illustration and under commission from Choose Love and the UNHCR and at the Venice Biennale. In 2018 Majid was nominated and shortlisted for the 2018 Groucho Maverick Award celebrating original, creative artwork that seeks to challenge the status quo.
We are thrilled that Majid also joined the Board of Trustees at Good Chance in October 2020, bringing his vision, creative flair and experience to the governance of the company.
Through Good Chance’s Change the Word artist development programme, Good Chance commissioned Majid alongside Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Connie Treves and a number of brilliant Change the Word Collective poets to create a new theatre production, The Conference of the Trees. This won the Writer’s Guild New Play Commission Scheme and is currently being developed with Good Chance.
Hamid & Shakespeare: a graphic novel.
Majid is currently writing and illustrating his debut graphic novel inspired by an imagined friendship with Shakespeare. A chance spotting from the back of a refrigerated lorry of a poster marking Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary spurs a refugee’s imagination to transport himself from his detention cell to a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at London’s Globe Theatre.
As we move between the 21st and 17th centuries, Shakespeare introduces Hamid both to a promised new land, and to a series of well-known plays through which Hamid tells his own experiences: of interrogation, of his journey from home, crossing the sea, getting lost in the forest, his months spent in the Calais Jungle refugee camp, and his arrival in the UK in the back of a refrigerated lorry. In turn, Shakespeare teaches Hamid how to speak English and how to behave as he navigates the London Underground, and gives him a helping hand at the Home Office.
“I want to change the way the refugee experience is understood. I want to demonstrate how different cultures can live together through the exchange of dialogue and share with readers the stories of refugees, and the experiences many of us have gone through. As well as the difficulties, I want the story to demonstrate how humour and hope can be found in every situation, and that friendships can be made between all people despite cultural differences.”
- Majid Adin
Broken Frontier “Debut Graphic Novel from Animator and Former Calais Jungle Camp Refugee to Explore the Crisis in 2021”
UNHCR - “New exhibition in Venice explores the experience of refugees”
Evening Standard - “Politics on paper - Majid Adin is sharing his story on the refugee crisis in a new House of Illustration exhibition”
BBC Outlook - “How Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’ changed my life”
ITV - Elton John music video goes on display at the House of Illustration