House of Kal Berlin: Artist talk with Mahmoud Khaled

11 August, 6 pm – 7 pm

This talk will take place online via Zoom.
Please register via this >>link<<

As part of the summer collective reading practice ‘the archive is not a thing of the past, it is a promise for the future’ with the residents of House of Kal Karachi and Colombo being co-led by Vera Ryser and Aziz Sohail, artist Mahmoud Khaled will be giving an talk on his practice.

Mahmoud Khaled explores identity and intimate dynamics while questioning the larger structures that produce them. Moving between the scale of the minute and a more immersive totality, his work takes on failure, austere violence and the aesthetics of an institutional heritage. Engaging with the burden of nostalgia and state-sanctioned processes of constructing collective memory, Khaled reproduces artifacts of dead ideologies and thinks of those who were crushed in the process of their erection. And in attempts of projection he thinks of canonic commemoration and the marginalized bodies it leaves behind, so he reformulates and records their presence through absence. For Khaled, a queer identity is explored through the objects that inform it and an amassed knowledge: articles of desire, spatial gestures and simulated conversations. Khaled’s classical training as a visual artist seems to manifest in his interest in materiality and formal composition and their capacity to mimic the theatricality of power. His relationship to a fine arts education is critical and conversational. It informs an alternating ontological position where he either pronounces himself within the work as a vocational voice or swaps it for another hat: once performing the protagonist role of a painter flâneur and another time an absent curator of a colossal condition. His work complicates and appropriates form to offer virtual proposals that rethink justice and imagine possibilities for a redemptive future.

This artist talk is part of the House of Kal Berlin, which unfolds in trans*oceanic correspondences and collaboration with the Houses of Kal Karachi and Colombo.