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.

MAHMOUD KHALED (b. 1982) studied Fine Art at Alexandria University in Egypt and obtained his MFA from NTNU University in Norway (2017). His work spans video, photography, sculpture, installation, sound and text. 

His solo shows include “The Beautiful Captive”, Gypsum, Cairo (2023), “Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it”, The Mosaic Rooms, London (2022) “I Want You to Know That I am Hiding Something from You”, Helena Anrather, New York (2018); “A New Commission for an Old State”, Gypsum, Cairo (2018) and Edith-Ruth-Haus, Oldenburg (2016); “Proposal for a Porn Company”, Galpão VB | Associação Cultural Videobrasil, São Paulo (2016); “Painter on a Study Trip”, Gypsum, Cairo (2016); “It’s Never Too Late to Talk About Love”, Nile Sunset Annex, Cairo (2014); “When Meanings Face Glossy Surfaces”, Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo (2010) and “I Never Wanted to Be Alone in a Room”, BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2010). 

His group exhibitions include the Brent Biennial 2022; “Viral Self-Portraits”, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (2020); “It’s Just a Phase,” K-U-K Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst, Trondheim (2021); “Modern Love”,  IMPAKT, Utrecht (2021) Tallinn (2021) and Freiburg (2020); “They are Impersonal, yet Habitation is Augmented by the Pressures of Their Indifference”, Gypsum, Cairo (2019); “Maskulinitäten”, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2019); “A Group Exhibition”, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2018); 15th Istanbul Biennale, (2017); 13th Sharjah Biennale, (2017); Terra Mediterranea – in Action, NiMAC Arts Center, Nicosia (2017); “Hips Don’t Lie”, Centre Pompidou, Malaga (2016); “Electronic Superhighway”, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); “Complicity”, Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2016); Lofoten International Art Festival, Lofoten (2013). 

In 2012 Khaled was awarded the Videobrasil in Context Prize, and in 2016 he was shortlisted for the Abraaj Art Prize. Khaled is a recipient of the DAAD fellowship for 2020. He lives and works in Berlin.