For Mahmoud Khaled, a queer identity is explored through the objects that inform it: articles of desire, spatial gestures and simulated conversations.

At the core of Khaled’s practice lies a probing engagement with the construction of male identity. In a society that is increasingly shaped by mediated and virtual exchanges, Khaled’s work traces the boundaries between what is real and what is hidden, disguised or staged.

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 process-oriented, multidisciplinary practice addresses intimate dynamics between individuals and the larger political structures that produce them, and attempts to record the presence of marginalized bodies through their absence.

For Those Who Cannot Sleep centres around a large circular, rotating bed that transforms the bedroom of a fictional (absent) man into a stage for his material existence. Drawing influence from Hugh Hefner’s iconic 1960s Playboy office-bed and sexualised scenes from Egyptian TV and cinema, the artist creates an immersive manifestation of broad changes taking place in our domestic sphere, where sleep is being harvested by apps and pharma in the name of an optimised state of hyper-capitalism.

Khaled’s circular bed highlights this violent, contemporary entwinement of labour, play, and technology — how, even in bed, the ultimate place of erotism and subconsciousness, we’re at work, being altered or enhanced.

The sculpture of a daybed poses as a personal effect, a platform for a historicized male vanity and anxious temperaments. It stands in a room as an item of a desire around which identity is assembled. It is an extension of ornament, social stratum, and a systematic exercise of daydreaming in an adorned personal space.

Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man - 2017. Commissioned by 15th Istanbul Biennial

Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man was conceived as a fictional house museum, commemorating the life of an unknown Egyptian man who moved from Cairo to Istanbul a decade ago. A narrative of queer persecution in Egypt and later in Istanbul is told through this unknown man's belongings. The proposed house museum is conceptually designed to exist anywhere, in principle, except for Cairo, the space from which the unknown crying man has been exiled.

Made for the occasion of a solo show in New York City in 2018 titled I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, the images are of a night the artist doesn’t remember from his first trip to the city. After further research, he realized that they were captured at Splash, an iconic New York city gay club that opened in September 1991 and closed in 2013, a casualty of the gentrification of Chelsea and the rise of dating apps. The prints float in a timeless place, memorializing the loss of a collective stage.

Mahmoud Khaled uses an iconic piece produced in 1991 by Felix Gonzalez-Torres called Untitled (Go-go Dancing Platform), where for five minutes each day, an unscheduled and unannounced dancer clad in silver lamé shorts, ascends a lighted platform to dance to music of his own choosing, played through earphones so only the dancer could hear. The platform functions as an art object or minimalist sculpture all day, except during those five minutes when the dancer transforms it by his presence.

In Khaled’s iteration, the dancer looks the same but he is not dancing. As he moves around on the platform, he is struggling to think about his own existence as an art object demanding a new form of art. Instead of a Walkman, the dancer carries a portable voice amplifier typically used by teachers and tour guides. He reads a text authored by Khaled and based on correspondences between him and a number of art practitioners and theorists who question the role and future of contemporary art in the current violent moment.

“Are you waiting for me to dance?

I’m afraid I won’t be able to

I know you’re expecting me to

I’m sure you’ve seen many pictures of me dancing in art books and magazines

And some of you have probably seen me dancing in some big galleries in the past decade

But I just can’t do it anymore...

I don’t feel like it.”