Much like that opening poetic scrawl, the wallpaper’s motif alludes to a narrative. Within this first room, Khaled’s unnerving photograph is hung upon a flock wallpaper of his own design. Khaled appears to lavish liturgical investment in each of the details of his installation. Mahmoud Khaled, Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it, 2022. In this way, Khaled’s photo feels more like an apparition than a realistic appearance a restive dream rather than some regurgitative document. Formally, within the photograph’s composition, the wallpaper contorts as if we were looking at this plain wall through some sort of kaleidoscope, whilst the iconographic details refracted in the mahogany mirror – where we see a simple photograph or print of dark chimneys leaking delicate trails of smoke into a baby blue sky above a limpy bedspread – give the scene a dissociative air. There is something more to this photo, however, something disquieting. With its olive green flock wallpaper and deep mahogany mirror, at first glance, the face of this pictured wall provides us with an inkling into Mr O’s aesthetic tastes – the man likes classical forms and baroque flourishes. Framed within a frame, next to another frame within a frame, this delirious note adorns a large photograph of a bedroom wall. “I can’t sleep without you / anymore”, the opening line to a love letter, a memoir, a novel? Written here, in sharp freehand script, the poetic sentence acts as an epigraph to Khaled’s exhibition one that is not only intimately bare but lays bare the tensions at the heart of Khaled’s fantastical storyline: a narrative where desire and anxiety rub, where dream and reality pour, together, out from the archive. Across the exhibition’s three rooms, we move from fresh encounter to eerie squeal not coming to know Mr O, the person, through some regurgitative action of biography, but rather, we becomes attuned to how a narrativizing of a life can move our bodies to feel the “very erotic, elegant,” but “troubled” personality of another. In turn, questioning the rigidity of archival technologies that so often overlook, or outright refuse to tell, the histories of folks marginalised or who live queer.įantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it, extends Khaled’s recent work around ‘house museums’ – described by Dina Ramadan in a recent Art-Agenda conversation with Khaled as, “space dedicated to the legacy of the person (real or invented) who lived there.” Rather than a museological-type display of rows upon rows of fetishised objects endowed with value through their auratic proximity to Mr O, as common practice in house museums, the personal fragments – the photos, the screen-shots, the notes and other memorabilia – saved upon this lost/found phone set a general ambience for Khaled’s installations. Working from an imagined anecdote about finding a lost phone in a public toilet, Khaled plays with a soft form of critical fabulation (to borrow Saidiya Hartman’s term) to narrate the life of the phone’s mystery owner – Mr O for short. Titled Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it, this immersive exhibition draws upon Max Klinger’s 1879 series of etchings titled Fantasies on a Found Glove, Dedicated to the Lady Who Lost It, as its methodological springboard. For his installation-based exhibition at The Mosaic Rooms, Mahmoud Khaled embraces the possibilities of these digital records to explore poetic alternatives to antiquated history-telling. More than just rendering a subject in high-resolution, they can endow a sense of affective mythos upon it readying it to be stored in our individual pocket archives.
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