Mahmoud Khaled: Architecture of Intimacy, Politics of Absence

08/04/2024

Writer: Michelle Hyun

Mahmoud Khaled is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans video, photography, installation, and sculpture. Currently based between Berlin and Cairo, Khaled’s work explores the intersections of desire, identity, architecture, and state ideology—often focusing on how personal narratives are shaped, suppressed, or erased by larger social and political structures.

A classically trained artist, Khaled adopts the language of display—museum vitrines, modernist furniture, archival aesthetics—to build fictional yet emotionally resonant environments. These spaces frequently simulate memorials, homes, or institutional interiors, blurring the line between personal history and public record. His works examine the poetics of absence: what it means for a life, or a body, to be undocumented or forgotten, and how spaces might retain emotional residue after their occupants have vanished.

One of his most celebrated projects, Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost It (2022, The Mosaic Rooms, London), transformed a gallery into a fictional domestic interior inspired by a phone discovered in a public toilet. Through furniture, wallpaper, sound, and carefully constructed vignettes, Khaled reconstructed a portrait of a nameless man—imagined through fragments of images, messages, and speculative intimacy. The exhibition offered a tender, haunting meditation on queer loneliness, surveillance, and invisibility, while questioning what it means to document someone’s life without consent.

In The Beautiful Captive (2023, Gypsum Gallery, Cairo), Khaled turned his gaze to architectural propaganda and cultural decay. Using imagery from Alexandria's defunct zoo and juxtaposing it with decadent interior scenes, he probed Egypt's "vanity projects"—state-driven attempts to aestheticize power while neglecting public infrastructure. The exhibition’s title nods to a 1975 surrealist film by Magritte and Alain Robbe-Grillet, reflecting Khaled’s interest in artifice, perception, and the theatrical nature of power.

Khaled’s installation for the Sharjah Biennial 2025, titled Pool of Perspectives – 2030, takes the form of a drained, tile-covered swimming pool. Adorned with digital imagery mimicking Portuguese azulejos, the work evokes both colonial nostalgia and failed utopias. It reads as a monument to unfulfilled national dreams—spaces built for glory but now empty and echoing. Here, the pool becomes a metaphor for both spectacle and void: a seductive surface that conceals the erasures beneath.

Across his body of work, Khaled employs minimalist aesthetics with deeply personal undercurrents. By using architectural forms, archival aesthetics, and ghostly narratives, he resists dominant historical narratives and reclaims space for voices marginalized by sexuality, class, or political context.

His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Istanbul Biennial (2017), the Sharjah Biennial (2017, 2025), Whitechapel Gallery (London), and MoMA PS1 (New York). Each project contributes to an evolving vocabulary of disappearance, longing, and reimagined memory.

Mahmoud Khaled's practice is not only about what is seen, but about what is withheld. Through fiction, desire, and design, he constructs places for what official histories often deny: intimacy, contradiction, and the radical importance of the personal.