Egyptian artist Khaled Hafez

from Visions of a Rusty Memory series by Khaled Hafez

I recall my excitement at discovering Egyptian born artist Khaled Hafez since much of his body of work resembled and had themes in common with a few years in my own art career. My style has changed and evolved considerably since then, but nonetheless still relies heavily on collage and popular culture. Of course, Hafez and I were making different statements and coming from a different cultural perspective.

While poring through a terrific book called Art of the Middle East by Saeb Eigner, I saw Hafez’s work, something from the mid ’90s, featuring Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley. Hafez frequently uses motifs of Egyptian gods in his work-here, the god motif surrounding the couple looks like something Jean Michel Basquiat might draw. The rough hewn collage work and texturing make for visual excitement.

from the artist’s site: (http://www.khaledhafez.net/home.htm).

“For over 20 years, Khaled Hafez has explored the continuous reproduction of dichotomies within and between the popular culture of his native Egypt, of France where he lived for several years, and of the United States – the ultimate consumer society and locus of political power, which seems to thrive on the marketing potential of divisive binaries.  Through painting and video, Hafez has concentrated primarily on the construction of certain categories and the overlaps between them:  East/West, sacred/commercial, old/new, good/evil, animal/human, male/female, and static/kinetic.  His work shows how these dichotomies rest on the international system of commodities that creates both the ideas of (cultural) similarity and difference, as well as affective attachments to certain histories and identities.  Hafez explores out how each half of a dichotomy has come to be signified through particular visual forms, figures, or objects.  This work suggests that it is the continual replication of these visual signifiers in mass media that creates emotions of love and hate, notions of collective memory, and visions of the future.  Dichotomies are attractive, then, because they have become seductive visual commodities.”

Jessica Winegar, Ph.D.,