Educated at the Cairo School of Fine Arts, Hafez has exhibited his work internationally and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 2005. 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.
Khaled Hafez
“I explore how each half of a dichotomy has come to be signified through particular visual forms, figures, or objects. My 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.”
Artist Information
Residency Dates
Sep 8 — Nov 23 2009
Currently Based Cairo, Egypt
Artist’s Website khaledhafez.net