African
Memories
The artist's obsession with continuities and relationships between
present and past becomes more explicit than in the earlier work.
Local heroes, ancient gods and goddesses, stylized snipers, prisoners
and decapitators are layered along with textual references on
the textured surface of the canvases.
Locating his discourse within the framework of heroes and gods,
Hafez proceeds to sketch out various processes of becoming human
– animal – god and its manifestations in the collective
consciousness. His iconic depictions, at once ancient and contemporary,
raise questions about the quest for immortality and the making
of myth in a given cultural context.
Aleya Hamza
2004
Identity and Hybridity
Identity is a recurrent theme in the work of Khaled Hafez, a notion
he does not attempt to insert in a unique reality, but rather
uses in multiple juxtapositions to explore a combination of multiple
visual elements. The work acts as a witness to the cumulative
cultures inherited by the artist across time, cultures that occupy
his visual universe and demonstrate numerous levels of cultural
and aesthetic references.
From ancient Egyptian iconography, the artist borrows figuration
of ideograms where Gods like Anubis, God of the cemeteries/mummification/underworld,
Sekhmet the Goddess of ferocity and Nute, Goddess of the night
skies recount stories of ideal universes where only the elite
can dwell.
In France of the avant-garde and visual revolution, the artist
retains a minimalist taste and pays tribute to conceptual/minimalist
culture in several of his projects. While in our modern world
of TV screens Hafez borrows/adopts a zapping behavior, juxtaposing
images of soccer, American mythology (Batman), televised world
news tragedies with icons of consumerism and mythological Gods.
Snipers parading over the surfaces evoke civil and regional conflicts
as well as imperial interventions that affect inevitably the Arabo-Islamic
world, both contributing to an impending Orient-Occident rupture.
Intersecting in interests and resembling each other, both worlds
(East and West) are confronted by the similar threats of civil
conflicts and other modern neighbor-violence in different forms,
ignited by cultural nationalism and fatal maneuvers aiming at
enforcing a unique political and cultural identity hostile to
any diversity.
In the work of Khaled Hafez the viewer perceives aspects of an
identity characterized by plurality and cultural wealth; the female
figure of the African prisoner that appears constantly in several
works insinuates a repositioning of Egypt as part of the African
heritage. The figure's nudity in ombres chinoises (Chinese shadows)
overtly evokes an air of femininity, opposed by the figure's attached
arms that raise questions about liberty, questions evoked since
the early days of history.
Through his navigation of the diversified identities of millennium
Egypt, be it national, regional, and/or Arab, Hafez explores the
different elements of his everyday visual culture and produces
an original body of work that comprises an aesthetic of certain
specificity; a specificity that, far from being definitive, reminds
us that identity is a cumulative built up of various influences
and components that surpasses any one unique definition, be it
religious, cultural or even more, political.
The work also draws the attention of the viewer to cultural hybridity
in the creative production of artists.
Victoria Ambrosini
2004