Hafez is hopelessly in love with the movies: in Idlers’ Logic, where a fiction ambition predominates over the collage and the ready-made, his alert directing hints at unexpected links between the environment surrounding the Middle-Eastern ne’er-do-wells and the room where the action takes place between the stars of Last tango in Paris: for example in the light that is always cast from behind the actors, so that the camera sees them as covered with shadows, reflections and signs.
Above all, Khaled Hafez is in love with cross-fertilizations, or perhaps it would be better to say he is convinced that they constitute the condition – and the secret – of our everyday life and our age. In and out of the cinema, “I belong to a generation of artists who spent their childhood, adolescence and adulthood surrounded by stress”, he explained years ago: “military confrontations, unexpected political landmarks and the subsequent effervescent socio-economic consequences”.
Of course, Hafez is talking about Egypt, the country where he was born, grew up and still lives today, with the exception of a period spent in Paris, for training (and cross-fertilization). His is a country that is socio-culturally quite contaminated: to the untrained eye, Cairo, now a megalopolis with about sixteen million inhabitants, looks like a series of layered elements from different origins, piled up or squashed one on top of another with no regard for their nature or origins, no care for the indispensable times of transition, so with no possibility to be recomposed harmoniously. “Egyptian society has been reshaped by continuous changes since the mid-seventies, losing some of its Oriental character on the way and acquiring other traits instead, some of which are part of the globalisation process” (which affects Egypt too, of course), “others simply deviations towards the consumer goods culture.”

Martina Corgnati
Art Historian, Critic, Curator
Professor of Art History
Accademia Albertina Di Bellearti, Turin, Italy