Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it

22 June - 25 September 2022

The Mosaic Rooms, Lonndon

 

The Mosaic Rooms presents Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it, the first UK solo exhibition by Mahmoud Khaled. Through a series of unfolding installations and interventions Khaled ambitiously transforms The Mosaic Rooms period domestic architecture into the imagined dwellings of the owner of a lost phone. The work continues Khaled’s interest in historic house museums and the memorialising of individual perspectives found in them. In this new immersive commission, the artist repositions this museological form as a device to imagine a history of marginalised queer life.

The artist notes: “the exhibition is a spatial portrait of an absent person revealed through the (quite strange) contents of the phone he left behind in a public bathroom. A mysterious portrait of a man with a passion for ‘décor’ and beauty, a highly eroticised man, afflicted with anxiety, insomnia, and melancholy at the same time.

In the exhibition, Khaled explores the tension between desire and anxiety, dream and reality. A state of sleeplessness permeates the space, acting as a metaphor for political states of being, of not belonging, and being displaced. This sense of disquiet is experienced in the installations where the visitor, as a voyeur, simultaneously feels at home and unsettled.

Calm, sees the main room covered in draped velvet and voile curtains, with a daybed in the middle of the room. This piece of furniture conjures references to Freud, and his work The interpretation of dreams. However, the proportions of this piece are disproportionately long, made from leather and wood and adorned with bondage straps. Centrally positioned, this daybed becomes an object of apprehension, desire, and kink. A sense of anxiety is evoked through the wall murals inspired by an etching from Max Klinger’s series “A Glove”. An accompanying sound piece transforms the room into a subverted version of a sleeping app, inviting the visitor to engage in a mindfulness exercise.

Another installation, For Those Who Can Not Sleep, features a rotating leather bed in perpetual motion. The work is a reference to Hugh Hefner’s iconic 1960s office-bed which became a pervading image of heterosexual masculinity in a domestic space. This round bed also became an appropriated design depicted in Egyptian TV and cinema, which the artist grew up watching. The circular surround framing the bed features another one of the etchings from Klinger’s series, and there is a looping soundtrack of discordant melodies.

While the phone or indeed its owner are never seen in the exhibition, the location of its loss is hinted at through the wallpaper motif and other objects found in the first room of the fictive home. On the bookshelf in this room is the accompanying publication, featuring images from the unlocked phone. Moving between the erotic, intimate, baroque and everyday, the compulsive sequence of images in the book references the dissonant and voyeuristic experience of scrolling through social media and swiping in dating apps, and the clash of hyper-capitalist forces of productivity and technology with the intimacy of a queer male gaze. Alongside, a large photograph of a bedroom hangs in the room, with the sentence “I can’t sleep without you anymore” handwritten across it.


WORKS

Untitled (entrance), 2022

Wallpaper, wood, mirror, glass, artist book with 147 images, framed giclee photo rag print 180cm x 135cm, handwritten sentence.

Wallpaper pattern designed in collaboration with Engy Aly

Artist book designed in collaboration with Marwan Kaabour

Calm, 2022

Velvet, leather, plywood, wood veneer, high-density sponge, monstera plant, sound piece (10min), mural, two etchings by Max Klinger

The sound element is inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, the sleep and meditation app Calm, and a conversation with Sara El Adl in summer 2019

Performance by Alaa Abdullatif 

Trompe-l’oeil painting by Mel Holmes

For Those Who Can Not Sleep, 2021

Wood, leather, metal, carpet, bird of paradise leaves, brass, speaker, framed reproduction of A Glove–Anxieties by Max Klinger 1st ed. (pub. 1881) plate 7, looping soundtrack Kay’s Theme by David Julyan

Press coverage: 

Arts Council England, Henry Moore Foundation, and The Elephant Trust generously support this exhibition.

Accompanying publication designed by Marwan Kaabour. co-published by Book Works and The Mosaic Rooms as part of Book Works Co-Series No. 23.

All images courtesy Mahmoud Khaled and The Mosaic Rooms, Photography: Andy Stagg

Production: Thomas Collier