Google Me / Duplicate Self-portrait. 2010

Two framed photographs (105 x 75 x 7 cm each), digital collage.

Google Me / Duplicate Self-portrait (2010) presents us with two images as objects. Each image is of a black screen shot displaying a single frame pulled from a video of a public performance at precisely the same moment. A command bar enabling the original viewer of the online video to play, pause, maximize or mute splits each image. Google Me began in 2008 as a response to a predetermined institutional art form (the artist talk) in an international context (the artist residency) for articulating the professional identity of an artist and his practice. Since then it has evolved into a work in multiple renditions that on one level explores the search for and the enactment of an artistic self and its duplicates in the public domain. The piece takes as its point of departure Khaled’s accidental discovery of "Khaled Mahmoud", a popular London-based belly dancer born in Cairo, who the artist found after trying to ‘google’ his own name.

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