The Beautiful Captive

30 November 2023 - 7 February 2024

Gypsum Gallery, Cairo

In The Beautiful Captive, Khaled combines new photographic and three-dimensional works in a meticulous dramaturgy that borrows its title from René Magritte’s historic series of paintings. Drawing inspiration from Magritte’s pictorial language for interrogating the opacity and transparency of images, Khaled stages his own commentary on display, power, control, and confinement.

On a wall concealing the entrance to the main exhibition space is a graffitied phrase that reads “The Privileged Lost Generation.” This ostensibly random act of vandalism operates as a prelude to the exhibition, which is composed of five distinct works that reverberate among each other.

In the twelve-part photographic series also titled The Beautiful Captive, six views of an empty zoo are each displayed next to a scene from a luxurious home decorated with a wallpaper version of the same zoological landscape. In one photograph, an image of a desolate mosaic duck pond is photoshopped onto the walls of a seafront bedroom, transforming it into an illusionary space. The perplexing series responds to photographs taken by the artist in the Alexandria Zoo, a location he frequented as an art student in the early 2000s. The Beautiful Captive speculates on the moment in which an artwork becomes wallpaper, generating questions about the value of art in a consumerist, leisure-driven society.

On the adjacent two walls, The Wallpaper tests the limits of illusion by wallpapering both with the same image, mirrored, of the Zoo’s neoclassical interior architecture. Within that vast space, a solitary guard is captured guarding rows of empty structures. In depicting a state in which captivity is institutionalized, the work also hints at the futility of the act of guarding.

In The Wall, a grainy monochromatic photograph shows the remains of an ancient monolithic structure. Set against the backdrop of Alexandria, the city it once purported to protect, this fragment of an enclosure suggests the prototype for a gated community. A relic, an impotent artifact stripped of function, it alludes to the fragility of power. The theatrical presentation of this work as a centerpiece of the exhibition highlights the relic’s performative role in the urban life of the city.

Drawing the most from the surrealist language of Magritte is the sculptural work titled The Home Theater. Incongruent elements are pieced together to explore the theatricality inherent in how we stage warmth and domesticity. A marble fireplace posing as sculpture is the base of the work. It is adorned with a red velvet curtain and two birds of paradise flowers arranged in a clear vase. In the hearth, a goldfish looping in a fishbowl denotes a flickering blaze, performing without awareness of reenactment.

Isolated in the terraced garden of the gallery is the finale of the exhibition. Here, Khaled constructs a guardhouse of metal and mirrored glass. The enclosure, a symbol of urban surveillance, is empty of a protagonist. It displays the trace of a desire to be elsewhere.

Credits:

Studio Assistant: Habiba Haddara

Installation shots: Marc Onsi