Of Purloined Letters: a message from Mohamad Khalid
By Mahnaz Fancy
On view at Warehouse421 from October 9–December 25, 2022, Dubai-based emerging artist Mohamad Khalid’s first institutional solo exhibition is intriguingly titled Let me tell you something. Composed of a loosely connected group of seven new commissions across multiple genres (including installation, photography, cyanotypes and works on paper), the multi-layered show presents itself in the form of a series of disjointed episodes from the artist’s own life. Speaking at multiple registers and devices, the exhibition resists easy reading behind a presentation of overtly mundane objects, millennial staples of Instagram selfies and what initially looks like a variation on cat memes. The viewer must therefore decode a subtle trail of clues (and a few deliberate mis-directions) left by the artist in her quest for understanding what the artist wants to tell us.
Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer first encounters the installation Suitcase, 2022, a Muji suitcase containing unremarkable personal contents—a replica of the suitcase that Khalid lost on a 2019 trip to Nice from Venice where he had an internship at the esteemed Peggy Guggenheim Collection. This last fact stands in contrast with how the artist seems to position himself as a self-taught artist and somewhat of an outsider to the art world. What is Khalid trying to tell us about his experience of loss while on this grand (mis)adventure of professional and personal development?
The viewer’s contemplation is interrupted by her own sense of feeling lost in an exhibition that doesn’t offer a clear direction about what work to look at next. Things are not as they seem, is the artist a reliable narrator? The viewer digs through her critical theory tool kit and pulls out one of her favorites: Jacques Lacan’s 1955 “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” (Le Seminaire sure la Lettre volée) as her lens for digging into the exhibition not unlike the amateur detective in the short story at the center of Lacan’s seminar Poe’s Purloined Letter.
The seemingly disparate works in Let me tell you something appear to be connected by a bunting flag-like installation of cyanotype-treated A4-sized pieces of textiles zigzagging through the exhibition space at eye level, a physical representation of the exhibition’s resistance to an easy linear reading. During work hours, 2022, is a work about making art works during work hours through which Khalid speaks directly to us through statement like, “Feeling like I am held hostage during work hours”, “thinking of a place during work hours”, “words sit at the tip of my tongue during work hours.” Possibly referencing Marx’s theory of the worker’s alienation from the product of his labor or the existential alienation of contemporary office work life in the Covid era of “the great resignation”, is Khalid just telling us about his professional struggles in carving out space for his own practice? There is after all, a proud tradition of artists who support themselves as art professionals, and Khalid clearly claims that lineage in his LinkedIn bio which reads “an artist and art professional working in a multitude of labels; Artist assistant, Exhibition assistant, Art handler and so on.”
But the Lacanian echo suggests that this is a clue to the conceptual foundation of his practice in Lacan’s theory that the subject is essential alienated from the symbolic (i.e. language) and doomed to repetition to play out that logic? In his famous seminar, Lacan says, “The lesson of this seminar is intended to maintain that these imaginary incidences, far from representing the essence of our experience, reveal only what in it remains inconsistent unless they are related to the symbolic chain which binds and orients them” (translated by Jeffrey Mehlman in Yale French Studies 48, 1972). Feeling a renewed confidence in her choice of analytical instruments for her task of decoding what the artist wants to say, the viewer continues her path of following During work hours, 2022 as a possible key to the internal logic of the exhibition and its symbolic chain (what it is telling us).
Following the cyanotype messages across the space, the viewer finds herself following another trail created by Street cats, 2022, a series of drawings of the ubiquitous UAE stray cats, to Replica of a shadow, 2022. She overhears the artist explain that this work was initiated by a friend’s discovery of an Instagram post that looked like a shadow of him, Khalid playfully attempted to replicate the image by taking a photo of himself at sunset every other day. A work of mimetic play in the Instagram era is coupled with a trail of the hand-drawn version of his cat memes seemed very millennial until the Baudelairian reference in a quote in Melissa Grundland’s exhibition essay “I see street cats as fellow flâneurs” grabs the viewer’s attention bringing us back to Lacan and the repetition compulsion behind the play with replicas in Khalid’s work. For those who don’t know, Baudelaire translated Poe’s The Purloined Letter which then allowed Lacan to come across it and deploy it in his psychoanalytic theory but he also famously wrote a denunciation of photography as “A madness, an extraordinary fanaticism [that] took possession of all these new sun-worshippers. Strange abominations took form” in the Salon of 1859 which seems not irrelevant to this particular grouping of Khalid’s work.
From the initial insouciant observation and replicas of the flaneur and bored alienated office worker if the earlier works, Khalid seems to shift affective registers and instead of speaking to himself and his replicas/avatars he begins to engage others as we move deeper into the gallery space. Here we find a second installation in the form of a bus stop for the Italian bus service entitled Flixbus, 2022 that picks up the narrative of the artist’s 2019 bus misadventure which opened the exhibition. On the back of the empty bus shelter which exhibition visitors are invited to sit in just as Khalid must have on that fated day, we find a Flexibus uniform shirt Khalid found in a thrift shop years after the incident and a print out of his desperate Google translate search for the Italian for “help.” The works reveals a hidden longing for connecting with others, the essential function of language as means of breaking out of the confines of alienation and forming a means of saying something about
The first group of these works plays with the epistolary form and makes this viewer with her Lacanian lens giggle to herself at the slightly “on the nose” recognition. One work, entitled Mrs. Sima, 2022, is a series of letters addressed to the artist’s second-grade teacher, the one who “trained” him to write with his right hand as a child. Written mostly with the left hand and visibly showing a progressively more controlled handwriting, we see Khalid overcome this original moment of alienation by reclaiming his unique original creativity as he writes these letters. A second epistolary work Thank you, 2022 is a diptych of letters: a hand-drawn replica of a letter he received from the security guard in his building regarding a parking issue and Khalid’s own reply to the security guard speak. The exhibition has shifted from an initial set of objects and images that conjured up the artist and his practice in different contexts from Italy to office, but these last two works allow us into his personal narrative as someone who grew up and lives in Dubai.
The viewer remembers seeing the the recognizable shirt from the 2018 inaugural Fikra Graphic Design Biennal “Ministry of Graphic Design” amongst the suitcase’s contents in Suitcase, 2022. leaves the viewer wondering if what the artist wants to tell us about is his practice and its relationship to the country that he calls home and to its burgeoning culture scene. While Khalid’s work resists any reading based on identity, the viewer recognizes a more subtle play between belonging and alienation that Khalid shares with a number of emerging UAE-based artists whose families migrated to the young country over the last 50 years and make up a large number of the emerging creative community. How do these young ex-patriot artists explore their subjective relationship to belonging when the emerging local art sector primarily aimed at representing a national identity in support of international art exchange in places like Venice? Building on over a decade of UAE representation of La Biennale, the UAE art cognoscenti migrate to Venice every Spring en mass and, on the same occasion, a number of young interns and art professionals from both national and ex-pat communities across the UAE are initiated into the same big and bewildering world just like Khalid. The metaphor of losing his luggage and calls for help suggest that these artists might be producing a new type of “outsider art” that emerges out of the particular social and cultural lived realities of the UAE in the 21st century. It might more aptly be called “not quite insider” art, playing on art historical definition from the 1980s that speaks of vernacular and “marginal” arts marked by a naïve eye, we discover world-weary voice of existentially alienated voices of artists who make their claims to belonging (and express their frustrations with its challenges) through their art.
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