Mohamed Khalid

Mohamed Khalid examines the materiality of everyday objects and coaxes out their metaphoric potential. Through fabricating receipts, playing with street cats, composing fictional tours and stealing corporate pens, he dissects ironies embedded in his everyday surroundings. What begins as an arbitrary flânerie, develops into a methodical formula that addresses philosophical and phenomenological, revealing the spatial, poetic relationships between his subjects and their frangible correlation to human beings.

Khalid is alumnus of programs Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship and Campus Art Dubai 7.0 with previous group shows at Art Dubai, Warehouse421 and Yorkshire Sculpture Park

 

 

In this work, Mohamed Khalid attempts to trace the UAE's urban memory, while abroad and away from the place itself. The work, almost childish in its medium, records a fleeting present through thorough research of personal advertisements on Dubizzle, a prominent classifieds website. 

 

The attempt, especially in the context of Khalid’s wider urban practice, displays a keen interest and an urge to preserve the intimate, the unglamorous, and the candid glimpses of everyday urbanity found on platforms like Dubizzle.

 

Through his work, Khalid often examines everyday experiences through detailed gestures of drawing and photographing. He extracts and questions relationships between hidden narratives and speculative histories. 

 

A series of over 30 oil pastel drawings, recreating screenshots of adverts on classified website ‘dubizzle’. Here the artist attempts to remove the coherent self and present a relational self using these ad drawings containing nuances of someone's

daily life. Also uses ads as proxies regarding topics on home, the art world, financial anxiety, and anthropology in Dubai.