Khaled Hafez

Khaled Hafez (Egypt) is taking part in Artists-in-residence program, he will stay in Klaipeda 2015 08 03–31

Khaled Hafez is born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 where he currently lives and works. He studied medicine and followed the evening classes of the Cairo fine arts in the eighties. After attaining a medical degree in 1987 and M.Sc. as a medical specialist in 1992, he gave up medical practices in the early nineties for a career in the arts. He later obtained an MFA in new media and digital arts from Transart Institute (New York, USA) and Danube University Krems (Austria). Hafez practice spans the mediums of painting, video, photography, installation and interdisciplinary approaches.

Artist’s statement:

My practice spans the mediums of Painting, video/film, photography, installation and interdisciplinary art approaches. My core research focus is the exploration of the complex nature of identity; for my painting practice, the identity I scrutinize is a one that is a composite of African, Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, Arab, Islamic, with ancient Egyptian and Judeo-Christian traces. In my current video, photography and other mixed media works, I am interested in sounds of places, as well as movement, an element that was indispensable in ancient Egyptian painting, where all painted elements were in motion, as opposed to Egyptian sculpture that always caught the protagonists in a “pose”, nearly always static. I use a lot of symbols and codes from all ancient cultures, and from the universal heritage of the world. I link imagery of the ancient iconography with deja-vu contemporary advertising elements; the icons/images are manipulated to insinuate metamorphosis. I believe that we are at a point in history where there is cultural recycling: visual, conceptual, beliefs among other aspects. Throughout the diversity of the mediums I use, I explore this cultural recycling.

www.khaledhafez.net