Ayyam Gallery Dubai (12, Alserkal Avenue) is pleased to announce A Temple for Extended Days, a solo exhibition that marks the addition of Khaled Hafez to the gallery’s roster of artists while inaugurating its new outpost.
Characterised by dichotomous juxtapositions of epochs, genres, and cultures, whether in its earlier, eight-year-long abstract phase or in the subsequent transition to the hieroglyphically figurative, Hafez’s practice demonstrates an inclination towards the collision of worlds.
In a multimedia corpus that clearly borrows from Egyptian iconography, slender deities wander with aplomb to cross paths with emblematic modern-day heroes, military warfare, and mass media symbolism, to prove that the past is constantly recycled in order to reassure the present; and perhaps even to lift the curtain on an indiscernible porch between artificiality and reality, defined by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard as ‘the third order of simulacra’ in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. According to Baudrillard, post-modern culture has grown so dependent on archetypes that it no longer is capable of distinguishing the natural realm from its fabricated counterpart.