Lost phone leads to insightful exhibition of gay life

LONDON - The loss of an unlocked simless phone in a public toilet inspired Egyptian artist Mahmoud Khaled to construct an elaborate fictitious narrative of loss, longing and desire around the life of the unknown gay man to whom the phone belonged.

Khaled’s first solo UK exhibition Fantasies on a found phone dedicated to the man who lost it at London’s Mosaic Rooms transforms three exhibition spaces into house museums of the imagined dwelling of the phone’s owner.

“The exhibition is a spatial portrait of an absent person revealed through the quite strange contents of the phone he left behind in a public bathroom. A mysterious portrait of a man with a passion for ‘décor’ and beauty, a highly eroticised man, afflicted with anxiety, insomnia, and melancholy at the same time,” Khaled explained.

It is an exhibition of understatement where much is left to the viewers’ imagination. Being invited into the house of the imaginary character enables us to share his emotions, empathise with him and come to terms with our own anxieties and fears.

The message of the first room in the fictive home is simple: there is loneliness in life without a lover.  The only art work is a picture of a reflection of a bed in a mirror with the sentence “I can’t sleep without you anymore” handwritten across it.

On the bookshelf in this room is the exhibition’s accompanying publication, featuring images from the unlocked phone. Moving between the erotic, intimate, baroque and everyday, the compulsive sequence of images in the book references the dissonant and voyeuristic experience of scrolling through social media and swiping in dating apps, and the clash the forces of commercialism, productivity and technology with the intimacy of a gay man’s  gaze.

The main room is draped in velvet and voile curtains, with a daybed in the middle.  This piece of furniture conjures references to Freud, and his work The interpretation of dreams. However, the proportions of this piece are disproportionately long, made from leather and wood and adorned with bondage straps. Centrally positioned, this daybed becomes an object of apprehension and desire.

 A sense of anxiety is evoked through the wall murals inspired by an etching from Max Klinger’s series “A Glove”. The exhibition’s title and concept were inspired by the 19th-century German artist Max Klinger’s series of 10 prints titled Fantasies About a Found Glove, Dedicated to the Lady Who Lost It which depict a tale of obsession and fetishisation, in this case centred on a glove dropped by a lady at a Berlin ice rink.

“The drawings are so fantastical and left a strong impact on me as they sensitively described the artist’s pain and struggle with love, longing, loneliness, and paranoia, all generated by a long and intense state of insomnia, which metaphorically describes the situation of many individuals in our contemporary time,” Khaled said.  “I remember after experiencing this piece for the first time, I kept wondering about what Mr. Klinger would do if he was living in our world now and found a mobile phone instead of an elegant feminine glove? And this question is what kept me going and working on The Mosaic Rooms show during the last year.”

An accompanying sound piece transforms the room into a subverted version of a sleeping app, inviting visitors to engage in a mindfulness exercise. But they are not allowed to sit on the bed and are quickly told to get off it by the Mosaic Room’s staff if they respond to their natural inclination. This makes it difficult to immerse oneself in the room and act like a guest. Viewing the room as one would a exhibition in a museum detracts from the experience.

In the downstairs gallery another installation, For Those Who Can Not Sleep, features a rotating leather bed in perpetual motion. The work is a reference to Hugh Hefner’s iconic 1960s office-bed which became a pervading image of heterosexual masculinity in a domestic space. This round bed also became an appropriated design depicted in Egyptian TV and cinema, which Khaled grew up watching.

The circular surround framing the bed features another one of the etchings from Klinger’s series, and there is a looping soundtrack of discordant, eerie, haunting sounds.  The bed casts a long shadow over the room and prompts us to confront our own fears and anxieties. An old radio on the ledge at the top of the bed suggests that yesterday was more comfortable than today and a plant next to it tells us that life goes on in the present regardless of how much we would like to return to the past.

 In the exhibition, Khaled explores the tension between desire and anxiety, dream and reality. A state of sleeplessness permeates the space, acting as a metaphor for political states of being, of not belonging, and being displaced. This sense of disquiet is experienced in the installations where the visitor, as a voyeur, simultaneously feels at home and unsettled.  All the rooms are spacious and elegant with an air of abundance, extravagance and plenty. Yet this means nothing if there is lonlineness  and one is not at peace with oneself.

Biography

Mahmoud Khaled was born in Alexandria, Egypt and currently works in Berlin. His work is multidisciplinary and can be regarded as formal and philosophical ruminations on art as a form of political activism, and a space for critical reflection. He has presented his art in international solo shows and group shows such as Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2019), Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (2018),Istanbul Biennale (2017), Sharjah Bienniale (2017) and Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016). He was a guest artist at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme in 2020.

Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost it, until 25 September 2022; The Mosaic Rooms, 226 Cromwell Road, London SW5 0SW