Khaled Hafez’s work delves into the dialectics of collective memory and consumer culture. Through various media – painting, video, photography and installation – Hafez deconstructs the binary narratives propagated by mass media and disrupts representational dichotomies such as East/West and good/evil. Re-assembling appropriated pop, historical, and political imagery, the artist traces links between the icons and serial format of Pharaonic painting and modern comics. His practice produces an amalgam of visual alphabets that bridge Orient and Occident, and address how globalization and consumerism have altered Middle Eastern societies, to create aesthetic hybrids far beyond the stereotypes of the news.

The video installation Mirror Sonata in Six Animated Movements (2015) for the 56th Venice Biennale was the culmination of Hafez’s excavation of Egyptian identity, combining hieroglyphic forms with superhero figures and emblems of warfare. His work has been exhibited at, among others: Venice Biennale (57th, 56th, and 55th editions); 12th Cairo Biennale; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; British Museum, London; Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; New Museum, NYC; Saatchi Gallery, London; MuHKA Museum of Art, Antwerp, Belgium; and Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany. Hafez has been a Fulbright Fellow (2005) and a Rockefeller Fellow (2009).