Mahmoud Khaled

CAMARADERIE

CAMARADERIE is a precursor to and a blueprint for Mahmoud Khaled’s later forays into queer aesthetics and modes of visual representation. This work is based on videos that the artist collected over the years through YouTube, of Egyptian professional bodybuilders exercising or rehearsing before posing in local and international competitions. The selection also includes videos of amateur young men from Cairo, who obsessively train and exhibit bodily transformations resulting from their admiration for those bodybuilders. The quality and style of these videos ranges from high-end productions commissioned by state and sports institutions to DIY home-made videos—all of them celebrating and representing the masculine body in different ways. 

The research process Khaled conducted on this material and its repository into his personal archive led him to superimpose them with audio and textual material related to certain personal memories of objects and situations pertaining to Egyptian state television broadcasts, which are always accompanied by the national anthem (which is also the soundtrack used when the bodybuilders officially represent their country on stage). The work grapples with the representational power of self- and nation-hood in relation to the idealized and desired masculine body, probing questions around the visual imaginary of hegemonic culture as well as the homoerotics of nationalist fervor and its queer subversion. At a time in which the Sisi regime in Egypt continues to violently crack down on queer individuals, spaces of refuge, and artistic modes of expression, CAMARADERIE remains a powerful and urgent testament to the ways in which artistic practice can subvert and toy with the hegemonic constructions promoted by the state and imposed on minorities.