Realms of the Hyperreal

Realms of the Hyperreal, a title that references Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum of signs, brings together major works from three aspects of Hafez’s practice: large-scale painting, video, and installation. In bold canvases, Hafez sets in motion a pop topology of Pharaonic symbolism and capitalist mythology. Images from fashion advertising and health culture are ‘kidnapped’, in the artist’s words; digitally manipulated, blown-up and inserted into compositions the scale of Ancient Egyptian wall paintings. Signifiers cross time periods as well as cultures, and superheroes find each other across millennia: see the amalgam of the jackal-headed god Anubis and a ripped Superman. Khaled Hafez’s artistic approach pulls apart prime dichotomies –modern/traditional, East/West, sacred/profane– to create intercultural iconographies that exceed simplistic analyses of identity.