Khaled Hafez
Cairo, Egypt
About the Artist
Khaled Hafez was born in Cairo, Egypt, where he currently lives and works. He studied medicine and enrolled in the evening classes of the Cairo School of Fine Arts (Faculty of Fine Arts) in the 1980s. After attaining a medical degree in 1987 and M.Sc. as a medical specialist in 1992, he gave up medical practices in the early 1990s for a career in the arts. He later obtained an MFA in new media and digital arts from Transart Institute in New York and Danube University Krems, Austria. Hafez’s practice spans the mediums of painting, film and video, photography, installation, and interdisciplinary approaches. Hafez is a Fulbright Fellow and Rockefeller Fellow.
About “Mirror Sonata”
Mirror Sonata in Six Animated Movements is an animated video project based on six themes tackled within the painting practice of the project creator, Khaled Hafez. The project was designed to be projected in three screens for the 56th Venice Biennale Official Collateral curated exhibition “In the Eye of the Thunderstorm,” curated by Martina Corgnati, and commissioned by Omar Donia and Contemporary Practices Journal. The video animation can also be viewed on one screen with sound. Mirror Sonata in Six Animated Movements is an interdisciplinary project based on painting, video and installation. For fifteen years I have been exploring through painting, film, and video the complex Egyptian identity, that is Ancient Egyptian, African, Greco-Roman, Judo-Christian and Arabo-Islamic, plus the modern influences of the Mamluk, Ottoman, French and English cultures that left traces on the more modern history.
