Google Me / Duplicate Self-portrait (2010) presents us with two images as objects. Each
image is of a black screen shot displaying a single frame pulled from a video of a public
performance at precisely the same moment. A command bar enabling the original viewer of
the online video to play, pause, maximize or mute splits each image. Google Me began in
2008 as a response to a predetermined institutional art form (the artist talk) in an
international context (the artist residency) for articulating the professional identity of an
artist and his practice. Since then it has evolved into a work in multiple renditions that on
one level explores the search for and the enactment of an artistic self and its duplicates in
the public domain.
The piece takes as its point of departure Khaled’s accidental discovery of "Khaled Mahmoud", a popular London-based belly dancer born in Cairo, who the artist found after trying to ‘google’ his own name.
