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DVD – 10.30 min - color, sound, loop. ‘found videos and texts on YouTube’.
Lover, Viewer, Audience, Street, Noise, Obvious, Hero, Satisfaction, Assistant, YouTube, Internet, Colleague, Hidden, Upload, Photographer, Present, Broadcast, Share, Download, Computer, Camera, Coach, Public, Show, Brother, Myself, Fit, Handsome, Mike, Trainer, Webcam, Well build, Private, Apes, Video, Shoulders, Back, Anonymous, Friend, Broadcast Yourself.
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*CAMARADERIE. Is a video based on some videos I found on YouTube showing some Egyptian professional bodybuilders in different situations in their exercises and their final training before posing in local and international championships ...etc, and a number of other videos showing some young men living in the city of Cairo, who are interested in this type of sports which quickly affect and change the body shape of the practitioner. The nature of quality and production mechanisms of these videos is ranging between the institutional and the personal, the professional and the home-made video, but all of them obviously are celebrating and representing the masculine body in different ways. The research and work process on these materials reminded me of some other audio and textual materials related to objects and situations as the end of the continuous image broadcast in official Egyptian Television accompanied by the national anthem, the same tune which is always being played when the bodybuilders officially represent their country on stage.
Through using a number of techniques of adding and cropping, the work is trying to understand the representative nature of the self and the masculine body in these videos, in its many variations from the official, to the popular, ethnical, personal and erotic.
"Connecting the intense and charged world of popular bodybuilding in egypt with the artist's attempt at understanding the modes of self-representation in such a context makes this investigation of male bonding and the camera especially evocative. Mahmoud Khaled manages once again to be both visceral and cerebral at the same time." -- Hassan Khan, 2010
Commissioned by Mashrabia Gallery for Contemporary Art, Cairo.
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