Literature

Mohamed Monaiseer treats history as a cyclical structure, a sequence of returns in which borders, enemies and technologies are revised while the underlying arrangements of domination persist. The series takes its title from the present setting of the Doomsday Clock, and time functions across the works as both countdown and circuit, a measure of proximity to catastrophe and a figure for recurrence. Developed during the war on Gaza, while the artist was in residence at Can Serrat in Catalonia, the works set colonial power against its contemporary forms of occupation, dispossession, territorial control and the unequal valuation of human life. Equally at stake is the question of transmission. News reports, digital images, literature, oral histories, conspiracy theories, folklore and myth each supply their own account, and the series proposes that violence is encountered through these mediating forms as much as through the event.

The series extends a practice concerned with war, occupation and imperial power, and with the potency a word or figure acquires through reproduction. Where Monaiseer's earlier work addressed the historical construction of conflict, these compositions attend to its circulation, through compressed images, screens, feeds and endlessly recirculating footage that render distant events at once immediate and unverifiable. Repetition operates conceptually, technically and structurally throughout. Armed figures, animals, vessels, trees, patterned grounds, grids and pixels recur in altered configurations, enlarged, distorted or translated between drawing, painting and textile, so that recurrence is legible on the surface of the work as well as in the history it describes. The approach invites a double reading at once invoking Sufi practices in which repeated words produce concentration and spiritual movement, and the disciplinary repetitions of the classroom, where a word copied a hundred times enforces obedience and eventually exhaustion.

Across drawing, painting, sculpture, textile and moving image, a shared iconography destabilises the visual language of war. Armoured figures dance or ride toy horses, drawing on the absurd heroism of Don Quixote; playing card symbols pattern the surfaces, proposing conflict as a game or a gamble; the sheep moves between pastoral imagery, fable and metaphor to figure herd mentality and the ease with which a collective position is assumed. Dark humour runs throughout, a means of examining the performance of power and the fantasies through which conflict is romanticised, rehearsed and projected. Gridded structures derive from conversations at the residency, where accounts of aircraft formations and chemical warfare converge with the geometry of the pixel. Material choices fuel these tensions. Monaiseer works across unconventional canvas formats and constructed frames, some tapering into the form of an obelisk, others unfurling in the manner of a scroll, and combines rusted iron with repurposed kitchen cloths and khayamiya, the Egyptian tradition of hand-stitched appliqué associated with tentmaking. Iron speaks of infrastructure, weaponry and force, and of corrosion; textile introduces touch, labour, nourishment and shelter. Together they summon a condition in which structures of apparent solidity stay vulnerable to collapse.