85 Seconds To Midnight Mohamed Monaiseer Solo : Tabari Artspace, DIFC

11 September - 1 October 2026

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  • In 85 Seconds To Midnight, Mohamed Monaiseer examines history through cycles, repetition and flows, while probing the unstable boundary between...

    In 85 Seconds To Midnight, Mohamed Monaiseer examines history through cycles, repetition and flows, while probing the unstable boundary between imagination and reality. Notions of war, occupation and imperial power have long animated his practice; here he considers how they recur across contexts and generations, altering borders, enemies and technologies while preserving familiar structures of
    domination. The body of work was developed during the war on Gaza, which began while Monaiseer was undertaking a residency at Can Serrat in Spain. The exhibition brings together a web of references to explore how violence repeats across time and how the stories through which we encounter it are subjective and constructed.


    The title, 85 Seconds To Midnight, invokes the current status of the Doomsday Clock and its measurement of humanity’s proximity to catastrophe. Time is mobilised in various ways in this series, as a countdown to judgement day and through the idea of cycles. Monaiseer sees colonial power resurface in patterns of contemporary occupation, dispossession, territorial control and the unequal valuation of human life,
    and during the residency he came to connect these ideas to our contemporary state of emergency and its mediation. He is equally interested in the forms through which these realities reach us. News reports, digital images, literature, oral histories, conspiracy theories, folklore and myth each offer their own versions of events,blurring the boundaries between what is imagined, perceived and believed.

  • The exhibition comprises approximately 40 drawings, paintings, sculptures and textile works, as well as a video installation filmed during the residency and presented in the back room. Recurring motifs in these works are absorbed from literary fiction, popular storytelling and contemporary media. Armoured figures in various poses, dancing or mounted on toy horses, draw on the absurd heroism of Don Quixote and destabilise the visual language of war. Dark humour runs throughout the compositions: for Monaiseer it is a means of examining the performance of power and the fantasies through which conflict can be romanticised, rehearsed and projected.

     

    Elsewhere, pixelated figures and fragmented grids evoke the digital mediation of contemporary warfare and our era of misinformation, in which information is increasingly manipulated and corrupted online. Monaiseer has previously engaged with the historical construction of conflict; in these works he considers how conflict reaches us through technology, through compressed images, screens, news feeds
    and endlessly circulating footage, producing realities that are experienced at a distance and often manipulated. The playing card symbols that form patterns in his work remind us that, for some, conflict amounts to a game or a gamble.

  • The grids that divide his canvases derive from the artist’s own interactions and from oral narratives. In daily conversations at...

    The grids that divide his canvases derive from the artist’s own interactions and from oral narratives. In daily conversations at Can Serrat, a resident named Anna spoke to Monaiseer of planes moving across the sky, associating their formations with the poisonous chemicals used on civilians in modern warfare. Her associations appear in the compositions through repeated lines and gridded structures, as the geometry
    of aircraft formations converges with the visual language of pixels, screens and mediated conflict.


    Monaiseer places contemporary codes alongside older forms of transmission, allowing disparate stories, images and associations to accumulate within the same visual field. Figures drawn from folktales and oral histories recur throughout the exhibition, among them the story of a drummer whose sound echoed through the mountains of Spain, creating the impression of a larger military force and frightening the approaching French army. These references destabilise perception, so that a formation in the sky might summon the hostility of chemical warfare, a drumbeat cam conjure an army, and a pixelated image can mediate a distant conflict as reality.The sheep recurs as another central figure, moving between pastoral imagery, fable and metaphor to evoke herd mentality and the ease with which individuals can be
    pushed into collective positions. Monaiseer uses such iconography to consider how people imagine themselves within conflict, how communities construct an idea of ‘us’, how an opposing group is cast as ‘them’, and how myth, repetition and representation consolidate those divisions. Fantasy therefore runs through the exhibition as a political force, informing the ways violence can be anticipated,
    justified or remembered.

  • Repetition operates conceptually, technically and structurally across the series. Armed figures, animals, vessels, trees, patterned grounds, grids and pixels return in altered configurations, enlarged, distorted or translated between drawing, painting and textile. Their recurrence suggests a history that repeats through variation. Repetition also has contradictory associations for the artist. It recalls Sufi practices in
    which repeated gestures or words produce concentration and spiritual movement, alongside disciplinary forms such as being ordered to copy a word one hundred times at school. The same act can reinforce history, impose obedience or eventually produce exhaustion. In the contemporary news cycle, images of destruction similarly return until urgency risks giving way to familiarity.


    Material relationships reinforce these tensions. Monaiseer works across unconventional canvas formats and constructed frames; some rise into the tapering form of an obelisk, others unfurl in the manner of a scroll, resembling artefacts. These formats situate the works within longer histories of monument, inscription and transmission, extending the exhibition’s interest in how accounts of conflict are
    preserved and passed on. Monaiseer combines rusted iron found in the frames with repurposed kitchen cloths and khayamiya, the Egyptian tradition of hand-stitched textile appliqué associated with tentmaking. Iron is associated with infrastructure, weaponry and force, while its susceptibility to corrosion suggests that nothing is permanent. Its movement between polish and oxidisation reveals another cycle of transformation. Textile introduces the intimacy of touch, labour, nourishment, protection and shelter. Against the looming Doomsday Clock of the exhibition, these materials summon a contemporary condition in which structures that appear solidremain vulnerable to collapse and transformation.

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    Mohamed Monaiseer, CanSerrat Residency

      
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