Gulf Today previewed 85 Seconds To Midnight, Mohamed Monaiseer's solo exhibition at Tabari Artspace DIFC, running from 11 September to 1 October 2026. The piece by Features Writer Muhammad Yusuf frames the show around history read through cycles, repetition and flow, and around the unstable boundary between imagination and reality that Monaiseer probes across roughly forty drawings, paintings, sculptures, textile works and a video installation.
The article traces the exhibition's origins to Monaiseer's residency at Can Serrat in Spain, developed while the Gaza conflict was under way, and reads the show as an argument that violence recurs across contexts and generations even as its borders, enemies and technologies change. Its title borrows from the Doomsday Clock's current setting, and Yusuf describes recurring visual devices drawn from that premise: armoured figures in poses borrowed from Don Quixote, pixelated forms evoking digitally mediated warfare, playing-card symbols that cast conflict as a game, and sheep standing in for herd mentality. Grids in several works derive from oral stories gathered during the residency, including a Spanish folk account of a drummer whose sound was enough to turn back an advancing French force.
Tabari represents Mohamed Monaiseer, and 85 Seconds To Midnight follows his earlier Tabari solo Limen: Thresholds. Gulf Today's account situates the new body of work within his continuing interest in how narratives around violence are subjective and constructed, carried here through the mixed media and folkloric source material the residency in Spain gave him.
