At Five in the Afternoon
2012
At Five in the Afternoon (2012)
"I don't see this piece based on an intensive research but rather as an accumulation of different types of experiences, artistic phases and areas of interest.
In 2009, I was doing a three-month residency in Barcelona, researching bullfighting as a sport and industry, but also as a fascinating spectacular performative practice. Through this research, I managed to collect and capture a lot of footage and materials related to this subject, including the video of the two toreros which is projected in the movie theater as part of this piece. This footage was kept in my archive for almost three years. I did not manage to get over my fascination and excitement about the subject and I didn't honestly know what to do with these witty materials.
In 2012, I attended a one-year post-graduate study program in Beirut, Lebanon. During that time, I was basically trying to recover from an artist’s block, result of socio-political complexities and of my own emotional states. I was facing depression and anxiety in a creative way and searching things related to Love, Social Life and Politics. That’s how the text for this piece came up.
One day, I was looking for some images into my archive, in order to finish the production of another project, and accidentally came across the footage of the torero. I started to edit it along with the text. Then, they came up together as one video piece.
Later on, I decided to push the work a step further. I wanted to put it in a third place, to create a positive and dynamic distance both conceptually and emotionally, so I projected it in a cinema with a single man watching it."
Mahmoud Khaled in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (October 2013)
At Five in the Afternoon (2012) | Mahmoud Khaled
Video installation | 6’, stereo, color, 16 : 9, loop
Testimony Mahmoud Khaled | 18th Festival
The artist presents his piece filmed at a bull race in Barcelona and in a movie theater in Beirut, Lebanon. He also discusses the main focus in his work: building identities in virtual social environments such as the cyberspace
A Single Man (2009) | Tom Ford
"This magnificent scene from A Single Man, a film I watched in 2009, left an emotional impact on me and inspired me to concieve At Five in the Afternoon", explians the artist.
"The text Gayja-vu? (2010), written by a Cairo-based gay blogger (Thoughts and Confessions of a Testosterone Addict!), didn't slip my mind for a while, and I was quite sure that I would get back to it sooner or later while formulating a new piece. It happened in 2012 with this work", explains the artist.
The poem Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1935), by Federico Garcia Lorca, inspired the title and most of the content of At Five in the Afternoon.