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Mohamed Abdelkarim

video , tekenen , Spoken word , schrijven , schilderen , performance , Objecten , Media , installatie , Digitale technologie , Artistiek onderzoek

Mohamed Abdelkarim (Minya, 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator working across performance, film, writing, and sonic practices. His practices are committed to performativity, through the overwritten script that moves through speculation, mythofiction, and eschatology, to the textures of rapture and defeat. His endeavors contemplate a world that might be undone and remade. His current umbrella project focuses on reconstructing reality, titled (Fiction as a reality we missed)

His performances have been included in Cabaret Voltaire, Manifesta 11, Zurich, 2016; Photo Cairo 5th and 6th, Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), Egypt, 2012 and 2017; Live Works Performance Act Award Vol. 5, 37° Edizione Drodesera, Trento, Italy, 2017; Interazioni Festival, Rome, Italy, 2022 and 2025; and Festival Internazionale della Performance, Performative 04, at MAXXI L'Aquila, 2024. Sonic Acts Biennial (Amsterdam), Techno-Ancestrality, the IMPAKT Festival (Utrecht), 2026. He established "Live Praxes", a performance encounter that includes workshops, seminars, and performance nights.

In Which They Will Remain Forever
In Which They Will Remain Forever - Audiovisual Performance 30’, 2026 In Which They Will Remain Forever is a performative meditation on memory, futurity, uncertainty, and interminable defeat in post-revolutionary Cairo. It unfolds through video footage taken by the artist in late 2012 of seven people and a dog gathered in an apartment, sharing testimonies of strange events that seemed to foreshadow an imminent catastrophe. Drawing on expansive elements of footage, poetry, recorded testimony, and live sound, the performance inhabits the incomprehension left by history and the remnants of defeat, proposing gestures of ritualized commemoration, repetition, and recitation to dispel the haunting presences embedded in the city.
thaqil al awwal [A Rhythmic Exoskeleton]
thaqil al awwal [A Rhythmic Exoskeleton] - Audiovisual Performance 45', 2026 thaqil al awwal is an audio-visual performance that contemplates and experiments with an ancient 8-beat rhythmic cycle used as a clinical "dosage" to balance the stagnation of the Black Bile (Melancholy). Drawing on the 9th-century Al-Khindi's treatise on the cosmological mapping of the humors, preserved in the Escorial, the performance restructures ancestral frequencies and the concept of the rhythmic exoskeleton to serve as a healing apparatus rather than merely an attempt to cherish antiquity's lore. The performance proposes a sonic healing in response to the melancholic stasis inhabiting the incomprehension left by history and the remnants of defeat and grief, through gestures of ritualized rhythms, repetition, and recitation, and techniques to dispel the haunting presences.
Blue Gaze at The Future: Designing the Unseen
Blue Gaze at The Future: Designing the Unseen - Blue Gaze at the Future is a series of audiovisual performances combining text, radio drama, and visuals. It questions the theater stage as a landscape that can reorder fractured reality, proposing a different world. The performance follows the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, known for her clairvoyance, tracing her appearances in literature post-1948. It explores future hope amidst grief and defeat. In this second episode, the desert is the focus — both as a physical and metaphorical landscape — considering how it can be staged scenographically. Through the legend of Zarqāʾ al-Yamāma, a woman who lived in the pre-Islamic Arabian peninsula and was known for her exceptional intuition, sharp eyesight, clairvoyance, and ability to predict events before they occurred, the performance traces and contemplates her apparitions in contemporary literature following events in 1948, 1967, 2013, and beyond. It explores how we can imagine a future hope that copes with grief and reconciles defeat, considering notions of negativity, grief, and defeat as rational apparatuses rather than psychic affects. *An iteration featuring an Intervention by Fay
Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the Sea
Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the Sea - Sound installation, printed fabric textiles and two audio channels. Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the Sea is an audio installation featuring a fragmented narrative from the perspectives of sea water, peripheral characters and mythical cryptid creatures. The narrative uses the history of the precarious sea sphere as a backdrop for an alternative mythical and metaphysical world. By merging historical materials of enslavement, naval warfare, and environmental exploitation of the sea, the project situates these elements within a fictional context, creating a narrative that speculates on the future consequences for the sea and its frontier shores.
Unfortunately, I Got Different Bodies, But One Tongue - The performance is structured around narrative and takes the form of poetry, songs, and lyrics. Fragmented narratives are utilized to complicate the relationship between the notions of body and performativity. Historical events are revisited and future crises are speculated upon in order to examine how a body is staged through performance. The performance includes a range of performative acts, such as seeing, mentioning, dying, dreaming, reincarnating, and automating, to explore the different ways in which the body can be presented through performance.
A Gift To Those Who Contemplate The Marvels Of Renegades - The performance involves establishing a narrative archive featuring a selection of seven characters float between real figures and are marginalized from history, whether it be from the history from below, fiction, or almost fiction. The selection of these characters, with various statuses of renegades, has to do with "Queerness, Mercenaries, Myth, Forced Migration, and Diaspora," and the narrative will explore these various currencies of locomotion. The props and tools used in the performance play the role of the characters' archive. This archive consists of books, cartographies, poems, images, soundtracks, and objects. The performance narrative moves between all these materials as a means of storytelling.
I Might Learn More from a Fish
I Might Learn More from a Fish - Installation consists of 36 Variable Sizes of Drawings: Watercolor, Pigment, and Ink on Cotton Paper, 2024. Speculative drawings depart from the colonial introduction of Water hyacinth as an invasive species, which led to the formation of a landscape shaped by conflicts within the biomechanical systems of invasive and indigenous species, morphed and intertwined. These conflicts are juxtaposed with remnants of humanity’s past. By weaving a fictional narrative, the work contemplates the concept of a brutal landscape, reflecting and rethinking notions of subjective violence, resistance, and brutality on a micro level, offering a non-human perspective as a model for learning.
Floating Limb - the case of evolution - #1, 2023, pigment and ink on cotton paper 50 x 70 cm
Isabelle Searches For Monad - Performance, 2016, 35 minutes. Starting from Isabelle Eberhardt's history: was a writer and traveler in 1898 she dressed like a man and left Europe to North Africa "Sahara" and called herself Si Mahmoud Saadi before she died, Isabelle was the leader of the Qadiriyya Sufi order. Through the research of Isabelle's biopolitics matter, within the notion of "Queer Diaspora" the performance questions the possibilities of the story as one of the unaccountable bodies of knowledge. Considering the medieval perspective of "Monad." as an intro to the mystical wolds of the body
Oh, I Am So Sorry! I Didn’t Mean To Scratch Your Face - Performance, 2017, 25 minutes. The performance is an episode of an ongoing performance project. The play delves into the exploration of the concept of "ugliness" and savagery, aiming to propose a redefinition of savagery in the context of times of crisis. Employing a combination of narratives, masks, and images, the play engages in a critical examination of the archetype of ugliness, drawing inspiration from both historical and contemporary drama productions. Within the subgenre of horror films, the Zombie is portrayed as an antagonist - an infected, decaying, and unsightly human figure that poses a threat of contagion to others. Similarly, in One Thousand and One Nights, also known as Arabian Nights, the Ghoul is presented as a fearsome creature existing between life and death, once again depicted as an unattractive entity. In these dramatic portrayals, Zombies and Ghouls are perceived as unsightly adversaries with monstrous forms, thereby presenting a menace to the protagonists. In contrast, the protagonists, often depicted as flawless individuals, emerge as the heroes who conquer these grotesque entities. Both of these dramatic narratives underscore the notion of the "ugly body" functioning as an antagonist deserving of elimination. This play utilizes the models of Zombies and Ghouls as a means to explore potential modes of existence during times of enduring crisis. Through a presentation that offers a darker interpretation of One Thousand and One Nights, the project delves into a fundamental question: "If savagery serves as a form of resistance, how can we contemplate its aesthetic qualities?" Through this performance, the complex interplay between ugliness, savagery, and resistance within a crisis-laden context is vividly examined and articulated.
Gazing...Unseeing - The video speculates a future scenario demonstrated in a climate fiction narrative. The narrative is based on a pseudo interview with an imagined fugitive in a post-disaster era. Through different positions, ideological turns, and economic sovereignty, the interview imagines the future of the greens, governments, and private sectors in a post-flood city. The landscape and fiction narrative complicates the relationship between infrastructure, privatization, ecology, surveillance, and migration.
I Almost Forgot The Roving Body...Let's Call It The Future - In a world teeming with drones and devoid of humans, the film follows a drone on an immigration journey to the north. Through a conversation with an anonymous figure, insights are gained into conflicts and the contrasting power dynamics of infrastructures and geographies.
A Song For The Loose Destiny - In a distant future, a group of humans gather at a coal mining site to reflect on their past or our future. Against the backdrop of the abandoned Zollverein coal mining industrial site, they engage in dialogue and perform speeches, songs, and poems that convey a sense of sublimity, pain, and alienation. The film speculates on the complex relationship between technology, landscape, and the human body in a post-disaster world. The landscape bears witness to both progress and devastation, portraying potential emergences in the future.
To slacken the ocean!...over my thick skin - The work contemplates the water lexicon - crossing, floating, drowning, withdrawing... staging the objects, fabrics, and ropes, speculating on the sea in the time of post-crisis.

Unbearable Horizons

Datum:
Locatie: Cairo
In samenwerking met: ARD Art Institution

This exhibition, Unbearable Horizons, presents three recent works by Mohamed Abdelkarim. It features two works produced between 2021 and 2024, alongside an installation version of the ongoing performance work Blue Gaze at the Future.
The three works share fragmented fiction-narratives that complicate the relationship between notions of body, performativity, language, and the effects of defeat, grief, and hope. By revisiting historical events and speculating on future crises.

https://ard-art.org/

Instructions for Placemaking: Blue Gaze at The Future, Episode #2

Datum:
Locatie: Amsterdam
In samenwerking met: De Appel

n Our People are Our Mountains (naar de woorden van Amílcar Cabral over de bevrijdingsbeweging van Guinee-Bissau) werken kunstenaars en collectieven in Palestina en elders samen met majelis (samenkomst) Jakarta door op afstand instructies te sturen.

https://www.deappel.nl/nl/archive/entities/16070-mohamed-abdelkarim

The Taste of Water Leaky vessels, flowing rituals and non-consensual collaborations

Datum:
Locatie: Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

The Taste of Water is a site for multiple encounters with and around water. The exhibition is a leaky vessel, with artworks flowing in and out of the space. Propositions are realized elsewhere only to wash up on the Academy's shores. As an exhibition, performance space, screening room, and ritual space, The Taste of Water takes cues from water's characteristics – flowing, shape-shifting, non-linear – appearing as a medium and signifier, in the shape of sensorial sculpture, sound installation ...

https://www.akbild.ac.at/en/museum-and-exhibitions/Exhibit/exhibitions-events/current-exhibitions/2022/the-taste-of-water

Interazioni Festival, a multidisciplinary festival

Datum:
Locatie: Goethe Institut, Rome

Different Bodies, One Tongue, and loose destiny PERFORMANCE

https://www.chiasma.eu/Interazioni_Programma.html

KAS, a group show

Datum:
Locatie: Centrale Fies

KAS is a group exhibition of a performative nature which constitutes the third episode of the "Anti-modern Trilogy", a cycle of exhibitions that Centrale Fies has been dedicating for some years to the relationship between objects and their activations, re-evaluating forms of knowledge (affective, somatic, visual) censored or suppressed by Western sex-colonial modernity.

https://www.centralefies.it/kas/

At the crossroads of different pasts, presents and futures

Datum:
Locatie: Villa Romana

The Tellers grew out of the same question that had also previously led to the digital exhibition A Whole Population of Poets presented on Sumac Space – a platform devoted to Contemporary Art from the Middle East through programs, critical writing, and research.

https://www.villaromana.org/front_content.php?idcat=69&idart=1638&lang=2

The Tellers

Datum:
Locatie: Villa Romana

A performance consisting of texts and images generated by the GPT-2-Artificial Intelligence model combined in a non-linear narrative. The narrative started from the event of a UFO sighting in Asyut, Egypt in 1989, moving on to other events in the same year. The AI-generated narrative moves between different milieus and characters, involving creatures from outer space, alien abduction, coup d'état, and the extinction of terrestrial species.

https://www.villaromana.org/front_content.php?idcat=69&idart=1638&lang=2

Artist in residence PACT Zollverein, Essen, Germany.

Datum:
Locatie: Pact Zollverein

residency program for the development of artistic projects and productions, in which artists from all over the world have been taking part since 2002, is the "heartbeat" of the daily work at PACT Zollverein.

https://www.pact-zollverein.de/kuenstlerhaus/residenzen

The Camargo Foundation, Fellowship Spring, Cassis, France

Datum:
Locatie: Camargo Foundation

During his residency at Camargo, Mohamed worked on his project [let the sea eat me: to perform a ferry], which is a new episode of his long-term project, that thinks through the history of different phases of fugitives/renegades such as immigrants, mercenary, tourists, rovers, queers, and exiles, and their relation to the sea as dissimilarity zone.

https://camargofoundation.org/programs/directory-of-past-residents/
Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices
Mohamed Abdelkarim Desert Without Sand: Sequential Practices
We Shall Have a Bon Voyage [Pirates, Whales and Jinns]
Mohamed Abdelkarim We Shall Have a Bon Voyage [Pirates, Whales and Jinns]