Mahmoud Khaled

Alexander Nagle
Apr 24
3 min read

Do You Have Work Tomorrow? (2013)

Series of small black and white prints by Mahmoud Khaled showing screenshots of a staged text conversation, exploring queer intimacy and surveillance

Close Looking: Queer African Art and Futures

Visual description:

Do You Have Work Tomorrow? consists of 32 black-and-white silver gelatin prints, each measuring 15 x 10 cm and mounted in a grid across the gallery wall. The images are screenshots of an iPhone conversation staged by Khaled.

The composition is minimal. Each print shows a screen displaying part of a text exchange between two anonymous Grindr users, identified only as “Me” and “you.” The text bubbles appear in stark black and white against the phone’s dark interface. The conversation unfolds line by line across successive photographs, guiding the viewer through a tense, fragmentary dialogue.

There are no faces, bodies, or location markers. The work presents only text on a screen. Its serial arrangement forces a slow, close reading, mirroring the anticipatory rhythm of the digital exchange itself.

Context:

Mahmoud Khaled is a multidisciplinary artist born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1982. His work often explores male identity, the tension between public life and private intimacy, and the political dimensions of queer desire in the Arab world.

Do You Have Work Tomorrow? was created in 2012, in the period following the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, when Cairo was marked by political turbulence and intensified state surveillance. Although homosexuality was not explicitly illegal, Egyptian authorities frequently used laws around “debauchery” and “public decency” to arrest and imprison gay men, often using digital platforms such as Grindr as tools of entrapment.

Khaled has described the work as emerging from a “personal experience between two strangers,” and as a way to approach large public concerns through a private point of entry.

Interpretation:

Khaled stages a conversation that hovers between desire and danger. The title asks an apparently ordinary question, but within this context it carries much more weight. It gestures toward scheduling, caution, risk, and survival, all at once.

By printing the screenshots as silver gelatin photographs, Khaled transforms something designed to be fleeting into something materially lasting. What might have been read and deleted becomes preserved, slowed down, and publicly displayed. The work turns ephemeral communication into record.

The black-and-white format deepens that effect. It recalls documentary photography and even surveillance imagery, complicating the viewer’s position. We are reading an intimate exchange, but we are also witnessing it through an aesthetic associated with monitoring and evidence.

The work also asks where intimacy can exist under conditions of political pressure. In a context where queer digital life is vulnerable to surveillance, even a simple message becomes charged. The conversation is not only about connection. It is also about calculation.

The absence of bodies intensifies this tension. The speakers remain unseen, but their vulnerability is palpable. Here, invisibility is not emptiness. It is a condition shaped by risk, and sometimes a strategy of survival.

Reflect and Explore

Why does Khaled present the conversation as 32 separate photographs rather than as a single continuous image? How does the grid shape your reading of the exchange?
What is the effect of removing Grindr’s familiar interface colors and rendering the screenshots in black and white?
How does the title function as a double meaning? What might “work” suggest in relation to labor, desire, and survival?
The conversation is staged, but rooted in personal experience. What is at stake in blurring fiction and autobiography in this way?
How does the absence of bodies, faces, and locations shift your sense of intimacy and risk?
In a context where digital platforms were used for entrapment, what does it mean to stage and exhibit these screenshots as art?