Literature

Mohamed Monaiseer’s acrylic and ink works on cotton take the form of suspended tombstones, their surfaces absorbing architectural and ornamental vocabularies drawn from the Islamicate world. Rendered on cotton, a material associated with shrouds and burial, these works operate as images and objects, collapsing painting into a sculptural register. Motifs reminiscent of Qur’anic ornament, funerary garlands and architectural tracery are layered with restrained gestures of ink and pigment, producing surfaces that feel simultaneously inscribed and eroded. The tombstone form functions as a site where personal grief, interrupted revolutionary futures and collective histories converge. Time appears compressed, with past, present and speculative futures held in uneasy suspension.

Central to these works is the concept of barzakh, understood by Monaiseer as a zone of in-betweeness. The tombstones articulate this condition materially: they signal disjunction between body and spirit, land and displacement, ecology and extraction, while refusing closure.