Literature

Mohamed Monaiseer’s practice operates through states of passage, drawing on the architectural, ritual and ornamental vocabularies of the Islamicate world to examine conditions of migration, enclosure and historical interruption. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, sound and video, he treats material as a site of conceptual negotiation, where personal loss intersects with broader political and ecological realities. His works are shaped by an understanding of history as unstable and incomplete, marked by thwarted revolutionary aspirations and ongoing displacement. Rather than anchoring meaning in fixed narratives, Monaiseer constructs environments and forms that remain unresolved, allowing memory, belief and material process to coexist without hierarchy.

At the core of this body of work is the concept of barzakh, understood as a generative zone between states of being. Monaiseer approaches this condition through layered surfaces, fragmented forms and recurring symbols that resist singular interpretation. Natural and manufactured materials are brought into dialogue, registering cycles of decay and renewal alongside systems of control and extraction. Across the work, liminality becomes a productive force: a space where spiritual, ecological and political dimensions overlap, and where loss is reconfigured as a site of continuity rather than rupture. In this way, Monaiseer’s practice moves beyond specific geographies or moments, articulating a visual language that speaks to shared conditions of uncertainty, movement and transformation.