Working across painting, embroidery, and appliqué, Mohamed Monaiseer examines how depictions of colonial history, esoteric traditions, and Egyptian folklore shape collective memory and reinforce systems of power. Throughout his multidisciplinary practice, text dissolves into illegible marks, fabrics carry traces of their former lives, and objects associated with play become charged with the logic of control and domination. His surfaces function as repositories of accumulated time, in which processes of making, repetition, repair, and erasure reveal how stories are constructed, transmitted, and altered.

Storytelling functions as both the subject and structure of Monaiseer’s work. Drawing on Egyptian folktales and their transmission through oral traditions before their eventual recording in written histories, he considers which narratives endure, which are transformed, and which are forgotten. Animals, taxidermied figures, and childhood toys appear as allegorical protagonists through which he explores instinct, conquest and vulnerability. Religious symbols, occult references, and indecipherable calligraphic forms are hypnotically painted on his surfaces, resisting direct interpretation and inviting viewers to experience language as image rather than as something to be decoded. Throughout his practice, language is treated as an unstable system of representation—one that can preserve, obscure, distort, or reinvent the past. Meaning is never fixed, but emerges through repetition, translation, and the continual retelling of stories.

Textiles occupy a central role within Monaiseer’s practice because of their intimacy with the body and their capacity to carry memory. Working on clothing, bedcovers, tablecloths, and military fabrics, often found rather than newly sourced, he draws attention to the tenderness and brutality embedded within their histories of use. Through hand beading, embroidered embellishments, and the medieval Egyptian appliqué tradition of khayamiya, Monaiseer foregrounds the human labour embedded within these materials, preserving gestures of care while reflecting on the gradual displacement of handiwork through mechanisation. Instead of resisting processes of aging, his works embrace them, allowing fabrics to fray, paper to yellow, and found objects to retain the physical traces of previous lives, treating time as an active material.

Rather than producing distinct bodies of work, Monaiseer develops projects over many years, allowing ideas, symbols, and materials to migrate across his practice. Whether producing thousands of hand-drawn toy soldiers or monumental embroidered textiles layered with repeated calligraphic forms, the scale and intensity of his works emerges through sustained acts of repetition. His installations, paintings, and embroidered works continually return to question how history is remembered, performed, and inherited, whether through children's games, religious iconography, military symbolism, or domestic craft.

MOHAMED MONAISEER (b. 1989, Cairo) is an Egyptian artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and embroidery. He holds a BA in Educational Art from Cairo University and lives and works in Cairo. His solo exhibitions include Limen: Thresholds, Tabari Art Space, Dubai (2025); I, Pet Lion, Gypsum, Cairo (2024–25); Adrift in the Labyrinth of a Parallel Mind, Athr Gallery, Jeddah (2019); Taxidermy Dreams, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai (2019) and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2018); Barzakh, Safarkhan Gallery, Cairo (2015); and Muted, Safarkhan Gallery, Cairo (2014). His work has been included in group exhibitions at TEFAF Maastricht, Netherlands (2023); Unit 7, London (2022); Art d’Egypte: Reimagined Narratives, Moez Street, Cairo (2019); Naptha, Khuzam Palace, Jeddah (2019); Art d’Egypte: Nothing Vanishes, Everything Transforms, Manial Palace, Cairo (2018); al-Riwaq Gallery, Bahrain (2017); and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut (2017). Monaiseer has participated in international residencies including Can Serrat, El Bruc (2023); La Place, Barcelona (2019); Delfina Foundation, London (2019); and Mass Alexandria, Alexandria (2016).