85 Seconds To Midnight

85 Seconds To Midnight is a solo exhibition by the Egyptian artist Mohamed Monaiseer at Tabari Artspace in Gate Village, DIFC, Dubai. It runs from 11 September to 1 October 2026.

The title refers to the Doomsday Clock and what the gallery calls its measurement of humanity's proximity to catastrophe. Monaiseer developed the body of work during the war on Gaza, which began while he was on a residency at Can Serrat in Spain. War, occupation and imperial power run through his practice; here he looks at how they recur across contexts and generations.

"Repetition operates conceptually, technically and structurally across the series," the gallery writes. "Armed figures, animals, vessels, trees, patterned grounds, grids and pixels return in altered configurations, enlarged, distorted or translated between drawing, painting and textile." The works use unconventional canvas formats and constructed frames. Some rise into the tapering form of an obelisk; others unfurl like a scroll. Monaiseer combines rusted iron in the frames with repurposed kitchen cloths and khayamiya, the Egyptian hand-stitched textile appliqué associated with tentmaking. For the artist, the gallery writes, repetition recalls Sufi practices of repeated words and gestures, and also being ordered to copy a word one hundred times at school.

Mohamed Monaiseer (b. 1989) studied at Cairo University, taking a BA in Educational Art in 2011 and an MFA in 2015. His solo exhibitions include Taxidermy Dreams at Townhouse Gallery, Cairo (2018) and I, PET LION at Gypsum Gallery, Cairo (2024). Limen: Thresholds followed at Tabari Artspace in 2025. He has held residencies at Delfina Foundation, London (2019) and Can Serrat, El Bruc (2023).