ArtTalks is presenting -Moulid Ya Dunia - the second solo exhibition by artist Mohamed Elbehairy , on November 25, 2025.
IThe exhibition unfolds the Egyptian folk festival, not as a mere cultural document but as a portal into a symbolic, liberating space where memory and imagination weave new realities. In this particular painting, El Moulid becomes a visual theatre rooted in the earth yet rising into the sky, both figuratively and literally. The old tree stump, hollowed out by time and crowned with a puppet theatre, serves as a foundation of memory: worn, resilient, and bursting with life in unexpected ways.
A man cranks an old music box that seems to awaken the scene into motion. He wears a suit and a beret, a figure straddling the old and new, perhaps a memory of a grandfather or a street performer reborn in paint. The box reveals apples and doves, symbols of sustenance and peace, emerging from a world where offerings and dreams coexist. Above, a woman in pink floats with a hula hoop, smiling mid-air atop The Pianola, echoing the joy and defiance of gravity central to El Moulid spirit.
Nearby, a man beats a tambourine atop a red-and-white circus pedestal. His stance is both humorous and heroic, like a figure out of a folkloric tale, a keeper of rhythm and merriment. And then there’s the mystic in green, who floats from the sky, blowing a horn not just to make music, but to awaken this enchanted world, summoning it from memory into spectacle.
White doves flutter through the scene, bridging earth and sky, reality and dream. The barren trees in the background suggest the quiet desolation of ordinary life, a landscape waiting to be transformed. And transform it does: through music, color, performance, and play.
This is not merely a depiction of folk life. It is a reanimation of the popular body, the collective, joyous, suffering, surviving spirit of the people, rising above hardship and conjuring wonder from the mundane. The painting translates surrealism into something deeply local, earthy, and emotionally resonant. It does not mimic the formal games of European surrealism, but reclaims its power, using its freedom to soar from within the grassroots of Egyptian culture.
This is a surrealism not of escape, but of re-rooting: where the floating woman and the flying mystic do not flee from the world, but uplift it, grounding the imaginary in lived experience. The reality portrayed here is playful and profound, an alternative truth where paradox is not contradiction but celebration: life as both sacred and silly, beautiful and broken, heavy and light.
In this world, even gravity like fate is negotiable.
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