It is not difficult to perceive the notion of ‘struggle’ in Kareem Soliman’s series of works titled The Mortal Struggle of the Soul. The works are both claustrophobic yet alluring, vacuum-sealed yet pulsing with energy, suggestive of an over-charged battery with explosive potential. The works are iconic, perhaps ready to be worshipped by its suit-adorned followers. However, they also capture a degree of the ironic, celebrating as they do, a symbol of the mundane reality of capitalism’s enforced signature – the shirt and tie.

Soliman points to department stores providing ‘shirt and tie’ wearers a million colour options and combinations of wearing the same garb, suggesting that combining a red tie with a blue shirt is a supposed sign of radical individualism. One tends to forget that a tie, no matter its colour or material, holds as its distant cousin a simple medieval snot rag, an item for phlegm and nasal discharge which gradually morphed into a fashion statement while also a symbol of entrapment and corporate bondage. Famous French semiologist Roland Barthes, writing in his 1967 tome The Fashion System, summed up the corporate ‘look’ as a kind of machine for maintaining meaning without ever fixing it.''

At the end of the day, The Mortal Struggle of the Soul has at its core a powerful sense of self-portraiture. It is Soliman the artist capturing Soliman at his aspirational height – would-be corporate powerhouse, metallised thus invulnerable, grasping for the freedom that theoretically comes with capitalist success – “aspirations that are unattainable,” as he himself notes. The Warholesque notion that the shirt in different finishes could be infinitely reproducible fed into Soliman the Corporate’s more fiendish tendencies. But the result, alluring as it is, appealing to our love of order and security, is also inevitably soul-crushing, a pre-packed, dry-cleaned and sanitised notion of prestige. Thus Soliman enters into the titanic battle for the Soul.

– Excerpt from essay written by Dr. Ashley Crawford