A conversation with Mohamad Kaaki on provocation, censorship, and building two very different worlds out of one voice
Mohamad Kaaki treats the split between his two art pages seriously: one is a business, the other is a war. This is a conversation about both.
On Beginnings
Nour Almoujabber. Did becoming a designer naturally occur to you?
Mohamad Kaaki. Since I was young, I used to love art in general, everything related to it. My dad had a computer shop (we call it Network in Lebanon), for gaming, and I used to go play video games there. One day I clicked on Photoshop by mistake and thought it was a game. The first tool I found interesting was “liquify”!
NA. Were your parents supportive of you becoming an artist?
MK. Yes, of course, my parents were always supportive, my uncles less so. But my parents never forced anything on me, they just noticed I could draw, I used to draw a lot, and my favorite subject at school was always that one, even though I was bad at almost everything else.
NA. Even as a kid you knew you weren't going to end up doing something else?
MK. I had two majors in mind. One was something related to agriculture, because I used to love nature and plants. The other was graphic design, which I chose in the end because I was more passionate about it, about art in general.
NA. Out of curiosity, is that why there's so much plant imagery in your work now?
MK. Maybe. I love everything related to nature, so it might be subconscious, because I think nature is the origin of everything, art, architecture, even technology, all of it is inspired by nature somewhere down the line.
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Tulip by Mohamad Kaaki
On Sensuality and Masskhara
NA. One of the pieces you sent me is a flower that looks like a vagina. What draws you to nature as a way to talk about women's sensuality?
MK. I always find it fascinating how some flowers or plants resemble human parts, a vagina, lips, eyes, some genuinely look like ballet dancers. In design school we learn to get inspired by what's around us, and I was lucky enough to study somewhere with a real garden, we'd take sticks and leaves and stamp them onto paper. I've always found that fascinating.
NA. Let's talk about the sensuality in your work more directly, there's a lot of sexual innuendo in it. Is that a theme you love returning to, or does it just happen?
MK. I come from Lebanon, which is relatively open compared to other countries in the region, but still an Arab background at the end of the day. What I find interesting is how we accept Western artists making controversial work, but the second an Arab artist does the same thing, it gets rejected, or attacked. Since I was young I've had a provoking personality, and sometimes I make this kind of work specifically to provoke people, or get them used to me being sensual, or being an advocate for the LGBT community, for women's bodies, all of it. It's genuinely hard, Instagram has very strict rules, I've been banned multiple times, and I've noticed the algorithm here treats the same kind of art differently than it does in the West.
NA. I remember a piece where you had a female nipple, and you had to swap it for something read as male just to keep it up.
MK. Exactly. It was a window with a female nipple coming out of it, and a sunflower piece too, Meta removed both, so I was forced to add hair to make it look male, just so Instagram wouldn't take it down.
NA. Doesn't it fascinate you that we live in a place where one is acceptable and the other isn't?
MK. It fascinates me completely, and honestly, that's exactly what led me to start Masskhara, which is doing very well now, over 250,000 followers, constantly reposted on WhatsApp, X, Facebook. The idea came from noticing how Arabs will accept curses in English without blinking, but the same curse in Arabic suddenly becomes offensive, too close to home. I wanted to break that. I think it worked, there are a lot of pages with that kind of language on Instagram now doing well, but I do believe I was one of the first to make it feel normal there.
NA. You did normalize it, though you still get real backlash. I follow the page, I see the comments. What's your actual first reaction reading a bad one, and how do you respond?
MK. I usually just ignore them, reading every comment is draining. If something's really bad I just block the person. What's funny is that people who leave the worst comments often still follow the page, they curse it out publicly and keep following anyway, which tells me they actually like the work.
NA. A little hypocritical.
MK. A little. As for how it actually feels, I don't think about it much until it touches my actual work. My page got banned for six months once and I couldn't get it back. My friend Zyad, also known as Zuhal, ended up giving a talk at a Meta conference about censorship and used my page as a case study, and that's what got it restored.
NA. What got you banned in the first place?
MK. A post where I called myself "لوطي بفخر" [En: proudly, a faggot]. I'm part of the LGBT community myself, and I was trying to reclaim the word.
NA. Very close to what happened with the word “queer” in the West, once it got reclaimed by the community it used to be thrown at.
MK. Exactly that. After I posted it, I got mass reported, not by the LGBT community, by homophobes.
On Reach and Reception
NA. We've talked about the negativity, but there's also a huge amount of positive engagement, people rewriting your posts in their own words, playing on your lines in the comments. What do you make of that?
MK. I might get a million shares and half a million likes, but if there’s only around a hundred bad comments, they somehow get highlighted. People who like the page just share it and move on, they don't necessarily comment.
NA. So the love shows up as shares and likes, the hostility shows up as words, and the words are what get remembered.
MK. I've met so many people, especially in Turkey, where I lived for four years, who knew the page. In the LGBT community especially, people know who's behind Masskhara even though I try to stay anonymous. I recently followed the page myself from my personal account, so at this point, whoever really wants to know can probably find out.
NA. Has anyone ever told you the page changed something for them personally?
MK. Yes, actually, quite a bit. I got feedback that the page is genuinely loved in Syria specifically, Syria shows up as my top follower location whenever I check insights, and people have told me, in person, that I'm considered something like an idol there. I'm honestly not sure if that's accurate at scale, but I've heard it more than once. There's also a guy who ended up in a relationship with his girlfriend because he sent her one of my posts, they met because of it. And a lesbian couple, Arab immigrants in Australia, who got together the same way.
NA. You're basically a matchmaker at this point.
MK. Somehow, yeah.
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Hookup by Mohamad Kaaki
Two Pages, Two Registers
NA. Let's talk about your work aside from Masskhara. You're a well-known graphic designer and brand strategist in your own right. How do you balance building brands and logos with what I'll call your side gig of making viral art?
MK. I didn't even have an active personal page for a while, I have one now, but I don't check messages on it much. My whole approach is that social media should be a source of income, so whenever I post anything, the actual goal is a client, or attention that leads to one.
NA. So you're treating your art profile as a real acquisition channel, a return on the time and the work you put into it.
MK. Exactly.
NA. Which one do you enjoy more?
MK. Honestly, I enjoy both. Masskhara is pure fun, I can write any curse or controversial line and it goes viral almost instantly. Mohamad Kaaki, the brand, is more of a storytelling page, heavier, I talk politics, feminism, LGBT advocacy, anything happening in the world. It's a lot more work, I actually have to read the news and articles to stay inspired, which is draining in its own way.
NA. I remember one of your most viral posts on the Mohamad Kaaki page, the one with the Beirut explosion, all the politicians' faces in the smoke. Walk me through that.
MK. I posted it right after the August 4th explosion, all the politicians embedded in the smoke. I got attacked for it, but it also went massively viral, I'd get screenshots from friends of their friends and family sharing it on WhatsApp. It wasn't stolen, like some people think, it was actually requested to be printed as a huge billboard in Beirut. It stayed up for a few hours before it was taken down, presumably by the politicians themselves, or their supporters, since it didn't spare a single one of them.
NA. Did that piece come from anger? And do pieces like that draw more heat than the jokes and curses do?
MK. Posts like that always cause me problems, and I know it going in, I made that choice with my eyes open. I get real threats on the Mohamad Kaaki page more than on Masskhara. On Masskhara I get called names, bastard, atheist, faggot, that kind of thing. On the personal page, it's threats, people have sent me my own location, and I once got a direct phone call from a political party in Lebanon asking me to take a post down. I won't go into the details of that one, but it happened.
NA. That's heavy.
MK. I tell my friends this a lot, because they ask why I keep doing it when I could just let it go, avoid the problems. I always tell them it's a war I decided to take, and I genuinely don't care if it gets me attacked, because I'd be fighting for rights I actually believe in. On a personal level, I don't believe in borders or countries, and I've never felt like I belonged anywhere, not Lebanon, not Turkey where I lived for four years, not as a queer person, and not as an Arab either.
NA. You've chosen to keep breaking the unwritten rule about not naming specific politicians.
MK. Because I think there's a real problem in how Arabs treat politicians, we practically deify them. I find it surreal, honestly, because most Arab politicians are functionally dictators, and yet we treat them like something untouchable. I never deify anyone. Even a politician I'd call out for being homophobic might make a genuinely good decision for the country elsewhere, and I'll say so. People are people who make decisions, sometimes I'll agree, sometimes I won't.
NA. So it's not the person you're against, it's whatever they're actually doing.
MK. Exactly, and I think that's what Arabs need to learn to do more broadly, because when we deify politicians completely, when we defend everything they do just because it's them, and attack anyone who criticizes them, that's exactly what keeps us from getting our own rights.
NA. I think, on behalf of everyone who agrees with you, we owe you a thank you for being louder about it than most people are willing to be.
MK. That means a lot, thank you.
On Influences
NA. Who inspires you as an artist, famous or not?
MK. At university I got really inspired by Lotta Nieminen, for her minimalism, saying the most with the fewest possible elements.
Walk This World (Lotta Nieminen, 2013)![]()
MK. Jessica Walsh, for her colorful pop art direction.
Milly (Jessica Walsh, 2018)
MK. And the Lebanese artist behind the brand Plastik, Eli Rezkallah, because we have a similar story, both of us building a colorful bubble for ourselves out of a darker personal life.
Marzouk (Eli Rezkalla, 2024)
MK. We used to get inspired by nature, but now, because of social media, because we're not out in the world as much, I think we're mostly inspired by other artists, or by AI.
NA. How does AI factor into your work?
MK. I think AI is here to stay, so fighting it isn't really the point, it's technology. What matters is using it ethically, and letting it help us create faster. We used to have ideas we'd never bother executing because it was too hard, and now AI can help bridge that gap. Like anything else, it has real upsides and real downsides.
On Bad Days and Advice
NA. Last couple of questions. What does a bad art day look like for you, when you're just not inspired? How do you push through it?
MK. I go through that a lot, actually, my senior thesis was on creative blocks. I'm an introvert, so if I'm not feeling it, I'd rather stay home than go out looking for inspiration, even though I know that doesn't always help. What actually helps most is daydreaming, or sometimes the news, even though the news drains me too. It's a specific kind of helpless feeling, being excited and ready to create and having nothing to actually make.
NA. What would you tell an artist who wants to be controversial the way you are?
MK. Always put yourself in a safe space, or a safe place in your life, and be independent, before you go anywhere near controversial work.
Prints of Mohamad Kaaki's work are available now on arabiyon.art.
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