Hassan Khan
dal 25/8/2008 al 17/10/2008
Segnalato da
25/8/2008
Hassan Khan
Uqbar - projectspace, Berlin
From August 27 through to October 18, 2008, uqbar projectspace will host an exhibition of new work by artist and musician Hassan Khan. While Khan has exhibited widely in Europe and the Middle East, Lust represents the artist’s first solo show in Berlin.
To date, Khan’s work has largely focused on drawing out an emotional logic of collective cultural systems and forms of production, exploring, for instance, the unconscious of Cairo’s popular shaabi music (DOM TAK TAK DOM TAK, 2005), the existential charge animating anthropomorphic cartoons (stuffedpigfollies, 2007), and the authoritarian underpinnings of the artist’s presentation as form (I AM NOT WHAT I AM, 2006-ongoing). The immersive nature of the work commands the viewer’s full involvement. In contrast, his current exhibition is at first glance a surprisingly demure affair.
Elements of the approach Khan has been developing over a ten-year period are present in Lust, and the current exhibition extends the artist’s longstanding interest in photography. At the same time, Lust’s intimate scale is an attempt at personal resonance and immediacy, which represents a shift away from the often complex and monumental nature of previous works.
The exhibition features a series of fifty photographic miniatures taken on Khan’s cell phone. Uneven resolution and subterranean colour, careful attention to composition and display combine to create a series of minimal images, the traces of an idiosyncratic photographic subconscious. Each picture records fleeting objects, people, and places: a document of travel and everyday life that catches an intangible and theatrical superfluity.
The images are, maybe paradoxically, both exceptionally clear and enigmatic: from a pornographically cheerful ceramic pig advertising cold cuts, to an image of a fluorescent-lit, tiled office in Egypt’s Palace of Culture, and a spectrum of hotel room lights in the various cities Khan has passed through in the past twelve months. In one picture an old, balding man with long white hair walks away from the camera. The artist suggests this image somehow has something to do with civilization. From Khan’s invisible cell phone lens the world is possessed.
Text: Clare Davies
The exhibition takes place within the frame of Cairoscape – Images, Imagination and Imaginary of a Contemporary Mega City (30.8-12.10.2008, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien), funded by Hauptstadtskulturfond (Capital Culture Fund), Berlin.
Hassan Khan (lives and works in Cairo, Egypt) is an established artist and musician. Selected solo shows include Gezira Art Center, Cairo (1999), Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2004), A Space Gallery, Toronto (2005), Gasworks, London (2006) and Le Plateau, Paris (2007). Khan has also participated in the Istanbul (2003), Seville (2006), Sydney (2006), Thessaloniki (2007), Contour (2007) biennales and will be participating in the forthcoming Gwangju Biennalle and Yokohama Triennale amongst other international group shows. As a musician he has composed soundtracks for theatre and performed his own pieces in venues including Melkweg (Amsterdam), Lydmar (Stockholm), Babylon (Istanbul), Whitechapel (London), Cairo Jazz Club (Cairo), KBB (Barcelona), Strange Fruit (Beirut), SESC Sao Paolo (Sao Paolo), Podewil, Salon Bruit and HAU3 (Berlin), the Garage and ACAF (Alexandria) and Point Ephemère (Paris). His album tabla dubb is available on the 100copies label. Khan is also published widely in both Arabic and English.
Opening Tuesday, August 26, 2008, 7 p.m.
Party August 26, 10 p.m. at Visite ma tente, Schwedenstr. 18b
uqbar - projectspace
Schwedenstrasse, 16 - Berlin