Hassan Khan
The Hidden Location, 2004, a fifty-two-minute, synchronized four-channel video installation at the heart of Hassan Khan’s solo exhibition, is a portrait of his hometown, Cairo. A vociferous critic of contemporary art from the Middle East that panders to and deals in Western stereotypes of the region, Khan rigorously and successfully resists the powerful lure of the exotic and formulaic.
The installation consists of sixteen distinct sections that vary thematically and stylistically. Documentary-style segments—some silent, some not—of passing container ships and car traffic both jammed and moving, and slow pans and zooms of trees, parked cars, and endless shelves of electronic appliances, are interspersed with short narrative sketches featuring Cairene actors. Playing out scenarios developed through improvisation exercises devised by the artist, these sequences reveal tensions between genders and classes: A woman confides in a less than sympathetic friend about how her married lover disrespects her; a young couple meeting after work bicker about money; a group of young men robotically recite an account of a failed sexual escapade. Khan effectively varies how he uses the multiple channels; in a segment that follows an insurance salesman—who flips tones, somewhat jarringly, from obsequious interactions with potential clients to a misogynistic tirade in a tea shop—one of the screens shows him looking into the camera while rattling off the names of political, judicial, and religious authorities in Egypt, implicating them as the cause—and possibly co-sufferers—of his peculiar schizophrenia.
Other segments foreground various staging devices like sets and green screens—the latter used, interestingly, not to introduce fake settings but to envelope figures in black voids, their bodies outlined with the slightest of green auras—reminding us that all representations are constructed and all figures are spectral. Buried in the disjunctive gaps between the various screens and segments, an unexpected sense of the city, always fragmented, partial, and subjective, gradually reveals itself to the viewer.
