The sources I am referring to here are several things at once. The reasons they are trusted also vary. On the one hand, these are the sources of the work. And that could be almost anything: the way you dash across the road, the exact distance between two shelves in a run-down café, the hysterical ranting of an obsessed writer, a moment of embarrassment suddenly remembered while washing the dishes, the fantasy of an incredible victory, a burning ambition, a deep sadness, a half smile, a simple song that every time it’s listened to reveals something new, a mistake taken absolutely seriously. They are also the sources that I imagine lie behind every gesture of the world, the hidden agreement that allows a transaction between two individuals to take place, to have a name and to remember that it’s yours. To know, to believe, to be. To believe or not in love, friendship, and family. To believe or not in punishment and rewards, in wanting and striving, in giving up, in accepting and rejecting. It is what allows a collective to exist, to organize itself into a form, and to communicate this order to all its members. It is what allows us to realize that we are conscious, we are one, and we are many. These are the sources that allow us to recognize that everyone else is similar to us, yet not us, exactly. And even if with every uncontrolled tic, every moment we forget, every time a king is beheaded our trust in these sources trembles. As long as we are here and still know that we are here, these sources will remain, outside our control yet absolutely trusted.
CONTENT EXCERPTED FROM A PRESS RELEASE I WROTE ON DECEMBER 12, 2011, IN KITAKYUSHU, JAPAN
PHOTOGRAPH OF AN OLD WOODEN BEAM THAT I FOUND ON THE STREET, SPRAYED WITH WATER AND PLACED IN A PUBLIC GARDEN
PHOTOGRAPH OF DAMAGED CERAMIC TILES ARRANGED ON TOP OF EACH OTHER BECAUSE THAT’S HOW BATTERIES WORK
EMBLEM FOR AN ASSOCIATIVE SYSTEM PAINTED IN GOLD AND BLACK DOTS ON A CUSTOM-MADE GLASS TILE
DRAWING BASED ON A GESTURE SEEN IN A DREAM AND COMMISSIONED FROM MOHAMED NOUR, A COMMERCIAL ARTIST BASED IN MIDAN EL ABBASSIA
A PHOTOGRAPH OF MY MOTHER SHOT ON MY CELL PHONE ON AUGUST 4, 2013, AFTER SIX YEARS OF THINKING ABOUT IT AND HESITATING
PHOTOGRAPH OF A CUSTOM-MADE GLASS OBJECT IMAGINED AS A WAY OF COLLECTING THE WORLD AROUND IT
PHOTOGRAPH OF A CUSTOM-MADE “DENSE” OBJECT CONSISTING OF ALUMINUM, BRONZE, IRON, COPPER, AND STAINLESS STEEL
“HOST” IS THE TITLE OF THESE WORDS THAT WERE WRITTEN IN 2007 ABOUT SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED IN 1997
THE FRONT EDGES OF SEVERAL MAGAZINES SCANNED AND DIGITALLY STITCHED TO CREATE A CONTINUOUS IMAGE
TRUST IS THE FIRST WORD in HASSAN KHAN’s project for these pages—but suspicion is never far behind. It’s everywhere in the artist’s language, which invokes decoys, conspiracy, hidden locations. Khan is continually drawn to the cover-up and the revelation; to the legerdemain of continuity editing, or to the wresting of objects from their right and proper places. Apparently unrelated vignettes may be strung together in a video, forming a story where there was none; reality-style cell-phone footage turns out to contain half-scripted dialogue performed by professional actors; sound is dubbed after the fact; a brass banister from a bank is ripped out of its context and perfectly replicated in a gallery; photographs of elusive sculptures are meticulously altered, so that the digital aftereffects seem to seep into the things themselves.
Such displacements blend seamlessly with our everyday, postproduction life, and Khan’s work takes this all as given. The London-born, Cairo-based artist doesn’t really seem to care about fact/fiction debates or the documentary turn, what’s fake or what’s real. He never means to convince. Instead, his work dwells on misgivings, reservations, on the recalcitrance of stuff. This means a hyperbolic attention to detail: separating the part from the whole, the decoy from the setup, the anomaly from the norm. So patterns—behavioral, linguistic, musical—are made and then broken. The gestures, rhythms, structures, and formats of culture—whether pop standards, street fashion, or Orientalist tropes—are established only to be dismantled, then recombined as phrases or fragments. The microtones of Arabic music flirt with generic four-on-the-floor beats. Tabla samples or session recordings are lifted from their original tracks and braided into new compositions. Men dance in a hypnotic mélange of piecemeal movements. As the artist has said of one of his favorite musical genres, shaabi, “it insists on . . . a pattern, and it bleeds that pattern dry.”
Khan’s work enacts both the instrumentalization of form and its undoing. This is one way to read his installations, which often pit a visual order against a material one. Narrative video faces off against inscrutable sculpture, for example, in I Am a Hero/You Are a Hero, 1999, in which screens confront a single hanging hammer; in his presentation at Documenta 13 in 2012, monitors showing his video Blind Ambition stood opposite The Knot, a length of rope that proved to be made of glass. The knot is, in fact, a topological figure that reappears throughout Khan’s oeuvre. The jewel reappears, too—in both the title of Khan’s best-known video and in the lapidary sculptures, some made in the workshop of Zeinab Khalifa, a jeweler and designer based in Cairo. These hard gems and crystalline plaits, stubborn and wondrous shapes, point to a morphology that can’t be broken down. In an art world that is all too quick to reduce culture to an illustration of this or that economic or political position, Khan insists on the irreducibility of form.
In times of revolution, form and perception are put under extreme pressure. The historical avant-gardes believed that a revolution in perception would beget political revolution. But now radically new perceptual experiences await us at every turn, every swipe, every click. Khan asks us what form can do, what it can be, and how it can change when the dreams of an earlier era have come back down to earth.
—Michelle Kuo