Hassan Khan — Chantal Crousel Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 29 → March 5, 2011

Artist, musician and writer, born in 1975, Hassan Khan lives and works in Cairo. He has published numerous texts in Arabic and in English. As a musician, he has composed soundtracks for theater and performed his own pieces. The work of Hassan Khan was presented, among others, in the 8th Biennial of Istanbul (2003), in the first Triennale Torino (2005), in the 15th Biennial of Sydney (2006) ; in the first Biennial of contemporary art of Thessaloniki in Greece (2007) and more recently in the 8th Manisfesta, Murcia, Spain (2010). In 2007, a solo exhibition will organized at Le Plateau, Paris, as part of the Festival d’Automne. The Kunsthalle, St. Gallen (2010) also gave him, in the summer 2010, an important solo exhibition. His latest work Jewel, a 35mm film commissioned for the exhibition “Told/Untold/Retold” presenting 23 contemporary Arab artists at the Mathaf, Doha (Qatar), is appreciated as one of the highlights of this event.

For his gallery exhibition, Hassan Khan will present at the gallery the following works :

Evidence of evidence II, vinyl print, 2010
This damaged oil painting, seemingly executed by a hobbyist, was found in a house sale in the bin marked “take for free”. The original painting sized is enlarged and printed on vinyl. As it is severely damaged, every crack and chipped bit of paint, every fold of the canvas are clearly visible and the passage of time is made literal in a way that, at least for the artist, holds emotional resonance.

Muslimgauze R.I.P. video, 8 min 07, 2010
Muslimgauze R.I.P. is a single channel-video made in Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, for the 8th Manifesta (2010). Muslimgauze was a music project formed in 1982 by the experimental musician Bryn Jones influenced by the Middle East without ever having been there. The name of Muslimgauze is a play on the word “muslin” (a type of gauze) combined with the word “Muslim”. In Ljubljana, for the preparation of an exhibition last summer, Hassan Khan came upon a location and a young boy reminding England’s Thatcherist economic and social features in the 80’s. The film evokes a home in Manchester in 1982.

G.R.A.H.A.M. video installation, 13 min 54, 2008
Hassan Khan’s video installation G.R.A.H.A.M. is essentially a portrait. It consists of a continuous, ten-minute real-time shot of the artist’s friend Graham sitting, slowed down to last fourteen minutes to subtly enhance every detail. Despite the fact that Khan is interviewing the subject about his life, the piece is silent, as Graham was asked not to answer the questions verbally, but to maintain continuous eye contact with his interrogator. At one point during the video, Graham lights a cigarette in the most perfect of cinematic gestures; this stands out as a key moment during his “incorporation” within a dialogue that shifts the positions of mutual authority and submission between the artist and his muse.


Lust, 50 photographies, 2008
“Lust 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. […]”

Clare Davies

The complete series will be presented in the exhibition.

Bank Bannister, brass, 2010
The brass sculpture, Bank Bannister is an exact replica of the bannister leading up the stairs to the entrance of the Central Bank of Egypt, in Cairo.