HASSAN KHAN

Cairo

Khan’s video installations often take place in the streets or interior spaces of Cairo, filmed in a documentary style but with actors and scripted conversations. Recurring themes include gender and class, as evident in the lovers’ disagreement about money or the unhappy affair found in the sixteen segments of the four-channel video installation, The Hidden Location (2004).

Familiar emotions are made surreal in Blind Ambition (2012), a black-and-white video shot using mobile phones over the course of a day in Cairo. The nine-part work follows actors in argument, play, or a formal meeting, with the unstable camera movement and the unsynchronised audio—dubbed after filming—rendering the otherwise mundane scenes alien. Blind Ambition was first shown at dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel in 2012 and also provided the title of Khan’s major solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2022.

Jewel

One of Khan’s most well-known works, Jewel (2010) is also one of the most enigmatic. The six-minute film opens with an anglerfish, swimming in dark water, that transforms into an illuminated speaker. Two men dance around it, with the accompanying soundtrack of Shaabi—a genre of urban music that emerged in Cairo in the 1970s—composed by Khan. Jewel has since been read in the contexts of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution or Cairo’s various metropolitan identities, although the artist has resisted associations with political events. The imagery itself derives from a scene he witnessed in Cairo of two men dancing on a street corner.

Composition for a Public Park

Emotions and subjectivity are central to Compositions for a Public Park (2013–2017), an outdoor installation of speakers playing libretto in different languages, instruments, and voices. The often- overlapping spoken narratives concern private yet familiar emotions, prompting recognition in the audience.

Compositions for a Public Park was first presented at the Parc de Belleville in Paris, then at the 57th Venice Biennale, where it was awarded the Silver Lion.