Projection and discussion
Hassan Khan en conversation avec Iman Issa et Tamer el-Leithy
23 Feb 2022
The event is over
Artist, musician and writer Hassan Khan began working in Cairo in the mid-1990s. His work is multifaceted, playing with contrasts and paradoxes that disrupt familiar reference points, while being attentive to the energies and tensions that emanate from the popular.
It mixes a committed conceptual position with a subtle reflection on the language of forms where a wide spectrum of both personal and collective references resonate. The Centre Pompidou is devoting a selective survey titled “Blind Ambition” to his practice.
The evening will begin with a screening of “Blind Ambition (Episode#1)” a rarely shown short video from 2005 and the first of many works by the artist titled, like this exhibition, “Blind Ambition”. The panelists will use this to open up a conversation around ideas and forms that permeate the exhibition, picking up the thread of numerous ongoing conversations and exchanges and using this opportunity to publicly frame such topics as counter-factual histories, depleted monuments, the shifting relationship to the audience, present day political grotesquerie, personal gestures and the power of music.
Hassan Khan
Since his beginnings in the 1990s in Cairo, Hassan Khan’s dynamic work has been attentive to public space and popular cultures, observing the tensions that define contemporary times. Khan came to art from a variety of experiences, following studies in English and Comparative Literature, when he had already started to practice music. Often stemming from dreams and other personal sources, his work addresses both the past and the present, releasing a political and sensory charge. It takes shape in sculpture, moving image, fiction, music, sound and situations. Humor, the grotesque and a sense of strangeness in the familiar recur as symptoms of the complex energies emanating from our world in an age of globalized anxiety.
Iman Issa
Iman Issa is an artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, MoMA, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 21er Haus, Vienna, MACBA, Barcelona, the Perez Art Museum, Miami, the 12th Sharjah biennial, the 8th Berlin Biennial, MuHKA, Antwerp, Tensta Konsthall, Spånga, New Museum, New York, and KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin. Books include Book of Facts: A Proposition (2017), Common Elements (2015) and Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011). She has been named a 2017 DAAD artist in residence, and is a recipient of the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise (2017), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2015), HNF-MACBA Award (2012), and the Abraaj Group Art Prize (2013).
Tamer el-Leithy
In a former life, Tamer el-Leithy studied Economics and then worked as an economist for a multinational company. There were various escapes from the drudgery of spreadsheets, but when he read a historical novel set in 15th-century Cairo, he saw the light and discovered a passion for medieval history. (The move also made him appreciate the transformative potential of distracting reading.) El-Leithy’s research has explored themes like Egypt’s Arabization; Coptic Christian conversion to Islam; hermaphrodites and transsexuals in the Middle Ages, and pre-Ottoman archives. He teaches at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn.
When
7pm - 9pm
Where
Hassan Khan, Happy Empire (détail), 2020
© Hassan Khan, 2020.