A brief moment on the street where two men were dancing in front of a makeshift speaker with a pulsing light attached to it, was the starting point for this piece originally shot on 35mm film and then transferred to HD Video. At the beginning of Jewel, mysterious lights emanate from a fish gliding through the depths of a black sea before transforming into artificial lights embedded on a rotating speaker around which two men are dancing. The music accompanying the piece, composed by the artist, is not only what the characters are dancing to but is also, maybe, what they are, in a sense, producing. Is this the space of located history or the transformation of culture? 

 

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer. He lives and works in Cairo, Egypt. Khan performs his music regularly in major museums, music festivals and venues such as the Louvre in Paris, Guggenheim NY , IN TON AL Music Festival in Malmo, Whitechapel in London, and MaerzMusik Festival in Berlin. He has published texts in Arabic and English, including: Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El-Azma (Cairo 2009) and Twelve Clues (Mousse Publishing 2016), his first sci-fi novella. He won the Silver Lion for Promising Young Artist of the 57th Venice Bienniale 2017, where at the Giardino delle Vergini he presented the sound installation Composition for a Public Park 2013/2017. Among his recent solo shows: the Beirut Art Center (2016), the Museum of Modern Art MMK (Frankfurt 2015), Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Cairo 2015), SALT (Istanbul 2012). He has participated in numerous Biennials and international exhibitions including recently the Biennial of Montreal (2016), the Sharjah Biennial (2015), the Liverpool Biennial (2014), the New Museum Triennial, New York (2012) and dOCUMEN TA 13 (2012).