Film presented at Lo schermo dell'arte Film Festival 2017

Made for Manifesta 8, shot in Ljubljana, the video is set in Manchester, 1982. A kid explores the space of a modest apartment in an anonymous house, touching its furniture and objects. He opens and closes drawers, pulls out their contents; moves the squeaking doors of a wardrobe; spills glass beads on the carpet; spins a coin on a table; sits and rises; looks out the window. The film is surprising for the contrast between the silent, almost perplexing accumulation of these trivial objects, and the violence of the sounds produced by the doors, drawers and various objects in the hands of the child. Muslimgauze, a wordplay between muslin (a type of veil) and muslim (muslim), is the pseudonym of experimental musician Byrn Jones, a native of Manchester, who began in the 80’s producing albums whose titles and sounds were direct allusions to the political situation in the Middle East without ever having been there. In response to this figure, Khan builds a highly allusive scenario: on the one hand a reference to a musician whose appropriation of radical politics from other places is maybe a potent comment on his local conditions; while on the other, a young boy suspended in a moment of time experiencing in detail an English middle class environment. A ghostly film in which Khan stages the conservatism of the United Kingdom under Thatcher as a domestic condition. 

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).