Hassan Khan: tabla dubb

13 tracks
Produced in 2001-2005

tabla dubb is an audiovisual performance where music composed and performed by the artist (sampled spliced edited and processed tabla beats, generated tone patterns, processed frequencies) is mixed to a live edit of an archive of imagery shot and edited by the artist.

tabla dubb is NOT a DJ/VJ event

tabla dubb is an attempt at fashioning a public media that uses a foundational element in popular egyptian musical culture (the tabla), within the context of a performance based on two elements: music and video. It offers a cultural practice where the politic of shared co-habitation, in a city where power is contested on a daily basis, is investigated in a concise and concentrated form.
Presence is intensified.

tabla dubb refuses to engage in the reductionist discussions around the “traditional and contemporary” imposed by the orientalizing discourses of the dominant institution; cultural production is treated as an instrument- the familiar is played with to suggest a meta of itself. This is an attempt at sidestepping the insecurities of having to constantly define specific identities, personas that are continuously promoted by official culture.

This need to view the ground as figure- as nineteenth century colonial world exhibition, is put into question.

Different sets of time, different configurations of space, are collapsed unto each other. A haunting is documented. A trace created. A psycho-geography suggested but never explained.
Hypnosis as strategy.

Urban environments are invested with hyper-reality. That which calls attention to itself, that which reveals itself as both surface and depth. That which is absolutely material yet refers to something else. That which acts as a code, a key- that which frames itself.

A position lost somewhere between confrontation and reverence, mysticism and analysis, totalization and political materialism.

A position lost somewhere between confrontation and reverence, mysticism and analysis, totalization and political materialism.

Hassan Khan

Born in 1975, London, UK. Lives and works in Cairo, Egypt and Berlin, Germany. Hassan Khan is a writer, a musician and an established artist, one of the most active in the Middle East. His work is nourished by the urban reality of Cairo and he considers the role of art as a conceptual and linguistic activity. To this end he makes use of the widest range of media such as video, photography, performance and installation. The artist considers the medium to not to be a sort of field that has to be mastered but rather a source of possibilities, potential as well as learning.

Hassan Khan’s notable solo exhibitions include The Portrait is an Address, Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, MMK, Frankfurt, Germany (2015); Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, Cairo, Egypt (2014); SALT, Istanbul, Turkey (2012); trusted sources, CCA, Kitakyushu, Japan (2011); evidence of evidence, Kunst Halle St Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland (2009). He also participated in dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany (2012) and The Ungovernables, Triennal New Museum, New York, U.S.A., Told/Untold/Retold, Mathaf, Doha, Quatar (2011); Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain (2010); 3rd Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan and 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea.

In 2017, his work was exhibited at the 57th Venice Biennale at the Giardino delle Vergini (Arsenal) and was awarded the Silver Lion for a promising young artist in the International Exhibition Viva Arte Viva. A new version of Composition for a Public Park, the celebrated installation at the 57th Venice Biennale, will be inaugurated at the Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, in October 2019. In October 2019 Khan will have a solo exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal organized by the Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid.