Hassan Khan | HOST

The Kestner Gesellschaft presents a comprehensive solo exhibition by the artist Hassan Khan (*1975 in London, lives and works in Berlin and Cairo) in the lower exhibition halls. Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer who is known for his broad and diverse artistic practice that includes music, performance, photography and film, sculpture, installation and text.

Khan’s work partially deals with the precepts, gaps and energies that lie at the core of how a sense of self as well as a collective social order are formed. It engages with both familiar, shared conditions as well as elusive and undisclosed content to produce forms that excite the imagination, raise fundamental questions, channel simmering undercurrents, seduce and alienate, engage with expectations, pose mysteries as well as help re-articulate our experiences with the shifting structures of power.

Khan’s exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft is, like many of the artist’s exhibitions, an associative system. It brings together works based on a present yet sometimes invisible thread. These works are diverse in form, medium and date of production. They are also informed by and suggest radically different registers sometimes within single works; the violent undercurrents of mass action as well as the joy and promise of collective power, the seemingly innocent gestures of a cute dance and the primordial act of self-possession that allows consciousness to operate.

Hassan Khan lives and works in Berlin and Cairo. He is the 2017 recipient of the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion. In 2018 he was appointed professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He has also participated in Documenta 13 (Kassel, 2012), the Montreal Biennale (2016), the Sharjah Biennale (2015). Running parallel to the exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Khan’s The Keys to the Kingdom can currently be seen at the Palacio de Cristal / Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. As a musician he regularly performs his music live, for example at the Ruhrtriennale, Essen (2018), the Intonal Festival Malmö (2017), the Guggenheim Museum New York (2016), Maerz Musik Festival, Berlin (2013) and the Louvre, Paris (2012).