Capitulation of Discourse | catalogue essay, GAGPROJECTS, 15 Oct-16 Nov 2014
The chaotic and dynamic systems in Hassan’s work do not conform to notions of abstraction in the traditional sense, instead they are reproductions of events that we don’t often see, extracting abstract models through processes of imitation more akin to neoclassicism. Representing nothing but themselves they suggest that to represent means to value, consequently excluding the other. His works open doors towards the mathematically elegant foundation of all.
A new series of ten large photographs and a three channel video installation form Hassan’s 5th show at GAGPROJECTS: Organic Occurrences Forming Within The Grey Zones Of Pre-existing Regimes advances Hassan’s research in translating events within silent structures. Here a collection of aleatory images of fluid paint have been circumscribed within the proportions of a Fibonacci rectangle, and later dissected by it and by various arrangements of Lemoine’s geometric construction of the golden ratio.
The geometric and organic sections come together to recompose the topology of an unknown territory, escaping definition; the sectioning affects the plasticity of the fixed image to form and deform further images within the complex maps and into our imagination. What we first see in these large photographs is only the surface of a much deeper ground, a virtual space where the point of view of the structure and that of the event, including the event of our viewing, converge. Thus the frame becomes a portal into the structure; into the environmental magic of the work, an access into a space of singularity far from discourse.
These images behave as open components of an ever-changing event. They are open to being, but nothing in particular, as they are proportioned within structures that can articulate and survive every answer. What we see therefore are not pictures of the artist’s imaginary, but contact images, irrational events captured within transitory moments represented in our time with a degree of fidelity.
Included in this exhibition is Traces and Determinants, a three-channel video installation running for twenty-one minutes. The work loops from light to dark, showing a swarm of lines that emerge and later dissolve; during their time they twist and connect, vibrating as a living organism that dances menacingly to the rhythm of techno sounds.