The exhibition was arranged as two components. One comprised of 10 photographic works titled Organic Occurrences Forming within the Grey Zones of Pre-existing Regimes, 2014, the other, Traces and Determinants, 2012-2014, a three channel video installation with sound by collaborator and Polish musician Rafał Krzysztoszek. Installed side by side, separated by a black curtain to control the light, they combine to evoke Hassan’s continuing grand gesture for pure freedom.
Hassan re-conceptualises the concept of State freedom and anti-freedom into a new format through other sensitive realities, such as applying a slowed down methodology in the use of digital technology. This idea creates a circular paradoxically duality, as a viable means for discourse, consisting of silence, as in the 10 photographs, or the loud and fast rapidly pulsating-interconnecting-irregular-organic-tubular forms, with high energy rhythmic electronic sounds as experienced in Traces and Determinants. No matter how Hassan uses digital technology, he seems to create meditative spaces that somehow expel and attract realities.
Both components in Capitulation of Discourse are made during a time of increased world complexity and instability. Hassan exposes the madness of this world through small accidental gestures and actions. The simple provocation of dripping different thickness of paint onto glass plates, sediment into complex environments, and can take on the appearance of internal organs, landscapes or even storms in the universe. Connecting oils, enamels and acrylics as protagonists to this accidental and controlled engagement, generates all these manifestations. Hassan then scans the coloured paints on the glass and digitally re-composes them into black and white tones with centuries of selected aesthetics: from Fibonacci’s thirteen-century sequences to Émile Lemoine ninetieth-century geometric constructions. The final result is a single and unique digital photographic object.
The use of a wide tonal range creates an intimate and emotional discourse within the subject of each photo and within the general installation. The histories of aesthetics and the multilayered tones interplay at a crux between geometric shapes and the original organic images, morphing back and forth within them to reveal contained dimensions, yet they are actually moving on one plain.
The large 2 meter high images are contained within themselves by a 2 centimetre unprinted paper area, and uniformly framed in a simple natural wood moulding. The even white tone around each of the photographs is occasionally slightly broken. Other small gestures are the appearance of scanned lines and materials like dust, which have attached themselves during the scanning process. These small interruptions appear as cuts or invasions onto the darker tones of the topology of the image.
All is constructed in a system that paradoxically Hassan works against. By allowing the photograph to consume the subject of its origin, the photographic objects takes on its spirit becoming itself the subject that draws us closer to the experience of seeing and imagining.
| Asian Art News, vol. 25 N 1, January/February 2015.
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