Hassan Khan: The Portrait is an Address

Beirut Art Center presents The Portrait is an Address, the first solo exhibition by artist Hassan Khan in Beirut, following a long and profound relationship with the city, starting with Khan’s collaboration on Akram Zaatari’s Transit Visa project in 2001 running through several editions of Home Work space Program (HWP) by Ashkal Alwan. This exhibition will also be the first to focus on the portrait as one central aspect of Khan’s practice in such depth. While recent critically acclaimed survey exhibitions of Khan’s work have had a wider focus and were on a much larger scale, this exhibition digs into one significant direction within the wider constellation that his practice encompasses. The portrait has played a pivotal role in Khan’s work starting with 100 Portraits in 2001. It deals with the complex relationship between visibility and truth. It remains one of the most intriguing elements in the emotional landscape of the human subject, whether as mimesis or fabulation; through the power of words or by visual means. The visual portrait acknowledges the human face as a space where interiority may become readable, but also as a surface where the conditions of lived experience are marked. This contiguity between the face as screen and as trace, between selfhood and identification; the recognizable and the unknowable is a space of possible reflection. This exhibition grapples with the possibility of intimacy, the gaps and losses that are necessary for us to make sense of what we see and what we know, the very possibility of making sense itself. It also simply allows the audience a chance to look at others and themselves in a direct, accessible and emotionally powerful way.

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer who lives and works in Cairo. His practice encompasses a wide diversity of media and approaches informed by a longstanding engagement with popular culture, film, theater, literature and the visual arts, and drawn from personal experience, observations, memories, dreams and childhood stories. Before beginning to exhibit his artwork in the late 1990s, Khan was deeply involved in Cairo’s alternative scenes with pioneering work in the fields of experimental music and video. He lectures regularly in art schools and cultural institutions around the world and has served on several juries, including the 20th Youth Salon in Cairo which sparked critical discussions in 2009. In 2011, Khan was the president of the jury of the Venice Biennial.

Recent group and solo exhibitions include Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Sharjah Biennial (2015); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, (2015); Kodak Passageway, D-CAF, Cairo (2014); Secession, Vienna (2013); SALT, Istanbul (2012); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Paris Triennial (2012) and the 2012 New Museum Triennial, New York (2012). His recent live music performances include Sursock Gardens, Beirut (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); SVNMASH Music Festival, Milan (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2015); Forget Amnesia Festival, Stromboli (2014); The Toulouse International Art Festival, Toulouse (2014), Klangzeit New Music Festival, Munster (2014); Maerz Musik Festival, Berlin (2013); Ghetto, Istanbul, (2013); Auditorium du Louvre, Paris (2012); and Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice, (2012). Khan’s publications include Twelve Clues (2016), The Agreement (2011) and Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El Azma (2009).


With the support of AFAC