Middle Eastern Circle Presents: An Evening with Hassan Khan October 26, 2016, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum SARA RAZA Good evening, my name is Sara Raza. I m the [Guggenheim] UBS [MAP] curator for Middle East and North Africa, based here in New York. And I m delighted to welcome you all to the first Middle Eastern Circle event, an evening with Hassan Khan. The Middle Eastern Circle is a distinguished group of supporters who are prolific in their regions, supporting artists and institutions, and also within the international diaspora, and we re very pleased that this event is made possible through their generosity. Hassan has had a long engagement with the Guggenheim. His work resides in the Abu Dhabi collection. Also, through the Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund, I had the pleasure of working with him just very recently for my exhibition But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, in which he was a featured artist. In addition, Hassan was also a recent finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize last year, so he s had a long-term engagement with us. And so we re very pleased to have him here in the United States, and particularly here in New York. Following the event this evening, there will be a short conversation between our esteemed curator Nat Trotman, curator of performance and media, which will allow for further dialogue, and comprehension of the concert this evening. Hassan was born in London in 1975, and he received both BA and MA in English in comparative literature from the American University of Cairo. He has worked across diverse media, including choreography, music, performance, sound art, and video, as well as engaging in literature and writing. He draws from a wealth of experience, as a visual cultural practitioner, and he centers a lot of his ideas around Cairo, the city where he currently resides. Hassan also has a prolific exhibition record. He has exhibited his work in Gasworks in London. He has shown in several biennials, international biennials, and centers. He s participated in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003 in Seville and Sydney in 2006, and the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece, and the Contour Biennial in Belgium, both in 2007, and recently in Documenta 2012. Through his musical work and compositions, he has performed internationally, and we re ever so grateful to have him here this evening. So without further ado, I d like to welcome to the stage, Hassan Khan. Thank you. Good evening. Before I start, I d like to say a few words about this concert, and the setup that I m using. I work with sets. So usually each concert is based on a set that has been developed over a period of time. Part of it is composed. I work with musicians in the studio, and use different methods for this composition. It s not necessarily all scored. There are different ways some of them are based upon a relationship with the musician, some of them are based upon finding ways to translate ideas into musical forms, etc. And then I take these sessions, and turn them into something that I can actually work with, in a live situation. Now, at the same time I introduce this pre-composed, and pre-recorded in the studio element to something that is much more chaotic. I ve been working for the past 15 years with my instrument, which is an old Mackie mixer, and what I do with this, is that all the outputs that go out, are split and go through different circuits, and pedals and effects and filters and processors, to be able to control them, Transcript 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 1 of 5
and they return back to the same mixer. Which means they re feeding back, which basically generates a chaotic sound. It generates chaos. And part of what I do is, I struggle with that chaos, to try to shape it, and try to give it form, in conversation with what has been pre-composed. So basically there are different languages at work, happening at the same time. This program for tonight is not one long set, as I usually do. I decided to select a few pieces from different sets, and to make a program out of them. The first piece is called A short story based on a distant memory, from 2011. And this piece was based on the sessions for another work that was in 2010. And in late 2011, I was very interested in narrative, in narrative writing, and I wrote several texts at the time that had a strong narrative tone. And one of these stories, which was about the discovery of humiliation, somehow, in the world, one of these stories became connected to this piece of music. So, although the sessions for this piece of music pre-existed that story, the way I shaped it was in relation to that story. But it is a standalone piece. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you. [Performance of first piece] This next piece is a medley of two existing pieces. It s the first time I ve put these two pieces together. The first piece is from 2007. It s called 12 pieces for piano and electronica, and it was a piece that I composed in Montenegro, when I was working with a theater director there. It was a piece that came out of working on this play. And I worked with a pianist there, and it was recorded in an old theater, with a really wonderful wooden floor. It was quite rich, in terms of the sound. But the thing about these 12 pieces, they re very brief. Most of them are one minute long. And they re about the possibility of drawing a line, or delineating a form, in a very concise fashion. So they re very structured, in a way, and they have a classical touch. The other piece, from 2016, which is a long-form improvisation called Phone tone generator and pedals, is almost the opposite. It is usually around one hour long, and it s a freeform improvisation using my phone as a tone generator, a lot of pedals, a lot of percussive elements that are being generated by using contact mics, in which what intrigues about that piece is the possibility of making myself the clock. As opposed to a lot of work that happens in dance music, or in minimal dance, or in minimal electronica, the clock is usually time-based it s usually already preset. And the thing about phone tone generator and pedals, everything is an element on its own, and there is nothing that unites them except my own very fallible rhythm, and I m interested in that. So the medley between these two very different forms was something that I found exciting as a platform to begin maybe exploring certain things from. That s it. [Performance of second piece] So, the last piece that I ll perform tonight, which is the longest piece in this program, is a piece called Taraban. It s quite a special piece for me, because it came at a point of time in which I had a great desire to break something, and I think it kind of helped in doing that. The piece is based upon two songs from the early twentieth century by Yousef El-Manyalawy, who was quite a brilliant, what you would call a classical Arabic singer. And what I did is that I took the two songs, and sort of studied them, and worked with their structure, and worked with musicians to produce new compositions based on these songs, and also with singers. Again, the same system Transcript 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 2 of 5
is in place I work with the pre-composed elements, and the live chaotic elements, and also rearrange the pre-composed elements in a live situation, to produce a conversation between both poles. The last thing I would like to say is that the lyrics of these two songs one of them is based upon the poetry of Ibn al-farid, who is a twelfth-century Arab poet. So, there are subtitles provided for that. Thank you. [Performance of third piece] My name is Nat Trotman. I am curator of Performance and Media here at the Guggenheim, and as we all come down from that remarkable experience, which was really... Thank you for providing us with such a powerful and moving... Yes, another hand. [applause] Thank you, thank you. So as we transition from that headspace into the reception that will be held on the rotunda floor, I thought we could just have a couple of questions, and a very short conversation, just to open up some of the ideas that you explored in the concert, and to give some context, in terms of what else is going on in your practice. As Sara had mentioned in her kind introduction, you work in a lot of different formats. And something that I was really struck by in this concert was the incredible variety of musical forms that you re working with, and that made me think about the diversity of other sorts of formats that you ve worked with across your practice, including sculpture, installation, video, photography, writing. To sort of start us off, what I was hoping you might be able to remark on is sort of how you situate your musical practice in relation to your socalled art-making practice, or museum and gallery practice, and what you see connecting those two practices, or separating them. I think of myself as a musician, and an artist not an artist who makes music, or a musician who makes art, but in those terms, quite separately. Of course there s a lot of crossfire between them, but my position towards the medium is different. I started with music since I was a student at university, which is now a long time ago, so, the relationship is quite different to what I m doing the kind of inner voice I hear is different. It s not the same. In terms of what we would call art practice, in terms of what is exhibited or installed or placed in that context, I think that the dialogue has a lot to do with what I imagine things might mean, or how they could be understood, and what kind of experience is being designed. While in music, the relationship is seemingly more immediate, and therefore there is a certain space in which I am willing to allow myself to do things, and treat things in a certain manner that I wouldn t in my art practice. So for example, in music I don t care where I play, somehow. You know? It could be in a bar. It could be here, it could be wherever, you know? Something about it doesn t demand this kind of, you know, pressure of thinking about what things mean, what is the work doing in that context, etc.? Whether that is real or not, to me, doesn t matter. I m just willing to take that kind of a relationship. Transcript 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 3 of 5
Yeah. Well I mean, something that is interesting to frame within that dialectic you re describing is, that in both your musical practice and your art-making practice, you do work with some cultural specific subject, or content that you recontextualize in the work. In this case, in Taraban, specifically classical Arabic music. And I m thinking in particular then of the piece that the Guggenheim Museum acquired, which is called Bank Bannister, which uses a particular architectural element from a bank building in Cairo and moves it into the gallery context. So what I d ask is, is that one of those points of crossover between these two? And how do you think of the musical composition or improvisation as a space, you know, in which you re playing with context? What I would say is that in both cases, I m not just taking something and putting it somewhere else. So it s not about recontextualizing. It s about reproducing, in the literal sense, something. So with Bank Bannister, it s not a found object. It is a sculpture that is of something that exists. It s an almost exact description of something that exists. But it goes through a process of labor, whether physical labor, or just mental labor, in terms of trying to think about what this thing is, and how it should be shown. In terms of Taraban, although it s based upon, actually, two songs that do exist from the beginning of the twentieth century, there is a process of composition, you know? I could say that I learned from these songs, and that I m in dialogue with that language in this case, of classical Arabic music but my process is very different. For example, this is constructed in the studio, and in the construction of the studio, things happen that are intentional. So for example, I work with the musicians, I make them play the same melody over and over again for like twenty minutes, and while they re playing, I change the melody. I tell them to put a note here, take a note out, etc., so then it s being shaped, you know, it s being sculpted in a way, in a live sense. And the musician, in this case, is not enacting, is not kind of playing out his fantasies of the music, he s just trying to access the code of the music. And in that particular example, I do like to use this long kind of repetition, to drain away the affects that, especially with session musicians, are acquired by working in commercial recordings all the time, there is a certain kind of accent about a certain type of emotionality. And I m interested in draining that away, and reformulating it, and putting it back forth. So there is a dialogue with an existing cultural genre or history, but I would insist it s not just about recontextualization, it s not about, in these cases, it s not about found objects; it s not about appropriation. In some other works, which have a relationship to popular culture, it s not about pop, you know? It s not about that. It s not a cynicism about these sources, or these existing things. It is an engagement with them, and it s a way of engaging with anything, and in music specifically, it s motivated and driven by real desire. I work in a genre, or a form, or something because I love that music. There is that kind of motivation. Yeah. I think it s interesting that those kind of ideas of affect and desire are coming up, because that s something I was very struck by, is obviously the lyrics in Taraban are deeply emotional, [laughs] and effective. And it s refreshing, I think, to have that in the mix of everything, especially within an art context where, unfortunately, there can be a lot of cynicism at times. Well, I could ask many other questions, but I m aware of the time, and you must be exhausted after that. So, I m going to end it there. And there is a reception, as I said, upstairs. Transcript 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 4 of 5
Yeah. If anybody has any questions, please. Yeah, we ll be standing upstairs. Feel free to approach with questions. We can talk further over a glass of wine. And thank you, again, very much. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, thanks Nat. Transcript 2016 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (SRGF). All rights reserved. page 5 of 5