Description
mixed media on paper, 7.5×5.5 inches, 19×13 cm.
History, geography and culture are mutable, imagined signs that Fathi Hassan often feels free to mix up and assign in his work in performance, installation, photography and painting. He explores the representational possibilities of language, inspired by texts from the Arabic calligraphy as core compositional elements. Although the texts in his work have no comprehensible meanings, it nevertheless serve as a specific link between image and writing whose aim is to give voice to Nubia’s lost oral tradition. Fathi Hassan was born to a Nubian family in Cairo, Egypt in 1957, where his family relocated after being displaced by the planned flooding during the construction of the Aswan Dam. He has often reflected upon this turmoil of displacement and dislocation in his works over the years. He studied at the School of Fine Art in Naples 1979-84, and has participated in several exhibitions in Africa, Europe and the USA including “Aperto 88? at the Venice Biennale 1988, 9th Cairo International Biennale in 2003, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in 2005, Dak’art – Dakar Biennial, Senegal 2008 and Villa Pisani, Stra. Venice, Italy, 2008
