Hassan Khan

July 26, 2013 was the worst day of my life. This is not an exaggeration. On this day something happened. Something public and collective, involving hundreds of thousands of people, and then the world felt contaminated. Waves of numbed out hysteria washed over everything. A savage and voluntary self-humiliation, a choice, to prostrate oneself in front of the fetish. A deep, physical, indulgence in fear. Fear the mind killer. Fear. Neighbors and strangers rolled through the streets whipping up a frenzy. Some ripped off their carefully cultivated propriety and succumbed to a perverse ugly twisted phallus-god. Others, worshippers of machismo, willingly castrated themselves as a sacrifice to the demon of fear. A hunger for victims and monsters fueled this dance.

This is only an exhibition. It feels a bit different to me than most of my previous exhibitions. Because it is, frankly, a risk. The works brought here together represent the meeting point of several latent things: first a private moment, a secret that was allowed to breathe and then the price that was paid; second the exciting, unbearably surprising, horrific, brutal, dangerous yet promising transformations shaping the world; and third, a risky, compulsive proposition that tries, strives, wants, to be able to manage that moment, to find a form that is suitable and generative without complacency and servitude.

This collection of recent works, installed in a space, are therefore both a proposition and something else.

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