Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer. Khan was the winner of the Silver Lion of the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), is currently a professor of fine arts at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and earlier this year his largest survey exhibition to date titled “Blind Ambition” was held at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. His works have been shown at Palacio de Cristal / Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Villa Medici, Rome; Venice Biennale; Beirut Art Center; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; Kodak Passageway, D-CAF, Cairo; Secession, Vienna; SALT, Istanbul; and dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel amongst others. Khan has composed many soundtracks and regularly performs his original music live; appearances include MAXXI L’Aquila, Aquila; The Louvre Auditorium, Paris; Ruhrtriennale, Essen; Intonal Festival, Malmö; Guggenheim, New York; and Portikus, Frankfurt am Main. Hassan Khan’s publications include An Anthology of Published and Unpublished Writings (2019), Twelve Clues (2016), The Agreement (2011) and Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El Azma (2009) and his album SUPERSTRUCTURE EP (2019) was released by the Vinyl Factory.
“The Infinite Hip-Hop Song Live!” – fire bars, mutating beats, shifting basslines, a slew of harmonic melodies and eleven different rappers all part of one big mutating system. What started as a cutting edge algorithmic music installation is now a live concert- The Infinite Hip-Hop Song (2019) is based on a vast database of original content produced by the artist: beats, melodies, bass lines and vocal units produced in the studio with eleven rappers of different ages, profiles and genders delivering hundreds of specially written bars that tap into our collective shared conditions, desires and fear. This battery of content is unleashed live by the artist on a custom-made specially designed interface.
(Talk at C-LAB Taiwan Sound Lab, 90 mins, including interpretation)
What connects a munshid who begins singing by falling in love with one stanza out of a memorized body of poetry extending over a thousand years to an algorithmic generator that puts together thousands of elements to produce duodecillions of possibilities? Hassan Khan will explore a series of propositions and music examples that are based on models of surface rather than depth, willful ignorance rather than repression, the impossibility of secrets rather than traumas and complexes to help think about culture, meaning, music, and technology in relation to the various iterations of his project — The Infinite Hip-Hop Song. Olivier Pasquet will introduce the talk by giving a brief entry into the generative aspect of the piece.
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