Hassan Sharif: The Storyteller

Curated by Murtaza Vali, this exhibition revisits Hassan Sharif’s ‘objects’, works which expand the definition of ‘craft’ beyond notions of skill, precision and medium-specific mastery and towards “an experimental, experiential and embodied practice of learning, understanding, and knowing through making”.

Its title references a 1936 essay by German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin which laments the eclipse of the art of storytelling in the modern era and posits a unique relationship between craft and storytelling – the craftsperson, primarily preoccupied with their hands but free to listen, provides the storyteller with a captive audience: the storyteller’s tales would help allay the tedium of repetitive action that serves as the foundation of much craft practice.

Sharif’s ‘objects’ exemplify this combination of storytelling and craft, of narrativity and materiality. Although they obviously owe much to the Duchampian readymade, they are undeniably handcrafted and the products of mundane manual tasks – cutting, folding, rolling, twisting, knotting, tying, plaiting, weaving, binding, gluing, wrapping. These actions produce small units which are then simply piled, stacked, bundled, or strung together and hung to create a larger form. The artist himself explained: “Despite the fact that my works are based on a sequential, industrial mode of creativity, they also demolish the sequential autonomy of an industrial product.”

This exhibition emphasizes materiality, manufacture, and form through careful groupings and juxtapositions, pairing exhibited ‘objects’ with texts that present an account of their crafting and perception. Sharif famously characterised himself as a “single work artist,” unifying his diverse oeuvre under one conceptual premise. The Storyteller” will attempt to trace some of the myriad material and formal complexities that are otherwise masked by this provocation, presenting a fragmented biography and (art) history of Sharif through thee works.

To 31 May.