Dreams and Music:
Hassan Khan
part of AUC_LAB
Notes on Practice

In 2016 came the 2nd volume of AUC_LAB Notes on Practice (you can see the first book in the series - about Malak Helmy’s work - here). This time the publication centered on the work of Hassan Khan. Since we had decided from the start to keep the series quite loose design-wise, we followed Khan’s lead on this volume and went in a very different design direction than with the previous book. Here we wanted a design that is rather classical, condensed and straight-forward; page layout that doesn’t pull attention to itself and lets the reader forget about the design.

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer. His work engages with familiar, shared conditions and undisclosed personal references to arrive at forms that suggest imagined communities, raise fundamental questions, channel conditions simmering under the surface, seduce and alienate, engage with expectations, pose mysteries as well as help to re-articulate our experiences with shifting structures of power. To this end he makes use of the widest range of media such as video, photography, performance and installation, as he considers the medium to not to be a sort of field that has to be mastered but rather a source of possibilities. [excerpted from Galerie Chantal Crousel]

The publication features essays by long-term collaborators of Khan’s: Nida Ghouse on the topic of dreams, and Sam Shalabi on music. It also includes images from Khan’s personal archive chosen in response to the two aforementioned essays. It is edited by Kaya Behkalam, Anneka Lenssen and Beth Stryker and was published by Revolver Publishing, as a response to the 2014 survey exhibition of work by Khan curated by Stryker as part of the Downown Contemporary Arts Festival and the parallel discursive program commissioned by AUC_LAB, *Footnotes to Hassan Khan, curated by Stryker and Behkalam.