Born in London in 1975, Hassan Khan received a BA and an MA in English and comparative literature from the American University in Cairo. Working with choreography, music, performance, sound, and video, as well as in writing, he draws on a wealth of personal experience to construct narratives around his home city’s diverse events, features, and individuals, studying them through the paired lenses of culture and identity. Curator Yasmeen Siddiqui, with whom Khan has often worked, characterizes him as an artist with a rare ability to approach and articulate ideas from multiple standpoints. Khan’s Bank Bannister (Banque Bannister, 2010) is one of a number of sculptures—others include Brass Column (2007), 44 unique and repetitious markers of value (2010), The Knot (2012), and The Twist (2012)—that reveal his interest in confluences of architectural and artistic form. Using displaced details to transform our experience of gallery space—exploiting the associations of the works’ gold-colored metallic constitution with power and wealth—Khan further complicates the project by representing specific, identifiable fixtures. Bank Bannister replicates a bannister outside the main branch of Banque Misr on Mohamed Farid Street in downtown Cairo. According to Khan, the railing’s ornate design renders it almost useless for its ostensible purpose, but significant nonetheless as part of the institution’s public image. The sculpture is also presented as an idealized object charged with a mysterious, almost ahistorical resonance. Key to Khan’s practice, then, is a fusion of his internal consciousness with external address; he is interested in examining philosophical, political, and social tendencies as they become locally influential. In other works, he has revisited his student days in a spoken-word performance staged for an unseen audience (17 and in AUC [2003]); portrayed the city through a multichannel video of semi-improvised activities (The Hidden Location [2004]); and engineered a deconstructed take on its popular street music (DOM-TAK-TAK-DOM-TAK [2005]). Khan has had solo exhibitions at Gasworks, London (2006); uqbar—Gesellschaft für Repräsentationsforschung, Berlin (2008); Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland (2010); Queens Museum of Art (2011), KUNSTHALLE São Paulo (2014); and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2015). He took part in the group exhibitions Haunted by Detail, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (2002–03); Moltitudini—Solitudini, Museo d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Bolzano, Italy (2003); The backroom, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (2007); El Mal De Escritura—Un Proyecto Sobre Texto e Imaginación Especulativa, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2009–10); Image in the Aftermath, Beirut Art Center (2011); and Moving Images, M+, Hong Kong (2015). He also participated in the Istanbul Biennial (2003), Seville and Sydney Biennials (2006); Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece, and Contour Biennial, Belgium (both 2007), and Documenta, Kassel, Germany (2012). He has performed, lectured, and participated in screenings worldwide from Abu Dhabi to New York. As a musician, he has composed soundtracks for theater and performed his own pieces in venues including Melkweg, Amsterdam; Babylon, Istanbul; Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; and Point Éphémère, Paris. Khan lives and works in Cairo.