FRANKFURT.- Around 10AM on July 8th 2025 I took bus 170 from Insulaner bus stop in Berlin. Mornings on that stretch meant white German pensioners, ethnically mixed kids, and mothers with their babies. I noticed him straight-away. His large longish face, thick lensed glasses, slight wisps of hair and wiry body gave him a fragile yet volatile air.
The next stop he stood up, shuffled to the door, pushing through the throng. Irritated, he suddenly unleashed a torrent of abuse at the woman in front of him who quickly jumped to the side to let him pass. Invigorated he stepped off the bus screaming at a louder more unhinged volume. The depth of his embodied disaffect directed at everyone. The doors shut, he stopped, narrowed his eyes and began scanning the collective. Head thrust forward, staring straight into our eyes he slowly and deliberately extended his right arm in a forbidden salute as the bus pulled away. A hushed silence, and nervous furtive glances marked the rest of the trip. – Hassan Khan
Little Castles unfolds as an album of shifts and modulations, composed in a world marked by violence, ruptures, contradictions as well as by the potential of massive transformations. The exhibition brings together one recent work and two newly commissioned pieces by Hassan Khan developed specifically for Portikus, exploring language, music, and image as distinct yet interconnected forms of transmission. It proposes art forms that can hopefully still function amid political and social disintegration. Each work puts forward its own conditions for engagement: a LED text piece samples an investigative newspaper article to examine taboos, social order and the role of cynicism in the emergence of contemporary power structures. In an installation of cellphones an app algorithmically searches an archive of images and text and turns a series of notes into a stuttering polyphonic fugue. And a song that is also a video merges analysis, humour, emotion and direct political address into one unified cultural product. This exhibition focuses on the toxicity behind liberal self-images, the unresolved histories that continue to shape our present as well as the generative possibilities that exist under these conditions.
Hassan Khan (b.1975) is an artist, musician and writer based in Cairo, Egypt, and Berlin, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions took place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana (2025); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2022); and Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid (2019). He has exhibited his works at biennials and group shows, such as Autostrada, Prizren, (2025), SFMOMA, San Francisco, (2019), 12th Sharjah Biennale (2015), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012) and The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York City (2012) amongst many others. In 2017, he was awarded the Silver Lion of the 57th Venice Biennale. Since 2018 he is a Professor of Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Khan’s An Anthology of Published and Unpublished Writings is published by Koenig Books and his album SUPERSTRUCTURE EP is released by The Vinyl Factory.
Curated by Carina Bukuts
Assistant Curator: Jacqueline Jakobi
