Titled after the seminal 1936 essay by German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller revisits Hassan Sharif’s “Objects” through contemporary theoretical approaches to craft, which expand its definition beyond modernist notions of skill, precision and mediumspecific mastery and towards an experimental, experiential and embodied practice of learning, understanding, and knowing through making. In the essay Benjamin, lamenting the eclipse of the art of storytelling in the modern era, posits a unique kinship and shared space-time between craft and storytelling. While the craftsperson, primarily preoccupied with their hands but free to listen, provided 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, through his persona, his practice and the discourse he constructed around it, especially in relation to the creation of his “Objects,” exemplified this weaving together of storytelling and craft, of narrativity and materiality. As those who knew him attest, Sharif himself was a consummate storyteller, often mischievously resorting to parables and anecdotes when called upon to explain his work, preferring to keep meaning and interpretation in play through recourse to allegory and metaphor rather than providing any definitive statement. And although he routinely dismissed contemporary art that simply recycled traditional imagery, techniques or mediums as mere nostalgia, Sharif surprisingly proposed craft as a hermeneutic through which to understand his “Objects” in an important text-manifesto titled Weaving, which was first published in the catalogue accompanying the 7th Sharjah Biennial in 2005.
Though often situated within a genealogy of the Duchampian readymade, Sharif’s “Objects” are undeniably handcrafted, the products of a near obsessive repetition of mundane manual tasks—cutting, folding, rolling, twisting, knotting, tying, plaiting, weaving, binding, gluing, wrapping. These actions are used to produce numerous smaller units which are then simply piled, stacked, bundled, or strung together and hung to create a larger form. While on one hand, this process of monotonous repetition resembles that of a machine or a worker on an assembly line, these actions also recall the endless and unrecognized reproductive labor of women (including the production of traditional handicrafts), who Sharif expressed solidarity with, sometimes attributing his “weavings” to Sharifa Hassan, a feminine alter ego. As the artist.
As 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.” While they might mimic the anonymity and alienation of an industrial system of production and willfull resist the aura of the master artist they are never devoid of the traces and memories of the space-time of their manufacture, of the hand or hands that crafted them. One just needs to know how and where to look for the fingerprints invariably left behind.
Presenting a selection of Objects ranging from among the earliest he produced in the mid-1980s to those he completed in the prodigiously productive months just before his untimely death in 2016, The Storyteller approaches each as a narrative prompt for a possible story about itself and its maker. The exhibition emphasises materiality, manufacture, and form through careful groupings and juxtapositions, pairing exhibited Objects with texts that present a layered 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 the artist narrated through his “Objects.”
Press release from Gallery Isabelle
Image: Hassan Sharif. Plastic Funnel and Aluminium Foil. 2006. Plastic funnel, aluminium foil and clothVariable dimensions (as shown: 110 x 140 x 150 cm. Photography by Altamash Urooj. Image courtesy of Hassan Sharif Estate and Gallery Isabelle
