Talk: The Artist as a Portrait of a Young Man by Nida Ghouse

This talk considers the place of (self-)portraiture in Hassan Khan’s practice. In echoing the title of James Joyce’s semi-autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it locates the significance of Khan’s formative years to the relationship of an artist to art history. More specifically, and against this backdrop, the talk considers the relevance of a particular moment that may be described as the emergence of an image of the self as an artist, for its implications on a practice that claims itself as unable to escape portraiture. But the title is also in fact a twist on the original and suggests a collapse between the artist and his portrait. This collapse can be seen as indicative of a certain elusive and yet unmistakable tension that often surfaces between ‘the persona of the artist’ and ‘the boundary of the work’ in much of Khan’s oeuvre.

About Nida Ghouse
Nida Ghouse is a writer and a curator, and presently the director of Mumbai Art Room. Her ongoing engagement with Hassan Khan’s practice first took form through a two-week series of events titled 14 Proper Nouns at Delfina Foundation (London 2011). Her latest text, “The Loss of Tokyo”, was recently published in Dreams and Music: Hassan Khan.

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