Fathi Hassan


Fathi Hassan is an Egyptian artist known for his installations involving the written word. He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland and Fano, Italy.

Life

Hassan was born in Cairo in 1957 as the second son to a Nubian family. His father Hassan was Sudanese and his mother Fatma was from Toshka in southern Egypt. He studied art as a teenager at Cairo's Kerabia Middle School where he was taught by the sculptor Ghaleb Khater.,

Work

In 1976, Hassan worked for some months in a library Madbuli in Cairo.The Ministry offered him a job and he moved to Baghdad in 1977.
In 1979, he received a grant from the Italian Cultural Institute in Cairo and moved to Italy. He enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Naples in 1980 to study set design having found that the painting course was full. He graduated in 1984 with a thesis on the influence of African art in Cubism. While he was studying and in the year after graduating, Hassan also worked as an actor and set designer at RAI in Naples and Rome. In 1986, he moved to Pesaro.
Hassan is one of the artists of the African Diaspora. Hassan received recognition from the Ministry of Culture in 1989, and he was the first artist to be selected to represent Africa at the "Aperto '88" section of the Venice Biennale. Chosen by Dan Cameron, Giovanni Crandant. He has exhibited in numerous galleries in Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Egypt, and United States., International TV "UNINETTUNO" telematic university, presents, transmission on the theme "inside L, soul".
Hassan's work often emphasizes power relations and the relationship between the oral and written word; drawing upon his Nubian heritage and installations, he places particular emphasis on the loss of language under the dominance of empire. Most of his scripts are based upon kufic calligraphy, but remain deliberately illegible and impossible to decipher. In his video Blessed Nubia the original language of the Egyptian region Nubia was analyzed.
Hassan has lived and worked in Italy since graduating in 1984, dividing his time between Rome, Milan and Fano.