Nubian warrior (2021) and other works

Overview

Fathi Hassan explores the colonial erasure of ancient languages and oral histories as well as the ambivalence and fallibility of semiotic meaning. Hassan presents four mixed media works that evoke motifs of Nubian folklife and ancient civilisations. The artist’s compositions render the vibrancy of his cultural lineage through real and invented units of language left indecipherable. At the core of these works are echoes of collective memory—of Nubian ancestral customs, oral traditions and submerged territories—expressing the restless pursuit of an identity suppressed by the violence of colonial modernity.