Idris Khan – Every...

26th January – 9th March, 2008

Since completing his studies at the Royal College of Art in London in 2004, the young British artist Idris Khan (born in 1978) has produced an intellectually lucid and visually impressive oeuvre in only a few years. Khan’s subjects show his passionate interest in culturally coded works and artefacts from the spheres of literature, art and music. Photography and video are his media of choice.

“Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’”, 2006
Digital C-Print, mounted on aluminium
184 x 209 cm
© Idris Khan, 2007

In his photographs he digitally superimposes pictures, texts or scores he has acquired onto one another. He has applied this method to postcards of Turner paintings, photographs of industrial buildings by Bernd and Hilla Becher, notations from Wagners Parsifal, pages of the Koran and from a treatise by Sigmund Freud. Idris Khan’s composites turn texts, pictures and music into a vibrating turbulence and give them a new dimension of presence.

Gabriela Swallow during the shooting of „A Memory... After Bach’s Cello Suits”, 2006
Photo: Thierry Bal, London

In his videos on classic pieces of music by Bach and Schubert, musical performances are turned into visual and acoustic palimpsests through multiple repetition and layering. Khan fashions artistically autonomous artefacts from multilayered images of knowledge and creative production. These works go beyond the strategies applied in Appropriation Art. Khan consolidates the multitude of visual, linguistic or musical sources into enigmatic pictures. New iconic qualities develop from the overabundant concurring of data and information.

Caravaggio ... The Final Years, 2006
Digital C-Print
257 x 173 cm
© Idris Khan, 2007