This article is part of Hyperallergic’s Pride Month series, featuring an interview with a different transgender or nonbinary emerging or mid-career artist every weekday throughout the month of June.
Singaporean trans nonbinary artist Aki Hassan’s sculptural installations and experimental comics invite us to consider how the collective presence of our bodies can forge unseen bonds and connections. What does it mean to occupy space, in all the physical, figurative, and radical senses of the phrase? And what does it mean to occupy space together? In a poetic new series of works, Hassan identifies instances of visual resonance between distinct forms and materials — lightweight three-dimensional metal rods that stand gracefully like flower stems and flat metal sheets that have the stoic authority of a sign or placard — and in so doing emphasizes what these various elements have in common rather than what sets them apart. Hassan describes these works beautifully in the interview below, sharing their concept of “quiet resistance” and their hopes for a gentler understanding of ourselves.
