“solidarities can be initiated and expressed through bodily cues
that we mutually exchange by coexisting nearby one another”
Aki Hassan
Yeo Workshop is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Aki Hassan, a Singaporean visual artist whose work is concerned by the varying forms of dependencies evolved within kinships and solidarity. Primarily working through sculptural installations and experimental comics, Aki speculates on nonbinary bodily (con)sequences, as they reflect on the present dilemmas with cultural and systemic forces. They see their practice as a tool to locate strengths, resistance, precarity and imbalances in exchange, whilst carefully disentangling normative imaginaries of support and care.
In their inaugural solo exhibition, Entangled Attachments, Aki Hassan traces through their terms of non-conformity, love, change, solidarity and survival. By incorporating text, image and object, the artist embraces the figure of fictive kinship through shaped lines that move and contort around and through one another. The acts of drawing, redrawing and layering highlight gestural vocabularies of relationality and mutual exchange, shifting our lexicon around expressions of dependency and care.
Aki perceives our subconscious gestures as embodied quiet resistance that persists within us as we endure normative societal conventions. The destabilised ground we collectively confront informs our suppressed desires for belonging, which complicates our ever-shifting habits of intimacy and support. Entangled Attachments proposes that kinship can take on an obscure form of relation beyond our immediate imaginings. By giving weight to the simple state of being nearby – coexisting – in proximity to one another, we loosen ourselves up from predominant hierarchies and ideal ties of kinship.
Aki was recently commissioned for their sculpture ‘Grounding Points: Settled and Settling In’, presented as part of a two-year public art trail initiated by Singapore Art Museum. Some of the artist’s recent residencies include Cutes/ظِراف with Samandal and Nino Bulling as part of Documenta 15 (2022) and SAM Art Residencies at Singapore Art Museum (2021/22). Recent exhibitions include RSA New Contemporaries 2022 (Royal Scottish Academy, 2022), innate (Yeo Workshop, 2021), An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season (National Gallery Singapore, 2020), Pig Rock Bothy Residency & Exhibition (Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, 2019) and Show Me The Difference (Studio for an Art Lover, Glasgow 2019).
Acknowledgments
Fabrication Assistant: Rusydan Norr
Designer: Jiong Ling
Editor: Rose Wei
Exhibition Design: Diva Agar
Sound: A Reading of ‘Prayer for the Unfamiliar (written for Aki Hassan)’ by nor
For full text, do visit @homesick.docx on instagram.
Thank you to Audrey, Charmaine and Siobhan of Yeo Workshop for the support.
Thank you to Nat, Rifqi, nor and Rusydan for being my pillars of support for this project.
Thank you to Rose, Sean, Bing and Jason for all the conversations that fuelled me.
Thank you to all of my families and kin for your love and encouragement.
Saturday 10 June, 4 - 6pm
Artist Talk & Exhibition activation (experimental sound and interaction) by the artist
Supported by
