"Towards the centre of the gallery space at Yeo Workshop is a slender, bronze-coloured steel pipe. Titled Dyke, it runs along the narrow edge of a partition wall, before leaping off the plane, and into the viewer’s path.
Currently on view at Gillman Barracks, the objects in Aki Hassan’s solo show Entangled Attachments exude a quiet defiance. They rise from the ground, slouch away from the walls, and hang well above the viewer’s line of sight. They demand that you take care and take time not to trip over them.
It would be tempting, at first glance, to dismiss Aki’s work as a compendium of amorphous, suggestively titled, vaguely industrial objects placed strategically in odd corners of the white cube.
What makes Aki’s work compelling is that it goes beyond being a successful formal exercise. Yes, Aki’s work is Minimalist in its tendencies towards abstraction, and in its attention to encounters between the viewer and the art object’s physical properties. But it is also deeply invested in reworking these formal conventions in order to carve out a visual vocabulary that accommodates the complexities of being—as the artist is—queer and non-binary."
