The Storyteller: Hassan Sharif’s ‘Objects’ Series

Titled after the seminal 1936 essay by German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller revisits Hassan Sharif’s Objects through contemporary theoretical approaches to craft, which expand its definition beyond modernist notions of skill, precision and medium-specific mastery and towards an experimental, experiential and embodied practice of learning, understanding, and knowing through making.

In the essay Benjamin, lamenting the eclipse of the art of storytelling in the modern era, posits a unique kinship and shared space-time between craft and storytelling. Sharif, through his persona, his practice and the discourse he constructed around it, especially in relation to the creation of his Objects, exemplified this weaving together of craft and storytelling, of materiality and narrativity.

As those who knew him attest, Sharif himself was a storyteller, often mischievously resorting to parables and anecdotes when called upon to explain his work. The Storyteller approaches each of Sharif’s Objects as a narrative prompt for a possible story about itself and its maker—the exhibited Objects will be accompanied by texts that pay close attention to the artwork’s materiality, manufacture, and form, presenting a careful layered account of their crafting and perception.

Sharif famously characterized himself as a “single work artist.” The Storyteller will attempt to trace some of the myriad material and formal complexities that are otherwise masked by this conceptual provocation, presenting a fragmented biography and (art) history of the artist narrated through his Objects.