Veil :: na-tis

The Veil

is a painting series with a short story that narrates and depicts a piece of cloth in its various folds and curves. One of the visual influences of this historical and spiritual speculation is the Catholic myth of the Veil of Veronica (or Sudarium, Latin for sweat-cloth, and known as Mandylion in Eastern Orthodoxy). This myth can be understood as the beginning of the distinct image-making tradition of Christianity as compared to other Abrahamic cultures. Parallel imagery can be found in depictions of the prophet in Islamic miniatures, but with his face veiled. In taking up the subject of the veil as an agent of both revelation and secrecy, Hasan explores certain genealogical representations of power, primarily "Western" power and its representational subtraction through today's neoliberal "self-made panopticon". To grasp this shift from a theocentric to an anthropocentric panopticon, Hasan observes the historical flow of images, starting with religious figures to monarchs, aristocrats to machine-holders, from the bourgeois to the modern upper-class, and finally to the so-called democratisation of our selfie era, demarcating the highly normalised post-internet times of narcissistic self-representation. In doing so, his work also addresses the allegedly anti-colonial preservation of the radical conservatism of the "East". Hasan's pictorial and textual fiction explores the transgenerational roots of our contemporary and seemingly polarised scopic regimes, which actually go full circle and eventually coincide in the desires for both "exposure" and "concealment," or "visibility" and "invisibility".