Rania Hassan creates site-specific installations that weave sculptural stories about our connections to time, place, and circumstance. The five main themes she works with embody ideas of community, synchronicity, identity, time, and memory. Her work is about levels of interconnectedness. From a single strand of thread, we are all connected.
For more information, please see: raniahassan.com and on Instagram, @goshdarnknit
Rania Hassan, Marker, 2020. Connecticut Avenue and K St NW, DC, Steel, 6 x 15 feet. Photo by Albert Ting.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
I’ve been finding myself between modes of exploring and creating. In the early days of the pandemic, when it seemed likely that we’d be in this for a long while, I got a knitting machine and a sewing machine to learn some new tools. I taught myself how to machine sew by making masks, and played around with stitching possibilities on the knitting machine. The knitting machine stitches left me with some interesting stitch forms to draw from that looked totally different from hand knit stitches.
This focused space had me thinking about how time seems to be moving so differently for each of us, and the experience of it is continually changing. I started 2020 with some big project deadlines already in place, and picked up some creative habits to help track the days: In March I wrote daily; in June I gold leafed some brick on my balcony where I was spending more time; July had me knitting nonstop for my Kreeger Museum installation, with details and stitch counts and numbers all tracked in spreadsheets; and consistently, from the start, I’ve been drawing my unraveled knitting, starting with hand knit, and thanks to new tools acquired because of the pandemic, machine knit.
Rania Hassan, Marker, 2020. Connecticut Avenue and K St NW, DC, Steel, 6 x 15 feet. Photo by Albert Ting.
It’s my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
It’s very easy for me to hide away to focus on longer projects. In terms of rhythms, repetition plays a major role in the patterns of my work—repeating the same stitch or painting over and over again, from hundreds to tens of thousands of times. Time helps me in keeping pace to avoid physical injuries, and audiobooks bring me worlds to escape to by thinking about how the stories I’m listening to relate to what I’m making. Liminality, a hand knit suspended installation in the stairwell at the Kreeger Museum for a show titled TRACES that opened in September 2020, was made of 40,000 hand knit stitches—designed, measured, and tracked through many models, diagrams, and spreadsheets. My work often involves repeated countings and calculations while exploring words and meanings. The earlier days of isolation had me reflecting on my past work and how I got to making the things I do today. This rhythm of open time has also allowed me the space to make models of new ideas as they come up, rather than leaving them as sketches in my notebook for a later opportunity. Ideas are gifts, and it’s a luxury to get to act on them as soon as they appear.
Rania Hassan, Liminality, 2020. Suspended installation: Silk, linen, bamboo, copper, and stainless steel threads. Photo by Greg Staley.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
I create large scale site-specific installations about connectedness. My studio work involves a lot of measurements and numbers and models to figure out how my forms will scale up to fill the spaces they’ll be installed in, which are often much larger than the studio spaces I work from. My installation at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building for the 2019 By the People festival by Halcyon, which was designed to hang from a 40 foot ceiling, was completely knit by hand from the finest of threads, and the whole structure remained small enough to fold down to fit in my lap as I worked.
Liminality Concept Drawing, 2020. Ink on paper, video. Media courtesy of the artist.
There’s a vulnerability in creating something from numbers and calculations, and only really getting to see it fully once it’s installed in the space it was designed for. My process involves a lot of trust in artist/curator relationships, and experiencing the project actualized is a magical moment for all involved. I find this experience of unknowns-to-seeing is the same whether I’m doing all the hand knit stitches myself or collaborating with fabricators to help realize my ideas, as was done recently with my public art sculpture titled Marker—made of steel, inspired by women, and made possible by an amazing team of fabricators. This 15 foot tall bright pink sculpture based on my knitting was installed October 2020 at the intersection of Connecticut Avenue and K St NW in downtown DC, a public art installation representing a collaboration between the Golden Triangle BID and Smithsonian Women’s History Initiative to help expand their initiative to the streets of DC.
My earlier works involved more painting, then as my work scaled up, so did the fiber elements. My installation at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building was my first installation that was completely fiber, unless you count the under-painting of adhesive for the 2,000 sheets of gold leaf piled at its base. And just before that, my solo exhibition in early 2019 titled UNRAVEL,dedicated to previous works taken apart, featured the beginnings of my drawings and paintings of knitting with no fiber. Liminality, at the Kreeger Museum, is completely made of fiber, and Marker, which references my drawings and paintings of knitting, is all steel.
I love pushing materials into forms and spaces they wouldn’t normally occupy, or using them in ways to challenge their boundaries. Ombré color shifts in the hand knit structures happen through changing selections and pairings of threads of copper, stainless steel, silk, linen, and bamboo. And when I combined knitting with more painting, I was stitching threads into wood surfaces using needle-fine drill bits.
Often the creation of my work can feel like an endurance-based performance, with seemingly endless hours focused on the same motion or task. It would be a dream to complete the tens of thousands of hand knit stitches in a few sittings but I have to space them out in time so as to not injure myself. A question I’m often asked is how long it takes me to make something. Should I count the full days over weeks while the knitting takes place in 10 or 20 minute increments throughout? Or do I only count the actual time with needles and threads in my hands? One exhibition guest asking about this related my methods of artwork creation to marathons: in the “about 100 hours” of time it took me to knit something, they said I could have trained for a marathon.
Concept Drawing for Marker, ink on paper, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection to what’s currently happening? And why, or why not?
This has been a time of reflection for me, a space to focus on things outside of the day-to-day routines, and for playing with materials, both new and old. My June meditation was to gold leaf one brick a day in a space I’d been growing into and spending more time around. On my balcony, it serves as my own memorial to time.
The meanings behind my work are based on thoughts, ideas, experiences, and processes using my own imagery and codes, rather than specific reactions to current events. My series of installations titled Paths started around the 2016 election. Inspired by the French phrase “l’esprit de l’escalier,” Paths explores the delicate threads of directions presented, journeys chosen, and the things we could have said or done before it was too late. This series also brought with it the use of gold in my work, which felt timely, and was also reminiscent of my own childhood growing up in Dubai and the experience of walking through shimmering gold souks.
Rania Hassan, Paths: VII, 2019. Fiber, Wood, Metal, 480 x 480 x 480 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
Pre-pandemic, I would swim laps regularly, for an hour at a time. It was a meditative space where I’d get to process thoughts and come up with ideas and solutions on how to do things better, or where I could focus my energies. I miss that. Outside of water, I search for other ways to replace that head-space. I do appreciate the solid spaces of time that come with seclusion, and then making art as a way to process those thoughts. It’s like we’re all learning how to walk again with our new ways of doing things, and better ways of being. Everything feels more thought out and intentional, and there are inspiring parts to be found within this.
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment?
I’m hopeful for changes that are coming out of this time, and the connections that are forming that weren’t there before. The pandemic has shown us our actions and choices have a direct effect on others. And how small acts of care reverberate to scales that we aren’t able to collectively visualize before. It’s been a great reminder of how interconnected we all are, an overarching theme that connects all of my artwork. I’m also feeling very grateful that we live in a time that the internet exists.
Rania Hassan, June 2020 / Gold Leaf, 2020. 125 year old Brick / 24 x 29 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling?
Weeks ago, after a studio visit with a curator via FaceTime, I spent the hours following writing out so many thoughts and ideas. With the increase in video presentations, I’ve felt connected to other artists in new ways while learning more about them. There seems to be a common thread I hear from many, about their search for home, and the meaning of home. And I always thought that was unique to how I grew up in such a transient environment of moving continents every few years, or summers of nonstop travels around the world. Maybe we’re all more similar than we thought, and we’re all searching for the same things. It also makes me wonder, are we all repeating the same work over and over again? And do we make home or does home make us?
Are you reading anything?
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, especially as I’m working. A favorite recent book pairing was The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, followed with Rebecca Solnit reading her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence. Such a perfect title for now.
Rania Hassan, UNRAVEL I, 2019, Oil, Wood, 5 x 7 x 1.5 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist.