Aki Hassan

Solidarity and kinship in the queer community
By Nabila Giovanna W

Aki Hassan, ‘pulses wriggling, restlessly’, 2022, installation view at ‘like letters’, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist and starch.

Aki Hassan (b. 1995) is a Singapore artist whose works explore love, care and struggle in the queer community. They pursued their bachelor's degree at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, majoring in Fine Art (Sculpture & Environmental Art). Their works draw inspiration from their personal and the larger queer community's experiences. Aki works with a wide range of mediums, from drawing and printed matter to sculpture and installation.  With sculptures, Aki position and shape rigid metal into lines that reflect how the human body can similarly respond to pressure and care. 

Aki Hassan, ‘Entangled Attachments’, 2023, installation view. Photo by Marvin Tang. Image courtesy of Yeo Workshop.

The sensitive line quality in their sculptures are echoed in the visuals of bodies on screen in 'like letters' (2022) at starch. This is further developed for their first solo exhibition ‘Entangled Attachments’ (2023) at Yeo Workshop, where the artist has combined text, image and object to explore the idea of “being nearby”. The sculptures and paintings, placed carefully in proximity to each other, repeat the exercise of thoughtfully shaped lines meandering and moving around and through one another. It is the artist’s way of undoing existing hierarchies, suggesting alternative ways of connecting, and establishing new kinships. 

Aki Hassan, ‘Nonbinaryhood’, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist.

Their creative practice also extends to the publication of zines and comics. In 2019, Aki and fellow artist Nat Walpole initiated Power Couple Press, a Glasgow-based publisher of zines and comics. The initiative resulted in the publication of ‘Dysphoria Diarrhea’ (2019) which captures body dysphoria and the experience of being non-binary in a cis world. Although Power Couple Press is on an indefinite hiatus, Aki continues to explore non-binary experience through the publication of ‘Forming An Unsettled Whole’ (2020) and more recently,  ‘Nonbinaryhood’ (2021).

Aki’s work expresses the collective solidarity and resistance within the community and invites us to understand the queer experience. In doing so, they offer a gentle – but no less effective – way of caring for each other while standing up for what they believe, and showing us a viable way forward. 

Click here to read our dialogue with Aki Hassan.