Six Characters and an Anthropologist: Form and Information in three Works by Hassan Khan

This article presents an interpretation of three works by Cairo-based artist Hassan Khan. The works are “17 and in AUC” (2003), “Conspiracy: Dialogue/Diatribe” (2006/2010) and “Dead Dog Speaks” (2010). I argue that in these works Khan stages a withdrawal from the legacy of the 1967 Naksa. He does this by means of a separation of his figures from their particular contexts, reflexive narrative strategies, non-periodic scene structures and substitutive manipulations of his figures. I argue ultimately that Khan's staging of uprooted figures of Egyptian identity sends up the ethnographic notion of the “native informant” on which post-Naksa nationalists discourses have been based.