Among the elements on view are simple folded sheets, rubber stamp prints, xeroxes, broadsides, c-prints, audio work and publications that incorporate unconventional materials like wood, an aluminum slat, and continuous feed paper from a dot matrix printer. In one coil-bound book, each page has been hole punched at different intervals so that the absences read as a kind of musical score. Looking to the work of Adrian Piper, Hassan sheds traditional categories to inhabit many forms and genres at once — and paper itself, with its directional grain, becomes a medium that can hold movement and the physicality of sculpture.

In his own publishing practice, Hassan often looks to sound and music as a guiding framework. The exhibition considers the notion of arrangement—visually and in sound—and how disparate elements can play a part in an orchestrated whole. The work is also shaped by the tenets of free jazz and its historical lineage to hip hop, allowing for an approach to publishing that is rooted in reinvention and reference, while also being improvisational and responsive to the environment it creates. Taken together, the effect is of spinning through the radio dial with snippets of audio patched together into a seamless collage — an approach indebted to J Dilla’s 2006 instrumental album Donuts. Hassan’s work is realized in real time amidst a kind of chaos, embracing misprints and inexactness as something integral to the process.

In one print work we see an excerpt from an interview with Mobb Deep’s Havoc who recounts the making of “Shook Ones, Pt. II,” and how the song took on a new ecstatic life with the layering of a found drum sample, a pitch-shifted Herbie Hancock refrain, and a siren sound borrowed from Quincy Jones. Another piece simply holds the printed name of Greg Tate, the music critic, writer and musician whose work engaged similar concepts of lineage and reimagining in Black culture and beyond, before his passing in late 2021.