Fathi Hassan was born in Cairo. His family had been forced to leave Nubia when the Aswan High Dam was built in 1952. In his early twenties, he obtained a grant from the Italian Cultural Institute and moved to Naples, where he enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He graduated in 1984 with a thesis on the influence of African art in Cubism and he continued to live in Italy for many years.
Fathi was one of the first African and Arab artists to exhibit in the Venice Biennial in 1988 and has participated in numerous solo and group shows
internationally.

Fathi's Nubian heritage is a core feature of both his personal identity and his artistic practice. His lived experience also plays out in his works, which literally layer on Nubian icons such as the extinct ibex, warriors, houses, pots, and boats; fabric from his family members' clothes; and ephemera from his travels, such as train tickets and super market receipts.

Fathi has also had to continually confront his own identity as a person existing between and among cultures. White or black, Christian or Muslim, Nubian or Arab: the artist has been confronted with this parties demanding that he assume or explain a particular identity, as well as his personal questing to decide what he is or is not, and whether it matters.

As well as using actual desert sand, Hassan frequently re-enacts motifs and other textures from his North African heritage in his works. His palette evokes Nubia - the blue of the Nile, the reds, ochres and browns of the desert, earth and architecture.

Collaged elements can include textiles belonging to his mother or salvaged from his children’s clothes, wrapping paper, receipts, and travel documents. A crescent moon frequently appears as a recurring motif alongside the Nubian ibex, elephants (now extinct in North Africa), and various means of transport including camels and feluccas.

These motifs are recalled from the artist’s memory reside alongside references to Western iconography, Renaissance art and African mythical figures. In so doing, Hassan explores the space between meaning, memory and symbolism, presenting a multicultural view of the world and his own cultural hybridity.

In this series of work that is central to the artists response to The Sunderland Collection, Fathi moves beyond space that is bound by time or geography. Here the artist imagines a place where characters across time, territories and disciplines converge and meet.

Philosophers, scientists, artists, writers and sportspeople who have been profoundly influential on global culture, as well as the artist make their way onto reproductions of maps from The Sunderland Collection. The contours of the land masses or boundaries dissolve into profiles of his selected characters, calligraphic marks and arabesque designs. Here Fathi not only celebrates his personal influences, but also imagines a diasporic community with a transnational sense of self that transcends the borders and boundaries of nations, time and location.

In the physically imposing and largest works in the exhibition Fathi continues to explore and advance the qualities of assemblage. In each, the artist creates new composite worlds in which he celebrates the work of art - and life - as an accumulation of matter and experiences. With these collages, elements such as textiles that belonged to the artist’s mother or those that have been salvaged from his children’s clothes, wrapping paper, receipts, and travel documents reside upon one picture plane. Elements from the artist's Nubian heritage are woven throughout the works: warrior heads, temples, buildings, boats - and the flowing waters of the Nile.
As with the maps within The Sunderland Collection, space is flattened to understand the world, but here, the elements, now dislocated from their original context become open to more complex meanings and possibilities, that suggest alternative modes of looking at the world.
An important element of this work is text; at times actual words but more frequently made-up, tiled and repeated like bricks. This metalanguage references displacement and loss: when the Nubian region was submerged by the dammed Nile, so was its language.
Included in this series for Shifting Sands are two historical works. The first is Migrant Heart, executed by Fathi in 2009. In this poignant, gleaming work, a fragile boat traverses the blue waters of the sea, surrounded by applied materials including fabric and white glitter, and cradled by the artist's textual motifs in gold and black.
Fathi has revisited this theme in the new work The Migrant… … Where Everything is Possible (2023). Here, a solitary boat floats amid a sea of indigo paint; but the sparkle of gold and glitter on its surface hint of worth, of potential, and of finding
happiness.
The second historical work is Nubian Memory (2022). Exhibited at the Sharzhia
Biennale, this work represents the flooding of Nubia when the Nile was dammed in the
1950s, creating Lake Nassar. This event lead to the displacement of Fathi's family -
and to the painful imperative of keeping his cultural heritage alive therough the
active preservation and honouring of memory and personal identity.

Fathi Hassan converses in Arabic, Italian and English. His practice incorporates motifs from the West and North Africa, alongside forms of deliberately indecipherable text. This is a his visual language is all his own; an open and fluid metalanguage influenced by lived experience.

Punctuating this text are occasional, legible words in English and Arabic, evoking illusive emotions or specific concepts.

In his most recent work, the artist continues to expand upon the themes and content that he developed after his seminal Neapolitan years. Through his pseudo-Arabic and Nubian text, Fathi explores how ancient languages, such as those from the Nubian region, are erased by colonialism, and how in semiotic terms the signifier of language is untethered with time and displacement.

Calligraphy, language and text as well as the disruption of it not only have a long history within Islamic art but they also played an important part in International Western Modernism and Italian post-war art. Take for example Fathi’s friend, Alighiero Boetti, who used language to destabilise its authority by troubling the sequence of letters, in a similar way Fathi’s abstract calligraphic compositions and script take on pluralistic meanings.

In this body of work made in response to The Sunderland Collection, Fathi Hassan has worked upon copies of the Collection’s maps in his own cartographic writing. In one such work Fathi has used a facsimile of Cellarius’ Ptolemaic armillary sphere from the Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1661. Fathi has applied his calligraphic script in the shape of a crescent moon - a motif of spiritual significance as well as physical guidance reminding us that maps are not simply devices to physically orientate oneself but that they are also places to explore existential possibilities.

Living with a phobia of flying, the artist has also created a set of four exquisite works in pencil and ink during train journeys. These minutely detailed works feature individuals, animals, and text together with the Arabic words for Illumination, Imagination, Magic and Power.