Who is Hasansen?

—Presents editors Rachel Withers and Nicholas John Jones speculate

RW: My first reaction to this work is that this is very funny. Nansen becomes Hasansen! My second reaction is this is rather complicated fun. Why do you think Sayed has chosen to masquerade as Fridtjov Nansen?

NJJ: Well, we should admit that we do know a bit about this Hasansen fellow - he has been working with PRAKSIS since 2018, when he took part in residency 11, Monumental-Temporal. He is of mixed UK-Pakistani heritage, grew up in England but has been living in Norway for the last few years.

RW: And we also know some stuff about Nansen, since he’s a Norwegian national hero, and also a bit of a hero of mine, I have to admit, though I’m not sure if he’s so well known outside of Norway. He was an explorer of the far north and one of his many remarkable achievements was to work out that by sailing his brilliantly designed ship, the Fram, up to the Arctic Circle, it would get locked in and travel around the pole with the movement of the ice sheet- thus bringing him and his team as close as possible to the pole. He didn’t make it, but the story of the journey is incredibly exciting. 

NJ: Also worth noting is that Nansen worked extensively with the League of Nations, introducing the ‘Nansen passport’ for stateless people. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of displaced war victims. In his youth, when he left for the north, his head was stuffed with nonsense about the superiority of Western culture, but in less than a year he independently worked out this was rubbish, and started to acknowledge indigenous cultures and their much more effective technologies for living in the Arctic. 

RW: He was also six foot two, very good-looking and had various passionate affairs. And when he got older he took some photos of himself in the nude - these caused quite a stir when they were first made public. He was truly a man in full! OK, there are lots of potential reasons to disapprove of him as a white hero figure, but I find it a bit hard to do, because he’s basically really fascinating. Plus, in the photo Sayed has appropriated, I’m quite convinced Nansen was wearing nothing underneath his fur coat. As for Sayed, we’ll just have to speculate. OK, now I’m off now to have a cold shower. 

NJJ: Well, not to get you fired up any further, but speaking of a ‘man in full’, this portrait of Hasansen certainly also exudes a strong, enigmatic and ‘manly’ presence.

RW: Except that his fur coat is clearly made of Wookie. It makes me feel sweaty, but not in a good way. 

NJJ: I think we can agree that Sayed is certainly having fun with this work. It may not be as blatant as in some of his other work, such as Grandiosa Viking Helmet - “the single most important cultural artefact ever to be made from a pizza box”, but it’s definitely there. For instance, there is the frame, which is a genuine “Viking Dragon Frame”. Internet research suggests you can buy them sized to order from various outlets. It’s real carved wood, by the way; they don’t come cheap!

RW: Hasansen is a kind of masquerade, and actually, it reminds me of another masquerade - Marcel Duchamp photographed by Man Ray in the character of Rrose Selavy. That work got criticised by Amelia Jones on the basis that Duchamp was masquerading as a woman from the place of white male privilege. Hasansen, on the other hand, is helping himself, as a member of Europe’s ethnic minorities, to the heroic white, aristocratic persona of Nansen.

NJJ: Here Sayed seems to be challenging the idea of national identity. How does he as a recently arrived person of mixed heritage relate to the narratives presented regarding those that have shaped Norway and Norwegianness. What space is there for alternative narratives to be acknowledged, or to form today?

RW: But I like this work because it’s ambivalent. I don’t think it’s setting out an easily legible critique; its sense of allegiance, or value, or the place it’s speaking from - to me, these feel unfixed. So maybe that is what is making me think about the Duchamp photograph, and the Duchampian attitude - setting up a problem, rather than delivering a message. 

NJJ: One thing I like in this work is the allure of adventure, the idea of Nansen and Hasanen as explorers. Here and in other work, Sayed works with the idea of fate. Previous works of his include lines such as “Northampton is my fate” or “Oslo is my fate” - which combine the grave concept of fate with the banality of at least some of the destinations he’s lived in. It’s as if he is both claiming a deep significance to aspects of his life, and trivialising them at the same time. 

RW: There is a critique of the whole idea of cultural authenticity here. Hasansen refuses to be constrained by some idea that, to create his own work, he should try to elevate some kind of culture that is authentic to him or “a part of his heritage” (a culture that challenges the Western canon, let’s say). He asserts his right to rummage in whatever part of the debris of world culture that makes sense to him at a given time.  

NJJ: So who is Hasansen?

RW: Well, we could ask him, but I don’t think we’d get a straight answer.

Sayed Sattar Hasan, Portrett av Hasansen, 2020,

Sayed Sattar Hasan, Portrett av Hasansen, installed at Interkulturelt Museum (IKM), Oslo