Artist, writer, and musician Hassan Khan explores the margins at which a vernacular, be it linguistic or formal, attains its stature. Through a series of narrative portraits and accompanying images of his recent sculptures, Khan’s seemingly ubiquitous tales are in fact an attempt to let a story tell itself.

The bilingual (English/Arabic) book includes five short stories based on observation that engage the reader with very particular yet uncannily recognizable characters and occurrences. This sense of recognition emanates from a certain quality the stories embody rather than in any specific details they convey. The specific cultural, aesthetic, and personal sensibility through which the stories are filtered is further revealed when considered in relation to the accompanying images of sculptural objects explicitly produced for this purpose and based on the demotic style of popular kitsch ornaments.

This book is published on the occasion of “The Twist,” a solo exhibition of Hassan Khan’s work at Objectif Exhibitions (September 3–October 22, 2011), curated by Mai Abu ElDahab.