Dr. Melentie Pandilovski, "The world of Ariel Hassan – Between Barthes, Phenomenology, and Post Phenomenology, Exploring Boundaries and Perception"

link to brochure with Macedonian language

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“… wrestling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result (Roland Barthes)”

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Ariel Hassan’s art career defies easy categorisation. Being primarily a painter, his artistic practice spans various mediums, existing at the intersection of painting, sculpture, performance, installation, and media art (video and VR), always coherently conceived, and installed with regard to the architecture of the exhibition space.

Hassan’s work at first seems perplexing, engaging with how we perceive, interpret, and interact with art, often destabilising conventional modes of seeing and understanding the phenomena we are witnessing. By continuously pushing the boundaries of form and meaning, Hassan has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art, one whose work resonates on both an aesthetic and existential level.

Hassan’s artwork is also a lasting testament to the continuing power of abstraction and conceptual art, proving that the philosophical and material dimensions of art remain vital, even in our age that is so saturated and dominated by digital media. Hassan’s innovative and thought-provoking work explores themes of identity, culture, and human connection, often drawing inspiration from his experiences and cultural context, adding depth and authenticity to his work. His art is also characterised by the ability to blend traditional techniques with modern concepts, creating pieces that resonate on the intellectual as well as emotional levels.

Roland Barthes analysed how materials and objects carry cultural meanings. Like Barthes, Hassan decentralises the artist’s authority, making the viewer the primary interpreter. Hassan’s use of industrial materials, such as resin, strips them of functional purpose, turning them into pure signifiers open to reinterpretation.

Hassan also transforms the art experience through exploration of many of the phenomenological and post-phenomenological categories of lived experience, where aesthetic experiences and existential concerns become central to his work, by exploring ideas of existence and human consciousness and examining how technology shapes and transforms the human-technology-world relations.

Generally, Hassan’s lived experience can be broken into the phenomenological categories of materiality (by recognising the active role of material objects and structures in shaping those experiences), perception (by examining how we perceive the world and the structures of that perception), spatiality (by referring to the lived exhibition space), time and temporality (referring to subjective time), corporeality (referring to the lived body), and relationality (referring to the lived other), thus challenging the viewers to reconsider their relationship with art and the world around them.

As Director of Riddoch Art Gallery in South Australia, I included Hassan’s three-channel video installation Traces and Determinants in the 2018 program of the Inaugural International Limestone Coast Video Art Festival. In this installation, Hassan turns toward post-phenomenological research, focusing on the relational and mediated nature of experience through the context of technology, emphasising the ethical and political dimensions of technological mediation and multi-stability (multiple and context- dependent meanings and uses). Three panels were suspended in triangular formation, and the projected images deliberately spilled out onto the surrounding walls, visitors walking in and around the installation, often lingering in the immersive space for much longer than the 21-min looping. The installation was visually arresting and, in retrospect, presented a prophetic view of the Coronavirus that was to engulf the world in a few years. The project affirms the notion of post-phenomenology, rejecting the idea of a fixed, isolated subject, putting forward the argument that subjectivity is co-constructed through relations with technologies.

The project Tragedy of Equality has had three previous distinct iterations: Headshaving Battle, Mud Wrestling, and Knife Fight. The fourth Act at the Skopje Museum of Contemporary Art in the period July – September 2025, presents an arm-wrestling match between two equal contestants, occurring within a triangular elevated platform designed by the artist, and built especially for this occasion. It is presented in front of screens showing the three previous Acts staged in Tokyo (Japan), Adelaide (Australia), and Berlin (Germany).

The transparency of actions and symbols in this wrestling match signifies it as a spectacle of excess. Barthes’ interest in Pro Wrestling is found in the scripted performance, not in the genuine competition. Arm wrestling, on the other hand, as a pared-down spectacle, unless it is staged, likely falls outside his critique, unless it is mythologised in media or culture. Following Barthes, Hassan frames the project functioning as a myth framed symbolically, as a test of masculinity, honour, and endurance. Pro wrestling’s appeal lies in its exaggerated gestures such as suffering, villainy, and justice. Arm wrestling, by contrast, is restrained, with just two locked hands lacking the spectacle of excess, so celebrated by Barthes, and does not carry the same semiotic richness. However, this is an arm-wrestling contest in the context of an exhibition, we can be certain that it is staged (in our conversation about the project with Hassan, he uses the term Fake Wrestling). Therefore, as a (part of) performance artwork, we could analyse (like Barthes) its gestures, such as the trembling arms and the torture masks, hiding the actor’s expressions, as signs of struggle, transforming physical effort into visible myth.  

We could also refer to the winner/loser symbolising the moral triumph, often used to represent fairness, righteousness, or the upholding of principles within the often-fictional narratives of wrestling, like pro wrestling’s concept of Justice, sometimes used in wrestlers’ names such as Jesse Justice Smith, a former American Gladiator competitor. But Hassan sees this arm-wrestling contest (fight of equals) as a negation of negation, where the positive only applies to the totality, including the stage where they are stuck in and spinning – the plinth for the arm-wrestling spins, it is not fixed, adding to the dramatism and forcing the fighters to use all their bodily strengths to counteract each other’s move.

Hassan attempts to eliminate that sense of justice gained by the winner, or of viewers identifying with the hero, or finding any emotional connection with one or another opponent, and sees the project as an inversion of the hero to its antithesis in an exaggerated pathetic inability to establish a win, via the prism of flattening hierarchies, or ‘evening-out horizons’ (in a Gadamerian style) by force, which emphasises a mindset beyond brutality and requires leverage and strategy. In that sense, the arm wrestlers become vanishing mediators of a fictional narrative which enacts within itself a fictional wrestling of opponents, exaggerated without any intended winner or loser, devoid therefore of justice.     ▲

Dr. Melentie Pandilovski - Melbourne, May 2025.