Famous for superimposing every page of the Qur’an into a single frame and designing the cover art for the Editors’ album An End Has A Start, Idris Khan brings his second solo show to this mid-sized Hoxton gallery.
Seven Times is a Minimalist floor installation that consists of 144 black steel cubes, representing the Kaaba in Mecca, in a grid structure inscribed with the prayers Muslims perform five times throughout the day.
The contrast between the elegant Arabic script and the way it is aggressively blasted out of the cubes’ surface combined with the uniformity of the layout hints at an analysis of the state of the Islamic nation.
Khan’s wall mounted photographic works appropriate the score of Joseph Haydn’s The Creation and Milton’s Paradise Lost, while a second sculpture consists of 30 steel panels aligned through which runs a continuous line of music, scratched out of the metal. They fail to reach the heights of Seven Times, but are intriguing nonetheless.
4 out of 5
Victoria Miro Gallery, 16 Wharf Road, N1 7RW. Until April 24. Free.
