CV
Khan of Finland (Can Oral) is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and producer of Turkish-Finnish heritage. Living and working between Berlin, New York, and Mexico City, his practice brings together performance, sound, photography, drawing, and installation in an ongoing exploration of perception, memory, and collective imagination.
Rooted in subcultural contexts and experimental music, Khan investigates the liminal spaces between ritual and everyday life, intuition and technology, and digital and physical experience. His works unfold as open-ended processes emerging through performative actions, where sound, image, and the body function as equally significant carriers of meaning.
Since the early 1990s, Khan has worked at the intersection of music, contemporary art, and performance. Following a formative decade in New York, he has been based in Berlin since 2002, developing international projects in collaboration with artists across disciplines. His work has been presented at institutions including PS1 (New York), Fundación Meyer (Mexico), Gaîté Lyrique (Paris), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), and in the context of documenta 13.
Khan recorded and toured with a variety of influential artists such as Brigitte Fontaine, Julee Cruise, Kim Gordon, Diamanda Galas, Stereo Total, Cube40, and Global Electronic Network, to name a few.
With his current body of work, Fal Bakmak, Khan reinterprets the Turkish tradition of coffee-ground reading as a contemporary artistic practice. Photographs of coffee sediment become the starting point for drawings, performances, and installations that examine intuition as a form of knowledge and the relationship between chance, memory, and image-making. His work approaches art as an open process in which meaning is not represented but emerges through the encounter between the work and its audience.