Hassan Khan's (London, United Kingdom, 1975) broad and diverse artistic practice includes music, performance, moving and still image, sculpture, installation and text. His work engages with both familiar, shared conditions as well as elusive and undisclosed content to produce forms that excite the imagination, raise fundamental questions, channel undercurrents simmering under the surface, seduce and alienate, engage with expectations, pose mysteries as well as help re-articulate our experiences with the shifting structures of power.

For his exhibition at the Palacio de Cristal in Parque del Retiro Khan takes the tumultuous populism of the present and its intriguing method of tapping into the grotesque as a starting point. The Keys to the Kingdom is an exhibition of song, flags, glass sculptures, computer generated murals and other forms that lies on the spectrum between the romantic and the vulgar, the sublime and grotesque. The exhibition enters the imaginary landscape of a political economy underpinned by slavery, exploitation and dehumanization.