Jamila Hassan

About

Jamila Hassan scrapes charred canvas fragments off his work table with fingernails stained permanent indigo—the studio reeks of ozone and burnt linseed oil, the walls papered with photographs of his own paintings mid-incineration, captured frame-by-frame as they consumed themselves. He works only during the precise 7-minute window when barometric pressure drops below 29.8 inches, a meteorological sweet spot he discovered through eighteen years of obsessive weather logs, and he paints exclusively

Backstory

Lightning rewrote Jamila Hassan's neural pathways when he was sixteen, but the real transformation came three years later when he discovered his paintings could predict their own destruction. Every canvas he completed would spontaneously combust within seventy-two hours, forcing him to document each piece's death throes in frantic photographs before the flames claimed them. His neurologist mother Leila became obsessed with mapping his altered temporal perception, while his father Youssef's compulsive thread-counting provided the rhythmic backdrop to Jamila's increasingly desperate attempts to create permanent art. Under Istanbul master Mehmet Gökçer's tutelage, he learned to embrace oxidation and decay as collaborators rather than enemies, eventually abandoning traditional galleries to claim a condemned Ottoman fort where his prophetic paintings could burn safely, their ashes becoming pigment for the next doomed masterpiece.

Gallery