Lawrence Abu Hamdan to present at MoMa on Monday, November 21st, 7pm.

MoMA presents the US premiere of an “audio essay” by Beirut-based Jordanian-British artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose work attempts to trace and highlight the relationship between the act of listening and politics, human rights, international law and borders, testimony, and truth. Using audio documentaries and essays, as well as audiovisual installations, Abu Hamdan expresses his fascination with different types of listening at work in today’s legal and political forums. MoMA has recently acquired three important works dealing with similar themes: The Whole Truth, Conflicted Phonemes, and The Aural Contract Audio Archive.

In this new audio essay (a term the artist prefers to “lecture-performance”), he focuses on Saydnaya prison, near Damascus. Working with Forensic Architecture, Amnesty International, and the survivors of Saydnaya, Abu Hamdan captures “ear-witness accounts,” as detainees reconstruct events and the architecture of the prison they experienced through sound. The work raises pivotal questions about the politics of the field known as “forensic listening.”

The artist will be joined for a conversation by Ana Janevski, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a 2015–17 Vera List Center Fellow.

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/2526?locale=en
http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/blog/

Sexing Sound: Music Cultures, Audio Practices and Contemporary Art
Feb 2015 — Symposium archive

About the event

Pop and rock music has long been an important forum for experimentation with gendered performance, audience identification, and different models of authorship and collaboration. What happens, we ask, when the complex affective and social dynamics of popular music cultures are put into a dialogue with more rarified notions of audio cultures or sound art? Taking the issue of sexual difference and sexuality as its central concern, this symposium brings together an international group of artists, writers, educators and curators to address the gendered complexes of “music cultures,” “audio practices,” and where these two realms intersect in contemporary art. Presentation topics include the feminist sound archive Her Noise, women in early punk, the voice, and the soundscape. The symposium will end at 5pm with a performance of a composition by Annea Lockwood performed by Kristin Norderval, followed by a reception at 6pm in the James Gallery with a set byJD Samson.

Organized by:

Valerie Tevere (Mellon Humanities Fellow, the Center for Humanities; Media Culture, the College of Staten Island/CUNY)

Siona Wilson (Program in Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Performing and Creative Arts, the College of Staten Island, CUNY.

http://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/sexing-sound-music-cultures-audio-practices-and-contemporary-art