[inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts

“I became interested in the legal space as an acoustic space because it’s filled with many different types of listening,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan told me when I interviewed him several years ago. “It’s called a hearing, more often than not. I’ve been thinking about what the voice is and what the voice does and its politics, because [in that space] it’s really where speech acts.”

Abu Hamdan, an artist whose material and subject is sound, but who works in a variety of media, from photography and graphic works to audiovisual illustration and performance, has been researching the politics of speech since 2010. Looking at the ways in which a person’s voice can be turned against them, Abu Hamdan has produced works that highlight such instances: through lie detection software; through the Miranda warning, given by police to suspects informing them of their right to silence; or through the Language Analysis for the Determination of Origin program, which is deployed by many Western countries to ascertain whether refugees’ language use match their claimed countries of origin.

[inaudible] A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts is the first artist book he has produced, following his exhibition تقية (Taqiyya) – The Right to Duplicity (Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, 2015) and published alongside his most recent show, Earshot, at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, 2016. The book offers insight into specific instances of Abu Hamdan’s artistic practice and research, presenting concepts as scripted ‘acts’ in a play. Each concept (linked to an existing work) is given context as a ‘scenario’ (written by Abu Hamdan and his collaborators), which functions as an introduction to the different acts, engaging with and guiding the reader through the slim volume.

The form of the book is cleverly conceived. Given that Abu Hamdan works with sound – and considering that three of the four acts are specifically about speech – scripting the research in the form of a play is an obvious choice of format. But this literary form makes evident that speech is not just everyday and automatic; it is also performed: acted. Reading the monologue of an asylum seeker straining to talk for 15 uninterrupted minutes, or a conversation about the right to silence and the pronunciation of the Arabic letter qāf (ق), or a fictional court session, or the sermon of a Muslim cleric (complete with tonal cues) allows you almost to hear these voices in your head. The best moments are when you find yourself testing the ق at the back of your throat, breathing between words, and letting vowels slip aloud.

From the Winter 2016 issue of ArtReview Asia