When: Friday, April 26, 2024 | 10:00am-11:30am
Where:SEIGLE HALL, ROOM 301
Undergrad and grad students are welcome to join us for breakfast and Q&A with Turner Prize–winning artist and “private ear” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, whose innovative approaches to the study of sound bridge between artistry and human rights investigation and advocacy.
Please RSVP to attend! In lieu of a pre-circulated reading, please review Lawrence’s more recent projects on his website, particularly:
- Walled, Unwalled (2018, 20 minutes): “Walled Unwalled shows Abu Hamdan behind the windows of an infamous Cold War–era recording studio in former East Berlin. He speaks about the permeability of walls, citing in the process the U.S. Supreme Court thermal-imaging case Kyllo v. United States (2001), the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, and the survivors of Saydnaya prison. The accumulation of walls, holes, and speech in the video is polyphonic, even if Abu Hamdan’s voice, set to increasingly ominous percussion, is the main one we hear.” Complete video available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY4jU85o8pE
- Air Pressure: “Constantly hearing hostile jets and drones overhead, residents of Lebanon live in a state of precarity; the potential of full scale aerial bombardment is a daily possibility. The disturbing roar of Fighter jets tearing up the coastline and the persistent buzz of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles circling the southern regions have become a familiar part of the Lebanese soundscape. Yet till now there has been no easy way of accessing information about what or just how many of these aircraft are in the sky. AirPressure.info has recorded that 8,231 fighter jets and 13,102 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have violated the Lebanese skies since 2007. These invasive acts are not short flyovers but rather last an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes. The combined duration of these flights amounts to 3,098 days. That is 8.5 years of jets and drones continually occupying the sky.” Project available for review at https://www.airpressure.info/
Co-sponsored by CRE2, Program in Global Studies and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum