Design: Maeve Redmond
Our Room for Reading offers further reading on the work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, in tandem with his project ‘Live Audio Essays’, presented in June 2024 as part of Glasgow International Festival.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Live Audio Essays’(2023)
‘Live Audio Essays’ presents transcripts from seven of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works, which were originally presented as performances, films, or video installations. Texts from works performed in Glasgow include ‘After SFX’, ‘A Thousand White Plastic Chairs’, and ‘Air Pressure’ and can be found alongside scripts from Abu Hamdan’s various performance and film works from 2014-present.
Using personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media, and transcripts rooted in historical and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. These live audio essays turn our focus to acoustic memories, voices leaking through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonant frequencies of buildings, the echoes of reincarnated lives, and the sound of hunger.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, ‘Dirty Evidence’ (2022).
“In this piece[…] as in some before and many after, an important core of the artist’s work is revealed. It is much less about sound or the production of noise, but rather about listening - listening closely to spoken language, to noise and to silence.”
Fabian Schöneich
Published with Lenz Press to coincide with Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, ‘Dirty Evidence’ provides a visual overview of Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s works of more than a decade, and elaborates on a formal vocabulary characterised by the aesthetics of sound and language. The artists’s first monograph, the publication presents a comprehensive overview of Abu Hamdan’s practice accompanied by commissioned writing by Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Theodor Ringborg, Yasmine Seale and Eyal Weizman.
Details
In conjunction with our projects, exhibitions and events, Room for Reading offers artists we work with an opportunity to contribute to The Common Guild library and share the books and resources that have influenced their artistic practice.
Every artist’s selection is added to The Common Guild’s expansive reference library of artist books, catalogues, and cultural and critical theory.
