Live Audio Essays presents transcripts from performances and films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist known for his political and cultural reflections on sound and listening.
Abu Hamdan’s intricately crafted and heavily researched monologues are at times intimate, humorous, and entertaining, yet politically disquieting in their revelations. 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.
Live Audio Essays collects seven iconic works, which were originally presented as performances, films, or videos installations from 2014 through 2022. Featured pieces include Contra Diction (Speech Against Itself), Walled Unwalled, After SFX, Natq, A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, Air Pressure, and the newly-completed The 45th Parallel.
All the texts were transcribed and edited with the artist and are available here in a single volume for the first time.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist whose work takes the form of installations, video, performance, photography, writing, and lectures. Abu Hamdan holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has completed fellowships at the University of Chicago and the New School. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Sharjah Foundation; Secession, Vienna; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Institute of Modern Art, Birsbane; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Portikus, Frankfurt, among others. He is the recipient of the EMAF Award, the Edvard Munch Art Award, the Baloise Art Prize, the Abraaj Art Prize, and the 2022 Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media by the Philadelphia Museum of Art the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. In 2019 he was the co-winner of the Turner Prize. His audio investigations and research have been used as evidence at the United Kingdom’s Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organizations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International together with fellow researchers from Forensic Architecture.
Editor: James Hoff
Designer: David Bennewith / Colophon
Copy editor: Allison Dubinsky
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Published by Primary Information, 144 pgs, 19 × 12.7 cm, Softcover, 2023, 979-898-762-49-51
