Student Q&A with Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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

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Artistic Research at Tyson

Friday, April 26–Saturday, April 27
Tyson Research Center
Full weekend and drop-in hour options available
Separate RSVP required; see website

Invited guests Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Salomé Voegelin will guide a collective discussion about working at the cross-section of sound studies, performance and other artistic research methods, environmental studies, and histories of war. Via discussions, presentations and guided explorations, this gathering will be about the exchange of methods for including (and exposing) creative practice as complementary and fruitful to the critical and intellectual work within the university.

A cohort of 13 Washington University humanities graduate students will present their works in progress following a semester of site-specific exploration of creative practice and critical inquiry at the Tyson Research Station. They will share the evolution of their ideas in a variety of formats, including but not limited to performance, documentation of their process and display of creative work within a bunker on site.