Curated by Liquid Architecture for Melbourne Festival
Artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Jordanian artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan examines the contemporary politics of listening – its relationship to power, borders, human rights, testimony and truth – through the production of audio documentaries and essays, installations, sculpture, photography, and performance.

His Aural Contract series investigates the role of the voice in law; the changing nature of testimony in the face of new regimes of border control, algorithmic technology, biomedical science, and modes of surveillance.

The Aural Contract works draw from an evolving sound archive – built by the artist – containing extracts of recordings from political and criminal courts, police evidence, films, literature and other sources.

In 2013, Abu Hamdan’s audio documentary The Freedom of Speech Itself was submitted as evidence at the UK asylum tribunal where the artist himself was called to testify as an expert witness.

At Melbourne Festival, Liquid Architecture will present a series of audio documentaries from Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract as a ‘live listening event’ in the cinema setting.

Further developing the theme will be talks by researchers James Parker and Poppy de Souza. Parker’s writing explores legal questions about sound, and sonic questions about the law. De Souza’s inquiry asks “how listening works, and what listening does, in our post-convergent, post-Snowden, post-privacy moment.”