Saturday, November 30, 2013

OuUnPo goes to Germany



All the Worlds that you Word..

Reading, listening and speaking sessions by artists Mounira Al Solh and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
All the Worlds that You Word... is the closing act of Quantum Fluctuations in a Synecdochic Universe -  at ZKM Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe, January 18, 2014


As a response to the ZKM exhibition Global Activism, OuUnPo has invited Mounira Al Solh and Lawrence Abu Hamdan to enact and perform two ongoing research projects that poke and investigate the liaisons between language and power.

Mounira Al Solh will present her NOA (not only arabic) magazine. NOA, whose third issue is currently in the making, is a series of collaborative and performative gestures recollected under printed form. Addressing sensitive subjects such as “Treason” (1st issue) and “Arrest” (2nd issue), NOA can normally only be viewed and read individually by arranging an appointment with the artist. For the event at the ZKM though the artist will arrange a special reading of NOA for the first time. The magazine becomes thus a tem- porary object-shape, which is not definitive and enclosed but acts as a further trigger for a dialogic and performative dimension with the reader.



Lawrence Abu Hamdan will instead organize a collective listening session and discussion stemming out of Aural Contract, a project about the rela- tionship of listening to politics, borders, human rights, testimony, truth and international law. Throughout his Aural Contract project Abu Hamdan has built up a sound archive, containing audio extracts of his works together with specific moments of juridical listening and speaking gathered from a wide range of sources such as the trials of Saddam Hussein and Judas Priest,

UK police evidence tapes, films such as Decoder and readings from texts including Italo Calvino’s “A King Listens.” For this event the components of this archive are mixed together live, generating a performance/ seminar and collective listening session that intends to immerse its audience in the heart of a discussion about the fundamental ways in which we speak and listen today.

In both Al Solh’s NOA and Abu Hamdan’s Aural Contract the word is embedded in different manifestations as well as approached through diverse angles, and yet it emerges as a generator of worlds and subjectivities. With this respect the word is a synechdochic device per se, always carrying along the weight of invisible semantics.

OuUnPo members Sara Giannini and Fatos Üstek, together with Mounira Al Solh and Lawrence Abu Hamdan invite the Karlsruhe audience to collectively speculate on the unspoken, unheard and unwritten implications of the language we speak and write. Paraphrasing media theorist and philosopher Vilem Flusser, we try to control the language only to be controlled by it.

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