Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Dirty Evidence
Join us to celebrate the launch of artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s, first major monograph Dirty Evidence, published by Lenz Press in collaboration with Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and edited by CCA Berlin founding director Fabian Schöneich.
The publication presents a comprehensive overview of the artist’s practice over the last 10 years. The book presents an in-depth visual analysis of Abu Hamdan’s work accompanied by commissioned essays that focus on single pieces as well as on the artist’s oeuvre. Scholarly and creative reflections explore the political aspects of key work by Abu Hamdan, while a complete list of works to date makes this monograph a crucial tool for curators and researchers working in and around the subjects to which the artist has dedicated his practice. Contributors to the publication include: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Natasha Ginwala, Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff, Theodor Ringborg, Fabian Schöneich, Yasmine Seale and Eyal Weizman.
The event will feature a conversation between the artist and curator Aram Moshayedi.
The book launch is part of CCA Berlin's Stirring Up Trouble, a program unfolding until the end of June, and which aims to host, restage, and think alongside four distinct artistic positions that foreground acts of listening and their manifold potentialities. Through their practices, invited artists engage listening as a method of witnessing unseeable formations of violence (Lawrence Abu Hamdan); an invitation to inhabit tropical geographies otherwise (Kent Chan); an everyday practice of place-making and communitarian belonging (Black Obsidian Sound System); and a regenerative archival portal into shared inheritances and histories of struggle (Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks). By tuning in to organized sounds, accidental leaks, and enforced silences, they conceive modes of aesthetic experience that challenge common perceptions of artmaking, and trace roadmaps to resonant imaginaries.
Stirring Up Trouble is generously supported by the foundation Between Bridges.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and “private ear” whose projects have taken the form of audiovisual installations, videos, performances, photography, essays, and lectures. His interest with sound and its intersection with politics originate from his background as a touring musician and facilitator of DIY music. The artist’s audio investigation has been used as evidence at the UK 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. Recent solo exhibitions include Lawrence Abu Hamdan / Dirty Evidence, Bonniers Konsthall (2021); Green Coconuts and Other Inadmissible Evidence, Secession, Vienna (2020); The Voice Before the Law, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2019); Earwitness Theatre, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019), Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (2019), Witte de With, Rotterdam (2019), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018); Hammer Projects: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hammer Museum, LA (2018); and Earshot, Portikus, Frankfurt (2016). Abu Hamdan is the co-winner of the Turner Prize 2019. He is also the recipient of the 2020 EMAF Award, the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award, the Baloise Art Prize 2018 and the Abraaj Art Prize 2018. In 2017, he won the short film award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and in 2016, he received the Nam June Paik Award for new media.
Aram Moshayedi is a writer and the Robert Soros curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where he most recently co-organized (with Connie Butler) the exhibition and publication Paul McCarthy: Head Space, Drawings 1963–2019. Other exhibitions include Stories of Almost Everyone; Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only (with Hamza Walker); and All the Instruments Agree: An Exhibition or a Concert. Since joining the Hammer in 2013, he has curated projects by artists Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marwa Arsanios, Andrea Bowers, Andrea Büttner, Simon Denny, Mario Garcia Torres, Shadi Habib Allah, Maria Hassabi, Jasmina Metwaly, Oliver Payne and Keiichi Tanaami, and Avery Singer. He has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues as well as Artforum, Art in America, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, Metropolis M, Parkett, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and Bidoun, for which he is a contributing editor.
