6:00 pm - 8:00 pmWelcome to an evening with performance and artist talk.
The artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents his performance A Thousand white Plastic Chairs which takes its scenography from the system of simultaneous translation deployed during the Nuremberg trials in 1945/6s. The newly developed electronic audio technology enabled the simultaneous translation of the trial proceedings into Russian, French, German, and English. Abu Hamdan’s performance departs from this apparatus to examine the inextricable relation between testimony and the technologies by which it is disseminated and distorted. Here Abu Hamdan re-performs the asymmetry between the speed of the technology, which allowed words to travel through copper cables at 4600 m/s, and the speed of the human mind to process what it sees and stores of a given event. The performance serves as a proposition that the true capacity to bear witness is measured not through acts of coherent testimony and seamless speech but rather its interruptions.
The performance is followed by an artist talk between Abu Hamdan and artistic director Theodor Ringborg, where we will get to hear more about the process behind the exhibition Dirty Evidence. In English.
