Witness-Machine Complex

The Witness-Machine Complex, 2021

Video (subtitles, looping sound, duration variable) on seven playback devices with inbuilt red and yellow lights)

The Witness-Machine Complex examines the role of translators and the electronic acoustic infrastructure deployed during the Nuremberg trials in 1945–46. Newly developed electronic audio technology enabled the live translation of the trial proceedings into Russian, French, German, and English, yet even though the translators’ work was of great importance to the procedure, there are no intentional recordings of it. The translators were not featured in the filmed footage of the trial, either, yet their presence was captured by the flashing yellow and red lights built into the witness stand and the prosecutor’s podium, which were used to slow down or pause the speed of the sound flowing into their headphones. When viewing footage in which the bulbs flash—instances of language in negotiation—it becomes evident that these moments have been removed from the transcripts, which make it seem as if the trial flowed seamlessly from voice to voice.

For his exhibition at Kunstverein Nürnberg, Abu Hamdan collected seven of these moments. In one example, a light flashes red to signal the order to repeat, derailing a witness’s train of thought and causing a minute of silence, during which agents of the court plead and prompt the witness’s speech to return, to no avail. In another, Nazi industrialist Walther Funk accelerates his speech and raises his voice in defiance while the translator jumps the light switch in contestation. When Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a member of the French Resistance who was interred at Auschwitz for three years, is interrupted by the flashing light, she begins to speak in a slow staccato in which each syllable is overemphasized; her robotic performance, combined with the violence she describes, sounds dissonant and yet is perfectly tuned to the machine of justice.

Abu Hamdan then staged the collected moments in a scenography that invoked the infrastructure of the Nuremberg trials to historicize the now-inextricable relation between testimony and the technologies by which it is disseminated and distorted. His sound and light installation restages the effects of the interruptions and shows how new practices for listening to and recounting testimony were inaugurated at Nuremberg. The installation is a device to tell a history of the trials exclusively through their interruptions.

This work was commissioned and produced by Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2021).

A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, 2020

Video (colour, sound, 13 min.)

This video documents a performance entitled A Thousand White Plastic Chairs in which Abu Hamdan subjected his own voice to the mercy of the flashing yellow and red lights that are a part of The Witness- Machine Complex (2021). The video is illuminated by these lights alone, which continually command and direct the artist’s speech and speed of thought by emblazoning his face in red and yellow. Here, Abu Hamdan re-performs the asymmetry between the speed of the technology, which allowed words to travel through copper cables at 4,600 meters per second, and the speed of the human mind to process what it sees and stores of a given event. These events are preserved within cacophonous and dissonant relics—objects that embody the schism between an event and its reckoning, and mediate the conflict between a sound and what that sound means. This work proposes that the true capacity to bear witness is measured not through acts of coherent testimony and seamless speech, but rather through their breaking points.

This work was commissioned by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, United States (2020).