Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself

"Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself is a live audio essay employing a series of sonic manipulations and pre-recorded samples to explore the concept and practice of Taqiya. This is a form of communication and political practice forged at remote altitudes, at the fringes of failed states, in buffer zones and on ceasefire lines. Focusing on the stories of alleged mass conversions of the Druze minority in northern Syria by Wahhabi groups Abu Hamdan investigates how such minor speech acts can help us re-appraise the precision of speaking, the multiple ways of remaining silent and the inherently unfaithful nature of ones voice.

Contra Diction (speech against itself) (2015) realises the performance as a two channel video installation in which one of the screens is a teleprompter, the speech apparatus from which the political lie often originates, and formally as a video playback device it symbolizes both duplicity and transparency. Wissam (2016) is a model of a vernacular technique that uses obsolete audio-cassette tape to ward off the birds and stop them eating fruit on the trees. Wissam is both a character in Abu Hamdan’s performance and a diagram for the concept of taqiyya." (Maureen Paley, 2016).