Listening from the Gut
Listening from the Gut: listening session with Joe Namy, is a collective listening experience that uses music and deep listening as a tool of resilience and community building.
The public programming of Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions continues the desire towards knowledge-sharing and insists on the potential of collectivity on the local and global level. The concurrent exhibitions in Houston and San Francisco and their related public programs are guided by Judith Butler’s notion of intertwinement and interdependency as ethics in order to untangle forms of oppression toward liberation.
The programs in San Francisco are titled Open Bodies and extend across the city in collaboration with local arts and cultural organizations. The series is conceived as a collective body that tends to various organs, perceptive faculties, and phenomenologies. Acting as the ears, the limbs, and the tongue to the exhibition body, Open Bodies reflects on the transformation of physical and social bodies through sound, dance/movement, and familial and collective language.
Learn more about Open Bodies
Listening from the Gut: listening session with Joe Namy
Joe Namy invites a group of artists, poets, and musicians to come together to share and talk about sounds, songs, and recordings that are meaningful to them in response to the themes explored in Namy’s audio-video sculptural installation Half Blue (2019), followed by a wider collective discussion with the audience.
On view in Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions, Half Blue is a poetic exploration that reflects on the increased militarization of police and the justice system. The audio-video sculptural installation takes its point of departure from the artist’s cousin Khalid Jabara, who was murdered by hate crime in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016, leading to the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act passed by the US Congress in 2021. Namy’s sound composition is a polyphonic elegy, interpolating news reports of Jabara’s murder with R&B and hip-hop tracks, vocal compositions by Arab musicians Alya Al Sultani and Halim El Dabh, media sound bites that target Arab Americans, the voice of Eric Garner’s daughter Emerald Snipes, and excerpts from artist Etel Adnan’s book of poems The Arab Apocalypse and poet Marwa Helal’s Census.
Artist and musician Joe Namy’s (Born 1978, Lansing, MI, USA. Lives and works in London and Beirut) practice encompasses sound, its history, and its impact on the built environment. Working collaboratively through public sculptures and performances, Namy’s work considers the social construction of sound and the political forces that enable its transmission. The artist’s work critically engages with the gender dynamics of sound, the migration patterns of instruments, and the translation between languages, score, sounds, instruments, and bodies in movement and dance. Other projects by Namy explore the history and resonance of opera houses across eleven countries in the Middle East as well as the archives of Arab American musician Halim El Dabh, a pioneer of tape music (Wire Recorder Piece, 1944). Namy’s recent exhibitions and projects include a public sound work at the Waterloo Underground Station, London, Busan Biennale 2024, Joe Namy: Heavy with Love, Brooklyn Public Library, and the upcoming Sharjah Biennial 16.