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.
Saturday, January 11, 2025, 2-5 pm
Free Admission
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.
With contributions by:
B Dukes
Matt Brownell
Cat Lauigan
Zekarias Musele Thompson
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.
Biographies:
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.
As an intuitive sound weaver, visual artist, DJ, instrumentalist, vocalist and producer, B Dukes / Blu Moon (@bdukesthetruth) creates electronic journeys channeled by Spirit while exploring trance states and spirit filled heart music, sharing the intersections of Black electronic music from across the African diaspora centering ritual. Experimenting with sound originated from experiencing it and playing as a source of ritual, of praise and direct connection with God. It was Black worship music in the Deep South paired with the uncovering of Afro diasporic dance music that has transformed the sounds of their heart.
Matt Brownell (@mattbrownell____) is an Oakland-based artist, DJ, and co-founder of Cone Shape Top, a record shop / project space / label. They have been spinning eclectic sets for over 20 years, from ambient to house and every zone in between. Never beholden to genre, they relish finding relationships between varied and often disparate sounds to create shifting and unexpected moods. They also perform experimental electronics as 1/3rd of S’hells Gate.
Cat Lauigan (@catlauigan) is a Filipina Oakland based multi-disciplinary artist, DJ, and co-founder of Oakland based underground cultural hub, Cone Shape Top and the club night, EGG! at Thee Stork Club. She is also 1 /3 of the experimental band, S’hells Gate
Zekarias Musele Thompson (@zekarias) (b. 1983, they/them/their) is an artist based in Oakland, CA, and Reykjavik, IS often working in sonic composition, mark-making, photography, collaborative group practice & performance, and writing. Their practice is concerned with humanity’s conceptual and emotional organizational structures—and how we bring them into material form. Zekarias has presented solo exhibitions and projects at the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Lab, Gray Area, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies – and is a co-founder of Working Name Studios, a collectively owned and organized arts institution with the mission of building institutional stability and equity for underrepresented creative practices, ideas, and people.