Hearings is the online journal of Contour Biennale 8, acting as a periodically updated resource tracing the artistic process, conceptual approach and historical research through textual as well as image and video-based contributions from a range of artists, filmmakers, thinkers and authors. Hearings is considered a polyphonic happening where established notions of representative truth and fiction, the nature of evidence and testimony, major and minor narratives of Modernity will become fundamentally destabilized.

Hearings: A Reader

This reader proposes a series of beginnings—a polyphonic happening that composes its editorial approach in borrowing from the juridical and musical spheres. Hearings was launched as the online journal of Contour Biennale 8, hosting a pairing of texts or image-based contributions each month featuring artists, writers, poets, anthropologists, and filmmakers. In this organic accrual our intention has been to reorient relationships around the artwork as site of evidence and testimonial record. However, these multidimensional readings are not restricted to the active apparatus of law and discipline, but instead seek to unravel the asynchronies of our times—the mesh of injustice in our midst.

Featuring texts and illustrated contributions by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, inhabitants, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Agency, Judy Radul, Sven Lütticken, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Ana Torfs, Pallavi Paul and Anish Ahluwalia, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, Trinh Thi Nguyen, Basir Mahmood, Susanne M. Winterling and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, T. J. Demos, Louis Henderson, Filipa César, Rossella Biscotti, Adelita Husni-Bey, Madonna Staunton, Arvo Leo, Council, Eric Baudelaire, Ho Tzu Nyen, Otobong Nkanga, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Rana Hamadeh, Hunter Braithwaite and Trevor Paglen, Samuel Mareel, Dirk de Meyer, Cooking Sections and Ghassan Zaqtan.

Published on the occasion of Contour Biennale 8 | Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium

Edited by Natasha Ginwala

Design by Studio Remco van Bladel

Co-published by Contour Biennale 8 and Sternberg Press

March 2017, English
15 x 22cm, 248 pages, color and b/w ill., softcover
ISBN: 978-3-95679-297-7
€20.00 [€18.00 at Contour Biennale 8]

To order a copy please contact Sternberg Press