14 laser-cut dioramas, C-Prints mounted on cardboard with wooden cases, 7 texts printed on Plexiglas plates, 7 cm × 10 cm × 6 cm
Disputed Utterance is Abu Hamdan’s series of works using the process of palatography, a technique that prints specific shapes onto the roof of one’s mouth by putting a mixture of charcoal and olive oil on the tongue and pronouncing a word. The contact of the tongue leaves a trace of the spoken word, and by learning to read these charcoal forms linguists and speech therapists can see exactly how their subject is pronouncing words.
Abu Hamdan uses this technique to tell seven stories of what is legally known as cases of “disputed utterances”; a trial where someone’s culpability or innocence is hinged upon conflicted claims over a recorded word or phrase. In one story, a woman calling emergency services was heard saying something sounding like “murder” before she died. Expert linguists pored over the phrase and battled in court until finally the verdict was that the bilingual French woman in fact said “merde” (meaning “shit” in French).
Abu Hamdan’s series of drawings and photographic palatographies produce a narrative demonstrating the ways in which, once recorded in a police interview, our voices are no longer our own. He then rendered these brief moments of critical misunderstandings and misinterpretations as three-dimensional life-sized dioramas of the different shapes that these words print onto the palate, accompanied by short texts explaining the cases. Shown in this way, the artist amplifies how a moment of utterance becomes a crime scene.
