Why do Fake Hands Not Clap

2010, 4 ́19 ̋ Courtesy the artist, Green Cardamom, London and OUTLET, Istanbul

This dispatch is the audio file extracted from the video Why do fake hands not clap (2010). The video consists of a dozen sets of the artist’s hands (plaster casts) in clap- ping motion, and disintegrating as a result. The clapping produces an eerie sound- track to represent the destructive impulses cloaked in our collective approval. The sound is not one of applause, and yet it is created by the very act of applause. So it is this disconnect that produces the anxiety, and plunges the viewer into a land- scape of broken shards falling all around.

Hamra Abbas (b.1976, Kuwait) lives and works between Islamabad and Boston.