Hannan Jones

Evolution of the Hum and Orbit of an Echo, graphic notations, 2021

Hannan works with sound, installation, and moving image. Recently she has expanded her practice and has anchored herself in themes of identity; exploring the hybridity within language and rhythm, and personal world-building associated with cultural and social migration. 

In using sound to not only reclaim her histories, but also explore the space between them, Hannan has adopted a sampling technique whereby collected fragments of sound, and their abstracted musical values, are reassembled to reflect a personal perspective. Acting to echo both collective and autobiographical experiences of migration, language, chaos and origin. 

Left to Right: Maghreb K7 Club : Synth Raï, Chaoui & Staifi – Vinyl LP, Cheb Adelhak, Sarbi Sarbi (cassette), DjurDjura (vinyl), Groupe De Femmes Algériennes Djurdjura (vinyl), Songs and Music of Algeria (vinyl) and SAID EL HEMRI, S/T (cassette), selected music archives of the artist.

Working with Rai, Kabyle music, traditional folk and the songs of the Algerian women’s trio DjurDjura who ‘sing out loud what our mothers hummed under their breaths’, Hannan composes a fractal patchwork of woven rhythms with the intention to gesture towards complex personal and collective histories.

She interprets Glissant’s ‘thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized’ as a catalyst to understand and construct these sonic landscapes. In addition, Hannan has channelled these underpinnings into an ongoing larger body of work, ‘New Horizons’. An audio and visual installation that seeks to deconstruct spaces we know intimately, before being reassembled by the soundscape, exploring hybridity and reclaiming of possibilities. 

Through her research-led studio based process, she has created and will continue to expand New Horizons as a carrier for disjointed realities; gesturing and questioning ourselves and our assumed knowledges of belonging, cartography and territories. 

Website: www.hannanjones.com/ 
Research: https://www.are.na/hannan-bouchemla-jones
Instagram: @hannannannanananannnn/
Forthcoming soundscape cassette release ‘Re/Tell Atlas’

Thank you to the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, DSGL and OSE for support in undertaking this development.