Although I usually find conspicuously inarticulate people more annoying than those who are just a bit too articulate, I confess to having harbored a certain reserve toward 35-year-old Dutch artist Jonas Staal. His work as an artist includes doctoral research at the University of Leiden, extensive public lecturing, and setting up the New World Summit, an artistic and political body “dedicated to providing ‘alternative parliaments’ hosting organizations that currently find themselves excluded from democracy.” At times during the last five years—the period covered by this solo exhibition at Laveronica, Staal’s first in a commercial gallery—I have found myself wondering whether, for all his eloquence and analytical prowess, he is really making sense. At a conference organized by BAK in Utrecht in 2012, Staal denounced the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom for producing only a stage-managed simulacrum of what it purported to promote back in the 1950s and ’60s. “That’s very probably true,” I said to myself, “but then shouldn’t he be more careful with how he stages his own New World Summit?” What exactly happens to the emancipatory potential of a temporary global “parliament” when the invited representatives of stateless peoples, including some organizations accused of terrorism, are put on display …

At the entrance to Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “The All Hearing” a tape delay device perches on a plinth, its magnetic tape wrapped around an external spool (The End of Every Illusionist, 2013). Through the attached pair of headphones emerges the artist’s voice, its vowels lightly pressed by his Yorkshire upbringing, to tell us that noise pollution in Egypt’s capital has reached the proportions of an epidemic. The barrage of sound in the world’s loudest city is so constant, he intones, that it threatens not only the physical but the spiritual well-being of its inhabitants. The vaulted ceiling above this listening post is speckled with the same red, green, and blue disco lights that, eight hours previously, had ghosted over my head at a Sicilian beach party. Here, however, the flickering projections are soundtracked not by synthetic Europop but by the beats emerging from rival boat parties along the river Nile, amplified through a row of speakers stacked neatly in the center of this narrow, high space (Gardens of Death, 2013). Songs bleed into one another as the microphone tracks the sounds of Cairo, recorded by the artist from a motorboat—an aural, waterborne equivalent to Taxi Driver’s celebrated montage of a ride …