Sonics of Separation: Lawrence Abu Hamdan // Jameel Arts Center
by Ruba Al-Sweel
It is hard to ignore the geopolitical context in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s solo presentation at the Jameel Arts Center in Dubai, which centers upon the 1967 annexation of the Golan Heights. Set against the abrupt plot twist of establishing diplomatic relations between the host country and Israel, Abu Hamdan’s sound and video installation, entitled This whole time there were no land mines (2017), is sown with silent tension. Comprised of lo-fi glitchy mobile phone footage and warbling audio recordings from the 2011 anniversary of the Nakba [النكبة], the Arabic word for catastrophe that marks the 1948 Palestinian exodus, the Middle Eastern debut of the installation is laid out in one-to-one square screens, which line two facing walls. Abu Hamdan here recreates the topographical conditions of the ‘Shouting Valley,’ a strip of land in the Israeli controlled portion of the Golan Heights annexed from Syria following a ceasefire. The valley allows for acoustic leaks to overflow beyond the new borders, accumulating an unlikely sonic stream of familial longing and aspiration that runs through the landscape as separated families—mostly from the Golan village of Majdal Shams—gather on both sides of the thick concertina wire and long-speculated land mines. The sound that pours is of voices attempting to keep in touch, using megaphones and binoculars in the absence of official forms of telecommunication. Like the valley, the narrow hallway between the two walls on which the cluster of small screens loop is a basin of fantasies of return and reunion as one trudges through a torrent of disembodied moans.
The separation caused by the annexation is generational, running as far back as fifty years; gathering by the valley is ceremonial, bringing displaced and separated peoples together for weddings, birthdays, and special occasions. But on May 15, 2011, a different cause for celebration rings through the valley as the location became host to a breach—Palestinian refugees on the Syrian side, in gradual bouts of adrenaline, crossed the border for the first time since it was drawn in 1967. In the footage on the first screen visible within the gallery, the scene is exuberant. Spread out over a craggy surface, from respective sides of the divide, people shout in earnest concern: “Abu Hussein, how are you Abu Hussein? 40 years really change a man!” Sound sloshes and spills into the neighboring screens, which present choppy footage of people advancing ever so hesitantly toward the fence: “How are you? How is college? Have you gotten married?” Individuals start scaling the fence, and suddenly, a man straddles it and jumps over to the other side, ushering an influx of contagious courage. Like a string of pearls, the rest follow as Palestinian flags wave rapidly. Unintelligible chants are interspersed with foreboding reprimand “Stop,” “Enough,” “Hey!” “There are land mines!”, only to realize instantly that this whole time, there were no land mines at all, and that the specter of violent eruption was a psychological operation. Israeli armed forces later retaliated, killing four and injuring twenty. But in that interstitial space between two warring states, intergenerational fears were defeated, myths were busted, and families united to practice, even if for a brief moment, their right to return.
Yet Abu Hamdan cares less about the physical border than the liminal space between sight and sound. For the Lebanese-British contemporary artist, borders are cartographic abstractions that are ever contracting and retracting in territorial showmanship. By centering the acoustic leakage as the first point at which the border was crossed—a bellwether of sorts, which heralded the physical breach—he highlights that while bodies have stayed behind fences for decades, their voices have not. It is this act of utterance that created the momentum that ultimately emboldened the breachers and enfeebled the security apparatus boasted by the Israeli state.
This exhibition is not Abu Hamdan’s first exploration of sound as an agent in litigation. A self-proclaimed ‘Private Ear,’ he routinely introduces sound to undermine the hegemony of physical evidence, offering a space for moral ambiguity and nuance that is so often bleached by the legal system, which has a tendency to draw hard lines and distinction. In 2016, the artist worked with the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture to produce a report for Amnesty International, carrying out an acoustic investigation into the Syrian regime prison of Saydnaya where thousands of political dissidents have been imprisoned and tortured since the beginning of the Syrian Civil War in 2011.
Relying on the aural memories of five Saydnaya survivors to record the violations that took place, who—due to the severe conditions of gaslighting and sensory deprivation, as most were kept in solitary confined darkness—had developed an acute sensitivity to sound. The artist used these testimonies to penetrate what is by all accounts an otherwise inaccessible prison, translating them into a piece of 3D imaging to reconstruct the architecture and gain insight into the nightmarish brutalities that transpired inside the black box of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. While the evidence is unlikely to be useful in a proper forensic sense, it serves a purpose; spotlighting a massive grey zone in which the human experience cannot be expressed in epistemic justification, but instead through pathos and intuition that must not be overlooked.
Abu Hamdan’s dealing with sound, an unlikely material in an art world hellbent on aesthetic display, has made him subject to the criticism of stuffy art academics. They argue that his work is impenetrable and necessitates heavy text-based explanations—what is failed to understand is that the works are not so much concerned with public displays of virtue signaling, as they are with excavating the political dimensions of art. Of experiencing world affairs in a way that is distinct from the news. As the artist posits, the voice of reason is not necessarily in our field of vision, but instead occupies an acousmatic space beyond the parochial human attempts of codification.