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فير زملر غاليري Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Starting on September 2, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, UNAM, will present the exhibition Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Cross-border Crimes, made up of a set of works that are characterized by questioning the political dimension of voice and listening to capture what exists beyond the sound itself. His projects present sound as testimony and political evidence.

Likewise, this exhibition by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Amman, Jordan, 1985) addresses the volatile nature of borders, reviews several events where walls and wall divisions have played a fundamental role in the clarification or condemnation of judicial cases; it investigates the difficulty of establishing the biography of a person through the voice, and highlights the sound, space and even psychological consequences generated by prolonged military presence.

In his artistic practice, Lawrence Abu Hamdan experiments with how to generate new aesthetic expressions that give another form to the political. Hamdan delves into the conditions of testimony and the importance of who listens and who is listened to, that is, in the political possibilities of listening.

— Virginia Roy, curator

Abu Hamdan has called his research a "political ecology of noise", that is, an analysis and understanding of the elements that interact and are part of sound. As he proposes, sound exists in relation to a system and requires listening to it in its relational condition. It is necessary to hear beyond sound. In this space of political listening, sound reveals us and becomes a key witness to confront and resist.

45th Parallel (2022) addresses the volatile nature of borders, as well as the porosity and fluidity of boundaries, which contrasts with the blunt and sometimes lethal nature of national demarcations. Filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel narrates this video, he tells the story of the Haskell Free Library & Opera House as a borderline space, while exposing the murder of Mexican Sergio Adrián Hernández by the border patrol in El Paso-Juárez, in 2010. An agent fired from the United States; however, the bullet crossed the border and killed the young man in Mexico. This fact prompts us to question under which law and in which country that death should be sentenced, what legal implications it entails and under what jurisprudence the murder should be judged and, most interestingly, are there legal limits to sound?

Both the narrative about the library and the border theater and the geographical complexity of Hernández's murder allow Abu Hamdan to delve into one of the axes of his work: the conflict and tension between sound and the space where it is produced.

In Walled Unwalled (2018), walls delimit spaces, as well as the actions and consequences that occur inside or outside them. In this piece, the artist explores the limits of the permeable and the way in which sound filters beyond the walls and becomes a revealing agent of stories for the construction of truth.

Abu Hamdan reviews several events where walls and wall partitions have played a pivotal role in clarifying or condemning a court case. The work begins with the story of drug trafficker Kyllo, whose drug plantation was tracked thanks to thermal technology that revealed the heat given off by the wall of his house. The sentence was resolved in favor of Kyllo because the limits of the private had been violated by not having detected the facts by human senses, but by a technology that had "accessed" his home from the outside. The video also recovers the murder that athlete Oscar Pistorius committed against his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the bathroom of the house. The conviction against Pistorius was imposed when it was found that the bathroom wall on which he shot amplified the sound - instead of muffling it, as he claimed - and, therefore, he could have differentiated the scream of his girlfriend behind the wall. Finally, the video addresses the acoustics in prisons and, specifically, in the Syrian torture prison of Saydnaya. The prisoners were always blindfolded, so that the sound universe was their only means of relating to the environment and of survival during the time of their detention. The artist asked the prisoners to describe the architecture of the space where they had been locked up. However, it was their perception of sounds that made it possible to discover the conditions of torture and suffering to which they were subjected.

Abu Hamdan does not limit himself to recording events as a receiver or sensor, but influences the recording process and the way in which they are communicated. In this way, the importance falls, above all, on who listens and who is listened to. That is, in the political possibilities of listening.

For Conflicted Phonemes (2012), Lawrence Abu Hamdan brought together a number of linguists, immigrants, and activists to discuss phonetic policies in immigration controls. The case before it looked at whether the accent and pronunciation of a language were sufficient to legally determine the country of origin of twelve Somalis and, consequently, for the Dutch government to reject or accept their asylum application. The result of the study were several diagrams that were collected in this piece and that show the difficulty of establishing the biography of a person through their voice.

Finally, there is The Diary of a Sky (2023). On 4 August 2020, 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded in a depot in Beirut's main port, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history that caused thousands of displaced and injured people and hundreds of deaths. Its causes remain unknown. From the event, some witnesses said they heard the flight of fighter jets before the explosion. Abu Hamdan launched an exhaustive investigation that led him to discover the constant invasions by Israeli fighter jets into Lebanese airspace for more than 15 years. Consulting documents from the U.N. digital library, Abu Hamdan compiled the incursions of 22,111 aircraft since 2007, proving a prolonged military occupation in Lebanon's skies. The sum of the duration of these raids gave a total of eight and a half years. With this information, the artist created the website airpressure.info which constitutes the first publicly accessible database where information corresponding to the trajectory, duration and type of plane that flew over the sky is crossed.

The Diary of a Sky (2023) shows the impact of persistent aircraft noise and the anxiety it produces in citizens in the face of a probable bombing. These air raids have been part of the daily life of the people of Lebanon. The piece is made up of aerial images obtained by the inhabitants of the city with their cell phones. It is archive material found online that shows new forms of testimony where, beyond the first person, the witness becomes collective. The different shots create a celestial kaleidoscope with the footprints and aerial records of the planes and drones. By inverting the gaze, the images reflect the sky as the protagonist, a sky that materializes and objectifies itself as a place of violence and control, a space where the duration and details of these violations accumulate.

Abu Hamdan's production invites us to understand sound and its relationship with the medium. He proposes to conceive the background noise that emerges as a moan that demands and challenges us. Abu Hamdan induces us to frame in the foreground and activate the sound to which we had stopped paying attention.

Photo: Oliver Santana