Wissam, 2016

"I first met Wissam in a remote village in the Chouf Mountains of Lebanon. I was sitting on the curb at the side of the road when I noticed something in a tree moving wildly in the wind and glistening brightly in the sun. On closer inspection I saw that the shimmering tree was covered in unravelled cassette tape and later learnt that this was a vernacular technique to use the obsolete media to ward off the birds and insects from praying on the tree’s fruit. I began following the trail of cassette tape that was quivering on the trees and it led me into an orchard of clementines. The whole orchard was incandescent, there must have been dozens of tapes containing hundreds of songs. It was one tree in particular, deep in the orchard, that stood out to me. The tape that was protecting this tree’s clementines was much thinner - it was mini-cassette tape - the kind used in small dictaphone recorders or answering machines. Anticipating a more personal content to this recording I collected all the mini-cassette tape from the tree and harvested the voice that was magnetized to its surface. The voice had weathered badly in its tireless defense of the clementines, yet there was small fragments that remained recoverable. However the process of recovery was demanding, some phonemes had to be listen to for hours in order to properly differentiate the muffled words from one another. After listening over and over again to the opening lines, I eventually heard the voice identify itself as Wissam [inaudible], and understood from Wissam that I was listening to an audio recorded manuscript for a book or a manifesto on the elusive concept of Taqiyya. An old islamic juridical concept that is widely understood as the divine right to lie. The recovery of the voice is a laborious and protracted task, and from the 90 minutes running time below is the totality of the audible fragments that I could salvage thus far.“

Earshot, 2016

In May 2014, Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank (Palestine) shot and killed two teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher. The human rights organization Defence for Children International contacted Forensic Architecture, a Goldsmiths College-based agency that undertakes advanced architectural and media research. They worked with Abu Hamdan to investigate the incident. The case hinged upon an audio-ballistic analysis of the recorded gunshots to determine whether the soldiers had used rubber bullets, as they asserted, or broken the law by firing live ammunition at the two unarmed teenagers. 

A detailed acoustic analysis, for which Abu Hamdan used special techniques designed to visualize the sound frequencies, established that they had fired live rounds, and moreover had tried to disguise these fatal shots to make them sound as if they were rubber bullets. These visualizations later became the crucial piece of evidence that was picked up by the news channel CNN and other international news agencies, forcing Israel to renounce its original denial. The investigation was also presented before the U. S. Congress as an example of Israel’s contravention of the American-Israeli arms agreement.  A little over a year after Abu Hamdan completed his report, he returns to the case of Abu Daher and Nawara in his exhibition Earshot. Expanding on the original body of evidence, he has created an installation encompassing sound, photographic prints, and a video to reflect more broadly on the aesthetics of evidence and the politics of sound and silence.

The video, Rubber Coated Steel, is the main part of the installation commissioned by Portikus and acts as a tribunal for these serial killing sounds. The video tribunal does not preside over the voices of the victims but rather seeks to amplify their silence, fundamentally questioning the ways in which rights are being heard today.