A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, 2020

In A Thousand White Plastic Chairs, the artist subjects his own voice to the mercy of these lights and the lights alone for there is no other light other than the illuminate interruptions that emblazon his face in red and yellow and command and direct the artist speech and speed of thought. Here, Abu Hamdan re-performs the asymmetry between the speed of the technology, which allowed words to travel through copper cables at 4600 m/s, and the speed of the human mind to process what it sees and stores of a given event. This works not only shares a common technology with the larger sound and light installation, it too serves as a proposition that the true capacity to bear witness is measured not through acts of coherent testimony and seamless speech but rather its very ineffability.

Shot Twice (With the Same Bullet), 2021

Bassel Abi Chahine is a 30 year old writer and historian, who has managed to obtain the most comprehensive inventory of extremely rare objects, photographs and interviews of the PLA and PSP socialist militia, led by Walid Joumblatt during the Lebanese Civil War. All this unprecedented research into this one militia was done in pursuit of material that could reconstitute what he describes as flashbacks, and unexplainable memories from a previous life.

The lucid and personal memories of the war that he had lived with his whole life, were due to the fact that he was the reincarnation of a soldier, Yousef Fouad Al Jawhary, who died at the age of sixteen, on February 26 1984, in the town of Aley. Yet, it was the details of his life that sat murky in his mind. This is where the before and after image could help. Throughout the spring and summer of 2019, Abi Chahine made over a hundred before and after images. It was the intensification of a strategy he had been using, since 2008, to trigger his past life memories.

Shot Twice (With the Same Bullet) is an audio-visual installation comprised of eight kinetic light-boxes. Abi Chahine’s before and after images are overlaid as still, translucent images, onto the white, illuminating background of a television screen. This light-box condition is then interceded by Abu Hamdan’s silhouette and narration. In these videos, he compares the images of Beirut during wartime and peacetime, and elucidates that the differences between them do not document the crimes of war, but the crimes of peace.