The Sonic Image
By Anna Seaman
Lawrence Abu Hamdan focuses on the intangible and the invisible. He is often described as a sound artist but his investigations into sound are far more nuanced than that. He says he is interested in the “leakage” of sound. By its very essence, one cannot contain sound in the same way that one can contain a visual image and so, in that way, it can occupy the spaces in between things and offer new perspectives. If art is, as Abu Hamdan calls it, a “mode of truth production” then his practice is evidential, revealing narratives concealed from history.
Abu Hamdan, who was born in Amman, spent time living and working in Beirut and is now working out of Alserkal Arts Foundation in Dubai, has used sound to help his audience hear, and see, things differently. He has done this not merely for investigation but also to shed light on real situations. In 2016, he worked with Amnesty International to produce an acoustic investigation into the notorious Saydnaya prison, north of Damascus, where thousands were kept in darkness, tortured and executed by the Syrian regime. Because prisoners were kept in silence, sound became the sense by which they navigated and measured their environment. Abu Hamdan worked with survivors’ ear-witness testimonies to reconstruct the prison and gain insight into what happened inside. His audio investigations have been used as evidence at the UK’s Asylum and Immigration Tribunal. He straddles disparate definitions—an artist, an activist and a phrase that he uses to describe himself, “a private ear”.
His largest solo exhibition of new work to date opened on March 4 at Sharjah Art Foundation featuring immersive installations and various studies of “splintered aural leaks”. The Sonic Image seeks to claim a new form of image-making that attempts to map out how we see sound.
It includes a previous Sharjah Art Foundation commission, Once Removed (2019), which was shown in Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber. It is an audiovisual installation that acts as a portrait of the time-travelling life and work of Bassel Abi Chahine, a writer and historian who gathered an unparalleled inventory of extremely rare objects related to Lebanon’s civil war.
It also features a major new commission, Air Conditioning (2022), and a site-specific performance, which collectively investigate the boundaries between voice and speech; translation and testimony; representation and reincarnation, as well as the power of sound and image to operate as mutual progenitors of and in public testimony.
Delving deep into the medium of sound opens up possibilities for the viewing experience. Do we view only with our eyes, or are our senses all fine-tuned to visualise? It is the no-man’s-land between these questions that Abu Hamdan is interested in and why the act of seeing one of his shows can’t even be defined as such.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: The Sonic Image until July 4 at Sharjah Art Foundation. Gallery 4, 5 and 6, Al Mureijah Square.