Hammer Projects: Lawrence Abu Hamdan

 

An online module makes this research available to the public, and the testimonies by Othman and others offer a view “inside a Syrian torture prison,” rendering its spaces and horrors as legible as possible, despite a complete lack of photographs or other forms of documentation.¹ The indelible mark left by the prison on the memories of former detainees enabled a reconstruction that, though incomplete, is the clearest and most accessible record to date of the Saydnaya prison architecture and the criminal acts that have unfolded there under the regime of Bashar al-Assad. In February 2017, Amnesty International estimated that as many as 13,000  people had been executed at the prison since protests against al-Assad began in 2011.

 

Othman’s detailed recollection of his former cell and his clear articulation of his spatial sensitivities are likely the result of the unique circumstances at Saydnaya. In addition to being kept in darkness, either blindfolded or made to cover their eyes, detainees also are forced to adhere to a rule of extreme silence. Having gone through these forms of sensory deprivation, the surviving former detainees were tasked with reconstructing the space of the prison by way of recollecting traumatic experiences imprinted on their acoustic memories.

 

The interviews with former detainees of Saydnaya form the basis of Abu Hamdan’s ongoing investigation, which has evolved into a series of audiovisual works that posit that fact and truth can emerge through listening carefully to things that would be considered illegitimate speech within a legal framework. With two recent installations—Saydnaya (the missing 19db) and Saydnaya (ray traces) (both 2017)—Abu Hamdan forces a reconciliation between research and art. In both works, a gray area situated within the silences and distorted memories of those who once occupied the prison is made productive.

 

Abu Hamdan poses a series of self-reflexive questions that address the role of a research-based practice within a broader discursive field. Though attempting to understand the human rights violations at Saydnaya initiated this pursuit, Abu Hamdan’s two artworks that have thus far emerged from his research speak more broadly about an aesthetics of evidence and an evidence of aesthetics. Together, these aesthetic documents use the formal properties of sound, text, and image to represent an experience of trauma and violence beyond literal reconstruction.

Saydnaya (ray traces) envisions a reconstruction of the prison via overhead projectors that cast images that have been rendered through ray tracing, a digital visualization tool used in architectural design to map the leakages of sound throughout a given structure. In the audio essay Saydnaya (the missing 19db), testimonies, voiceover, cacophonous whispers, extreme silence, and test tones comingle to suggest the ways in which acoustic memories are retained in the physical body as trauma. The installation’s audio emphasizes and manipulates qualities of voice, proximity to sound, acoustic depths, and a dislocation of the senses as ways of approximating the conditions of the prison—an environment otherwise designed to restrict perception. Saydnaya (the missing 19db) documents a nineteen-decibel drop in sound within the prison that is mapped onto the acoustic memories of those detainees who were there after 2011. Amnesty cites this significant shift as evidence of its transformation into a torture prison at that time. As an artwork, Saydnaya (the missing 19db) transforms research into a multisensory experience. Its final form is itself a document of perceptions, a recognition of testimony as a material that contains experiences that evade documentation as such. In this context, speech shifts from a communicative device into an object with unique characteristics.

Collectively, Abu Hamdan’s works address the politics of sound and listening in a cultural climate—legal, political, artistic—that is otherwise dominated by vision and visuality. Earlier works include investigations of a specific incident involving the death of two Palestinian teenagers by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank (Rubber Coated Steel, 2016); the vibrations felt by objects (A Convention of Tiny Movements, 2015); the political and religious  implications of noise-abatement policies in Cairo (The All-Hearing, 2014); and the controversial use of voice analysis to determine the authenticity of asylum seekers’ accents in the United Kingdom (The Freedom of Speech Itself, 2012). Abu Hamdan’s propositions are at times speculative, but they are grounded in a personal and political conviction that is sensitive to the testimonials, interviews, and accounts that contribute to the larger body of research focused on sound and acoustic space.

Abu Hamdan’s research-based work takes part in an art historical lineage—including Conceptual art and institutional critique—that places value on artistic methodologies in the pursuit of truths, whether speculative or analytical, theoretical or practical. In the Lebanese context, where Abu Hamdan currently lives and works, artists such as Walid Raad sit squarely in this trajectory, though to different ends. Raad is known for having formed the fictional research project The Atlas Group (1989–2004) to analyze the aftereffects of the Lebanese Civil War and its relationship to the contemporary history of Lebanon. Artists such as Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen are also considered to have research-based leanings, but the more this term is used as a shorthand, the more porous its definition becomes. Research, it could be argued, is at the basis of most artistic work; however, the ways in which research is emphasized and presented separate Abu Hamdan from others. The late Mike Kelley is an artist seldom associated with research as it’s understood today. But his Educational Complex (1995), which attempts to depict, as reconstructed from memory, every school that the artist attended, could perhaps offer some insight into the ways in which Abu Hamdan translates Saydnaya as a specific architecture through the memories of those who have experienced its horrors firsthand, and how the spottiness of their memories contributes to, rather than undermines, an overall understanding of the place.

As much as the prison has preoccupied Abu Hamdan’s research, the immaterial traces that have seeped beyond its architecture are what characterize both works of contemporary art. The basis of Saydnaya (ray traces) and Saydnaya (the missing 19db) is an attempt to understand the manner in which sound becomes sight and sight becomes sound—the results of communication and perception being forced to the limits of both sensory fields. With regard to the prison, Abu Hamdan has focused specifically on the perception of what was heard by detainees such as Jamal Abdou, who recollected of the darkness: “You try to build an image based on the sounds you hear.” For Abu Hamdan, the hypersensitivity to sound and an ability to construct images in the absence of what is seen defines his work and our encounter with the sounds and images he conjures forth as evidence of a practice, as evidence of research, and as evidence of his (and our) proximity to the crimes at Saydnaya through the individuals who have absorbed them into their being.

Note

1. Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture, “Saydnaya: Inside a Syrian Torture Prison,” https://saydnaya.amnesty.org/.