Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Chisenhale Gallery, London
Chisenhale Gallery, London Through December 9
“Earwitness Theatre,” the solo show by Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Chisenhale Gallery, London, develops along two opposite sensorial trajectories, each re-mediating narrated memories across diverse dimensions of experience: sonic and visual, physical and mental, individual and collective, real and imagined. Conceived after a series of interviews involving earwitnesses who survived the tortures of the Syrian regime’s Saydnaya Military Prison, the exhibition explores the role of imagination and artifice in the construction, retrieval and verbalization of traumatic events. Most importantly, it also questions the potential of art to provide the appropriate syntax for the representation of violence that has been witnessed and etched in memory through sounds, in a state of physical and psychological exhaustion. Given the delirious and often fragmented nature of the episodes recounted, the project looks into the gaps between subjective experiences and their objective documentation and contextualization as fact. The state of sensorial alteration defining the perspective of the interviewees is reflected and reproduced across the entire exhibition via two main installations inside the gallery space: Saydnaya (the missing 19db) (2017) and Earwitness Inventory (2018). The first is conceived as a dark listening room where the visitor is sightlessly immersed in a series of haunting recordings of testimony, alternating with re-enacted whispers and scattered tones. In this darkened, limited space, the artist seems to expand and emphasize the physicality of each sound by obstructing sight and spatial perception. Narrating voices move beyond the tragic reality of their content to become actual material, porous bodies bearing the traces of inflicted violence. Outside this isolated black box a series of seemingly random objects punctuates the gallery. A popcorn machine, a stack of metal trays, a car door… they appear as dissociated props, slipping out of different story lines. Referenced throughout the interviews both to instigate and verbalize the prisoners’ own memories, these items give body to subjective projections and associations, as well as fragments of personal histories. They function as a constellation of allegories, setting out a paradigm to reconcile discontinuous levels of reality and experience. Images used to convey the details of an event, disembodied sounds turning into material evidence of trauma: Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s exhibition serves as the ground for the articulation of a meta-language, an apparatus of environments enabling a negotiation between the truth of the subject and its communicability.