In both his art and his audio investigations, Lawrence Abu Hamdan grapples with sound, speech, memory, and the quest for truth in the context of today’s legal and humanitarian crises. A central concern that is woven through many of his works, including sound and video installations, objects, and research-based documentaries, is his engagement with questions […]
Centring around three key works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Marguerite Humeau, and Jesse Darling, the exhibition expands the spectrum of poem into language, sound, speech, ephemerality, and extinction. Understanding poem from its Greek derivative ‘poiesis’ (making) allows us to view the use of language from afar: the artworks in this exhibition explore a wide range […]
Renaissance TV is an experiment, an additional exhibition space, and a tentative exploration of the potential for the internet to be a generative platform divorced from vertical hierarchies and classical institutional agendas. Conceptualized by Myriam Ben Salah with Karsten Lund and Michael Harrison, and inspired by the lo-fi aesthetic and assorted programming of television broadcasting, […]
With the start of the war on terror and the proliferation of militarized technologies, many artists developed new aesthetic approaches to explore military sites and industries. Overt: Militarization as Ideology focuses on the ways in which artists have engaged aesthetically with the concept and condition of militarization. Through video, film, drawings, and installation, the exhibition highlights the […]
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s installation tells of a not-too-distant future in which everyday objects and surfaces can be used to watch over the population. Not only the walls have ears. Even the packaging in the supermarket might be listening to you as you shop. Find out what that might sound like at the Spar branches at […]
The Core Residency Program presents Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s livestreamed web lecture at mfah.org/core
The group exhibition Readings From Below explores how artists engage us in new readings of our complex present by making use of the virtual potentials of archives. While the traditional institution of the archive with its sense of permanence and timeless solidity, its physical location and architecture continues to exist, in today’s world of digitized information, archives […]
My only weapon is listening. Listening, in which the power of silence meets the potential of attention to the audible layers. Listening, which is able to reveal what extends beyond the visible layers and to perceive sounds and voices that are masked, hardly accessible or silenced. The leaking noise of suppressed gunshots and beatings, the […]
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ursula Biemann, Paulo Tavares and the Forensic Architecture research collective are all linked by concept of the ‘void’. Enter the Void presents the approach that connects these actors: seeking out gaps in the communication of events, in chains of evidence or in the administration of justice as if they were nothingnesses in our sensual […]
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s sound and video installation, This whole time there were no land mines (2017) documents a ‘shouting valley’ that lies in the contested area of the Golan Heights, Syria. This stretch of land was annexed by Israel from Syria following a ceasefire in 1967 and was named ‘the shouting valley’, as the area’s topography allows […]