Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Green Coconuts and Other Inadmissible Evidence Exhibition at Secession

This exhibition by Lawrence Abu Hamdan explores sound, language, memory, and the pursuit of truth within contemporary legal and humanitarian crises. It focuses on the relevance and challenges of acoustic evidence and eyewitness accounts in legal proceedings, presenting four works that examine testimony and expand the understanding of justice and truth.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist and audio investigator, delves into sound, language, memory, and the search for truth in the context of present-day legal and humanitarian crises. His work, encompassing sound and video installations, objects, and research-based documentaries, critically examines the relevance and complexities of acoustic evidence and eyewitness testimonies in legal proceedings. The exhibition at Secession presents four works from two series, each focusing on the theme of testimony. Abu Hamdan pushes beyond the established legal framework for eyewitness accounts, questioning fundamental concepts of law, justice, truth, and truth-finding. The audiovisual installation 'After SFX' (2018) originated from a 2016 investigation with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture into the Saydnaya prison in Syria. Abu Hamdan interviewed former inmates to create a sound archive of the prison, offering insights into its architecture, living conditions, and inmate numbers. This project profoundly altered his understanding of memory and testimony, leading to the development of conceptual tools for subsequent works dealing with testimonies of reborn individuals. The first work in this new series, 'Once Removed' (2019), is a two-channel video installation featuring the artist in conversation with Bassel Abi Chahine. Chahine meticulously researches the Lebanese People's Liberation Army, seeking material to explain flashbacks and unexplained memories of a past life, where he was a 16-year-old soldier named Yousef Fouad Al Jawhary who died in combat in 1984. Complementing this is 'A Speculative Portrait (for a boy who returned without his face)' (2020), a video that attempts to reconstruct Al Jawhary's appearance as a young adult based on a childhood photograph, a method typically used to ascertain the current appearance of long-missing individuals. 'For the Otherwise Unaccounted' (2020) comprises a series of graphic works inspired by Dr. Ian Stevenson's 1997 book 'Reincarnation and Biology: The Etiology of Birthmarks.' This collection of global cases suggests that the manner of a person's death leaves imprints in the form of birthmarks upon reincarnation. The depiction of these birthmarks in embossed prints draws attention to how the bodies of victims of injustice and violence—those overlooked in historical records due to colonial oppression, corruption, lawlessness, or reconciliation agreements—bear witness to their suffering. The exhibition's works offer a distinct perspective on testimony, evidence, and the construction of truth, requiring a different mode of listening. The artist articulated the intention behind the presentation: 'The exhibition as a whole develops specific formal and aesthetic strategies to create the conditions under which new kinds of testimony can be heard that would be out of place in the venues normally designated for the production of truth and history.'

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