Friday
Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Air Pressure
Between 2007 and 2022, 22.111 Israeli military aircraft violated Lebanese airspace. These invasive acts were not short flyovers but rather lasted an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes. That’s 3.098 days of jets and drones continually occupying the Lebanon’ skies.
The AirPressure.info project, developed by the artist and academic Lawrence Abu Hamdan at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz (Germany), has organised this information and made it available to the public.
From May 2020 to May 2021 Abu Hamdan kept a comprehensive diary of the skies above Beirut, with the precision of an archivist. During this time, he collected and filmed over 400 video recordings of Israeli fighter jets and unmanned aerial vehicles. The chronological presentation of this roaring sky, together with live audio processing, becomes the basis for a performance about background noise and atmospheres of violence. Abu Hamdan continually recasts the sky, moving it fluidly between menacing and pleasant, limitless and occupied, forgettable and fatal.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan calls himself a “private ear”, listening to, with and on behalf of people affected by corporate, state, and environmental violence. He is based in Beirut, Lebanon.
His work reflects on the political and cultural context of sound and listening, and is presented in the form of forensic reports, lectures and live performances, films, publications, and exhibitions.
Abu Hamdan’s audio investigations have been used as evidence in asylum cases and as part of international NGO advocacy campaigns. His work is in the collections of the Reina Sofia (Madrid, Spain), MoMA (New York, USA), Guggenheim (New York, USA), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France) and Tate Modern (London, UK) and was exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale (Italy). His film Rubber Coated Steel (2017) was awarded at the Rotterdam International Film festival (Netherlands). In 2019, Abu Hamdan shared the Turner Prize with Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani, for their work on contemporary social and political issues.
Support: Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts. RTCP – Network of Portuguese Theatres and Cinemas