Saudi Gazette

Lawrence Abu Hamdan won The Abraaj Group Art Prize this year, marking its 10th anniversary.

The film titled ‘Walled Unwalled’ was showcased at Art Dubai on Tuesday. It was projected on a glass wall covered in a special holographic foil. ‘Walled Unwalled’ is a revelation. The brilliant work highlights the fragility of truth and time we live in, bordering on contradictory theories and actualities we abandon with oblivion.

Abu Hamdan is part of the performance that comprises of an interlinking series of narratives derived from real life legal cases that revolved around evidence that were collected through walls. The series of reenactments and the monologue were staged inside a trio of sound effects studios in the Funkhaus, East Berlin. Eventhough the space is now abandoned the architecture and acoustic elements have been perfectly preserved since its use for GDR state radio production. Back then, these sound studios were the most advanced example of radio architecture; in which almost any acoustic world could be conjured. The floors divided into multiple surfaces in order to be able to create the sound of footsteps on any surface. Creating sounds from the outside inside. The arrangement of rooms allowed modular partitions that could create acoustic spaces of any shape and size. In the film you realize, rooms where the walls themselves that could revolve, transforming between different surfaces that could reflect and reverberate life on the other side of the wall.

“It is a series of interlinking stories about experiences of people who heard events through walls. There are three main cases. Each one is a legal case and I became really interested in the topic because I am interested in how the subject has always been about series of boundaries. Here the boundaries are traversable. Especially from a contemporary perspective and speaking through contemporary technologies that now means no wall on earth is impermeable. Even though at the same time we are building more and more walls, fortifying nations and states. So on one hand we feel totally unrestricted while using the Internet but on the other hand we are getting more confined to the trade of the nation. Its about the contradiction,” Abu Hamdan told Saudi Gazette.

In the year 2000 there was a total of fifteen fortified border walls and fences between sovereign nations. Today, physical barriers at sixty-three borders divide nations across four continents. As these walls were being constructed, millions and millions of invisible cosmic particles called muons descended into the earth’s atmosphere and penetrated meters deep, through layers of concrete, soil and rock. Scientists realized that these deep penetrating particles could be harvested, and a technology could be developed to use their peculiar physical capacities to pass through surfaces previously impervious to X rays. Muons allowed us to see for the first time the contraband hidden in lead lined shipping containers and secret chambers buried inside the stonewalls of the pyramids. Now no wall on earth is impermeable. Today, we’re all wall, and no wall at all. Historically walls have been both an architectural and legal device. Legal in that they define the limits to a city and its jurisdiction while also the walls of the home have been the barriers between public and private life. The history of the self and the citizen and the notion of the enclosed room, city or nation are intertwined. What does it mean for us as subjects that we are now building more walls than ever and more to the point what implications does this have now that the wall is no longer physically or conceptually solid or impenetrable.

Established by The Abraaj Group, a leading investor in growth markets, to support contemporary artists of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, The Abraaj Group Art Prize provides resources to empower artists and help them hone their craft. The Abraaj Group awards US$100,000 to a winning artist and US$10,000 to three shortlisted artists to support their practice.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York. His projects have taken the form of audio-visual installations, performances, graphic works, photography, Islamic sermons, cassette tape compositions, essays, and lectures. His works have been presented at The Whitechapel Gallery, London; MACBA, Barcelona; Tate Modern, London; and The Taipei Biennial. They are also part of collections at MoMA, New York, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Arts Council England.