Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Green Coconuts and Other Inadmissible Evidence

The works in the exhibition propose a different perspective on the concepts of witnessing, evidence, and the production of truth, which requires a different kind of listening as well.
Works on view include the audiovisual installation “After SFX” (2018) developed out of an inquiry conducted in cooperation with Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture in 2016 into the Syrian torture prison Saydnaya; “Once Removed” (2019), the two-channel video installation showing the artist in conversation with the young historian Bassel Abi Chahine about the latter’s extensive archive; the video “A Speculative Portrait” (for a boy who returned without his face) (2020) which illustrates an attempt at facial reconstruction; and “For the Otherwise Unaccounted” (2020), a series of prints from which Abu Hamdan drew on Dr. Ian Stevenson’s 1997 book “Reincarnation and Biology: The Etiology of Birthmark”.

The artist characterizes the presentation’s intention as follows: “The exhibition as a whole is developing specific formal and aesthetic strategies to produce conditions for listening to new kinds of testimony. Testimony that sits awkwardly in the forums we conventionally designate for the production of truth and history.”