Double-Take: Leader of the Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge, 2014

Officer/Leader of the Chasseurs/Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge (2014) is an installation that uses video, sound and paintings to tell the story of how a contemporary version of Théodore Géricault’s painting Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812, in the Louvre) where in which the artist replaced the French imperial officer with Sultan Basha Al-Atrash (1891–1982) the leader of the Syrian uprising against the French in 1925–1927. The painting was commissioned by a wealthy businessman from Syria for his British country house and anglophilia is the unusual reason for this paradoxical sight of an anti colonial image that uses the aesthetics of its colonizer. The sound appropriates a traditional method of storytelling set to music of which Sultan Basha Al Atrash often features and together with the photographs the work provokes a mediation on the way colonial violence is represented, celebrated, embodied and appropriated. Abu Hamdan uses the doubleness of the story told by the paintings (the beginning and end of French imperialism) to understand the ways in which people build a complex and contradictory relationships to their colonial past. The two hundred years separating Géricault’s painting from its perversion are condensed in one moment of double-take, into which a whole history of the colonial project can be read.

The All-Hearing,  2014

So pervasive to daily Cairo life is a loudspeaker libertarianism, that the issue of hearing damage and noise pollution was immediately accepted as a topic for a Friday sermon when Abu Hamdan suggested the idea to two Cairene Sheikhs. Despite new laws that the military government established that seek to monotonize the delivery of sermons by enforcing Sheikhs to only give speeches according to the weekly government sanctioned topic, the Sheikhs remained even more determined to have the issue of noise heard. And heard not only to their congregation inside the mosque but to all those passers by who were barraged by the mosques loudspeakers broadcasting into the streets outside. The military crackdown on the amplified voices of the city is done in the name of policing noise and the lawless terrain of the loudspeaker yet it is in fact simply a means to direct the flow of voices away from espousing anything against the government. Anything that they do not want heard. Hence on the day the Sheikhs delivered their sermons on noise pollution as far as the ear could hear all the mosques in the surrounding area were explaining the Prophet's Ascension to Heaven, the government dictated topic of that week.

The All-Hearing is part of Positions a collection of 5 solo exhibitions which took place at the Van AbbeMuseum in Eindhoven in July 2014. There Abu Hamdan presented the full Tape Echo project, co-commissioned by Beirut in Cairo and included a new video work produced for Positions. With Tape Echo Abu Hamdan proposes a series of methods for documenting and intervening within of Cairo's dense audio urbanity, looking at how voices are distributed and hearing is damaged within of the city's rapidly changing sonic conditions.

The All-Hearing,  2014, Digital video, 11 min, Ed. 3 + 2 AP, Trailer