Installation comprising two digital prints on canvas (54.4 × 40 cm each) and video (color, sound, 11:13 min.)
Double-Take: Leader of the Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge is a contemporary version of Théodore Géricault’s Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812) in which Abu Hamdan has replaced the French imperial officer with Sultan Pasha al-Atrash (1891–1982), leader of the 1925–27 Syrian uprising against the French. The painting was commissioned by a wealthy Syrian businessman for his British country house, and Anglophilia is the unusual reason for this paradoxical sight of an anti-colonial image that appropriates the aesthetics of its colonizer. The video is scored with a rabab, an Arabic stringed instrument, and appropriates traditional methods of storytelling through which legends and myths are often conveyed. 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 complex and contradictory relationships to their colonial pasts. 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.
This work was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), Belgium on the occasion of the exhibition Don’t You Know Who I Am? Art After Identity Politics (2014).
