Earwitness Inventory, 2018-Ongoing
Installation comprising ninety-five sourced and custom-designed objects/instruments and a video on screen. Dimensions variable.
The ninety-five custom-designed and sourced objects in Earwitness Inventory all derive from legal cases in which sonic evidence was contested and acoustic memories had to be retrieved. The ear- witnesses described, for instance, a building collapse as sounding “like popcorn” or a gunshot as sounding “like somebody dropping a rack of trays.” Abu Hamdan’s installation reflects on how the experience and memory of acoustic violence is connected to the production of sound effects.
Alongside this installation, which includes Arabic coffee cups, a popcorn maker, a wagon wheel, shoes, and a series of customized door instruments, an animated text work further reveals Abu Hamdan’s acoustic investigation into earwitness testimonies from legal cases across the world. The artist says: “Earwitness Inventory is an inventory of objects, but it is also a kind of database where those objects are listed, and that database includes the testimonies and narratives from which the objects are drawn. I have only included a selection of these stories because it is not essential to have each object narrated for what I want to say and do. Stories are embedded in certain objects: the coins are connected with the story of a tear gas canister in Israel; the popcorn maker leads to a sinkhole in Florida; the wagon wheel connects with a mine collapsing in South Africa; the punching bag is related to the wind and to hearing the first Belgian steamboat arriving in the Congo. It is a transhistorical collection of stories and objects, which speak to the broader concerns of the project and this question of sonic experience, conflicted memories, and the acoustic debris stored in our mind’s ear.”
This work was commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018), in partnership with Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2019); the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, United States (2019); and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia (2019).
