Once Removed — Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

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Once Removed, 2019

Single-channel video (color, sound, 28 min.)

Once Removed is an audiovisual installation that acts as a portrait of the time-traveling life and work of Bassel Abi Chahine, a thirty-one-year-old writer and historian who has managed to obtain the single most comprehensive inventory of extremely rare objects, photographs, and interviews associated with the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) and the PSP (Progressive Socialist Party), socialist militias led by Walid Joumblatt during the Lebanese civil war. In amassing this archive, Abi Chahine taught himself how to identify all manner of military equipment, including every pattern of camouflage and the origin of every AK-47, whether Bulgarian, Polish, Soviet, or Chinese. His obsessive and unprecedented research and analysis was initially undertaken to find materials that could reconstitute what he describes as flashbacks and unexplainable memories from a previous life. He came to realize that his lucid and personal memories of the war are due to the fact that he is the reincarnation of a soldier named Youssef Fouad al-Jowhary, who died in Aley, Lebanon, on February 26, 1984, at age sixteen.

Since the end of the war, details pertaining to sectarian conflicts in Lebanon have been suppressed in the interest of national security, so as not to incite further tensions between formerly warring parties. Therefore, for Abi Chahine’s generation, very little is known (or can be verified) about what happened during the conflict. Yet former PLA soldiers and commanders felt at ease confiding in Abi Chahine because they believed him to be the reincarnation of one of their comrades. Abi Chahine is a man living in two times, straddling the divide between the generation who experienced the war and those who live in the ineffable shadow it cast.

This video was commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE (2019).

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A Speculative Portrait (for a Boy Who Returned without His Face), 2020

Video, looped (color, 0:38 min.)

Bassel Abi Chahine, fueled by his need to reconstitute unexplainable memories of his past life as Youssef Fouad al-Jowhary, a teenage soldier who died in 1984 during the Lebanese civil war, has collated a comprehensive inventory of archival materials belonging to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) militias. Yet for all his obsessive research, Abi Chahine still has very little idea of what he looked like in his previous life. He may have an image of Youssef in his vast archive, but without knowing what he looked like, he cannot identify himself in his own collection.

Having in mind the potential of such a picture existing among Abi Chahine’s amassed imagery, Abu Hamdan approached Dr. Caroline Wilkinson at Face Lab, a research group at Liverpool John Moores University that carries out forensic archaeological research, including craniofacial analysis and facial synthesis. By using Abi Chahine’s sole portrait of his past incarnation, which was taken at the age of six or seven, as well as reference images of his (Youssef’s) father and brother, Wilkinson reconstructed what he may have looked like at sixteen years old, just before his death.

Shot Twice (With the Same Bullet), 2021

HD video (sounds, color, 9 min.), 8 lightboxes

Bassel Abi Chahine is a thirty-one-year-old writer and historian who has managed to obtain a vast inventory of rare objects, photographs, and interviews associated with the socialist militias led by Walid Joumblatt during the Lebanese civil war. All this unprecedented research was done in pursuit of material that could reconstitute what he describes as flashbacks and other unexplainable memories from a previous life. He is the reincarnation of a soldier who died in 1984 at the age of sixteen. His flashbacks are lucid, personal memories of the war. The details of his life sat murky in his mind, and he determined that before and after images could help. Throughout the spring and summer of 2019, Abi Chahine made more than one hundred before and after images showing Beirut during wartime and peacetime. In these videos, Abu Hamdan elucidates an intensification of a strategy he had been using since 2008—to trigger further past-life memories.

Shot Twice (With the Same Bullet) is an audiovisual installation comprised of eight lightboxes. Abi Chahine’s befores and afters are overlaid as still, translucent images onto the white, illuminated background of a television screen. This lightbox condition is then interceded by Abu Hamdan’s silhouette and narration. In these videos, the artist compares Beirut during wartime and peacetime, and elucidates that the observed differences document not crimes of war, but crimes of peace.

This work was commissioned and produced by Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2021).