Walled Unwalled, 2018
Single-channel video installation (color, sound, 20:04 min.)
In the year 2000 there were a total of fifteen fortified border walls and fences between sovereign nations. Today, physical barriers at sixty-three borders divide nations across four continents. And yet, all the time, millions and millions of invisible cosmic particles called muons are descending into the Earth’s atmosphere and penetrating meters deep, even through layers of concrete, soil, and rock. Scientists have realized that these deep-penetrating particles can be harvested and have developed a technology to leverage their peculiar physical capacities to pass through surfaces impervious to X-rays. Muons allowed us to see for the first time the contraband hidden in lead-lined shipping containers, and secret chambers buried inside the stone walls of the pyramids. Now no wall on Earth is impermeable. Today, we’re all wall and no wall at all.
Historically walls have served as both an architectural and a legal device—legal in that they define the limits of a city and its jurisdiction, and architectural in the sense that the walls of the home are a barrier between public (civic) and private life. The history of the self and the citizen, and the notion of the enclosed room, city, or nation are intertwined. What does it mean for us as subjects that we are building more walls than ever? And more to the point, what are the implications of walls being no longer physically or conceptually solid or impenetrable?
Walled Unwalled shows Abu Hamdan behind the windows of an infamous Cold War–era recording studio in former East Berlin. He speaks about the permeability of walls, citing in the process the US Supreme Court thermal-imaging case Kyllo v. United States (2001), the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius, and the survivors of Saydnaya prison. The accumulation of walls, holes, and speech in the video is polyphonic, even if Abu Hamdan’s voice, set to increasingly ominous percussion, is the main one we hear.
Earwitness Inventory, After SFX, and Walled Unwalled are all parts of a body of work derived from the artist’s 2016 investigation of Saydnaya prison in Syria.
