Lawrence Abu Hamdan's Saydnaya (ray traces) at FIAC 2019

At the 2019 FIAC art fair in Paris, a last-minute fictional purchase by Aurélie Cavanna spotlighted Lawrence Abu Hamdan's work 'Saydnaya (ray traces)' (2017) at Galerie Mor Charpentier's booth. The piece features an overhead projector displaying seemingly abstract black lines on a wall. These lines are actually laser tracings derived from audio testimonies of survivors of Saydnaya prison near Damascus, Syria. Because prisoners were kept in total darkness, sound was their only spatial reference; Abu Hamdan reconstructed the prison's interior based on memories of torture noises echoing through the building. Close inspection reveals a staircase in one drawing and a three-wing floor plan in another. The projections adapt to any space, as demonstrated in a 2018 exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Indirect and partial, they denounce incarceration conditions and repression by the Syrian regime. Abu Hamdan, a Jordanian artist born in 1985 and based in Berlin, was nominated for the Turner Prize that year and has shown at the Venice Biennale.