Overview

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s evolving performance Daght Jawi (2021–2022) is presented in a site-specific configuration in the brutalist architecture of Sharjah’s iconic landmark The Flying Saucer on 6 March 2022. Daght Jawi analyses background noise and atmospheres of violence through clustering and evolving ongoing research, initially conducted between May 2020 and May 2021. The artist’s starting point was his own detailed documentation of the sky over Lebanon—the result of filming more than 400 videos of Israeli fighter planes and drones.

The newly extended audio-visual essay brings to life this roaring sky in a chronological order, alongside live audio processing. Abu Hamdan’s atmosphere emerges in multitudinous ways—moving seamlessly from the quotidian to the menacing; the limitless to the contained.

Abu Hamdan invokes Brian Eno's thoughts on background music—it should be as ‘ignorable as it is interesting.’ By effectively utilising the unique acoustic and architectural qualities of The Flying Saucer, anchored around its concrete echoing dome, this performance exposes us to a sonic warfare that sits somewhere in the background—a violence that is as ignorable as it is lethal.