At the Barbican in London, Sep 23–26, 2026, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Repercussions assembled works that probe how we listen to events unfolding far away—and what is at stake in that act. Anchored by Zifzafa: Livestream Audio Essay (2025) and the live performance-lecture Air Pressure (2022), the artist’s event series examined aural injustices with research-driven intensity and deliberate formal friction.
Golan Heights: A contested soundscape
Zifzafa: Livestream Audio Essay simulates the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, with narration unfolding in a chat box. The work investigates the potentially near-deafening fallout surrounding the construction of a wind farm on the Golan by Israeli company Energix. As a virtual flyby crosses the plateau, audio clips of Jawlani village life and animal activity double as an archive of an endangered soundscape. In the narration, Jawlani activists are unexpectedly joined by the Israeli environmentalist group Keepers of the Golan in protesting the wind farm—an alliance split by aims: preserving tranquility for the Keepers, and protecting community ties and restoring the lively raucousness that was forcibly muted when an estimated 140,000 residents were displaced following the start of Israeli occupation in 1967. Fittingly, the work’s virtual spin is disorienting and the turbines’ drone grating, refusing easy immersion.
Lebanon: The score of daily life
Backed by social media footage, Air Pressure details residents’ experiences of emblematic incidents during Lebanon’s rapid unraveling in 2020–21, and how the din of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) aircraft trespassing Lebanese airspace became the structure of everyday sound. Abu Hamdan outlines how 20 countries have purchased and helped fund arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets, all bound to the American company for software updates and maintenance—except Israel, which operates its own software because it has the most real-world experience deploying the jets and can provide valuable feedback. As the IDF began airstrikes on the Gaza Strip during an 11-day offensive in May 2021, the Lebanese skies fell quiet. “In silence, we hear what they are most capable of,” he says. The performance enforces discomfort: a strategically extended pause halts breathing; videos are shaky and repetitive; sound swells too loud; the voice turns muffled.
Directly after Air Pressure, Rana Eid and Matthew Herbert presented their commissioned performance Sykes-Picot (2026), tracing the specters of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, whose 1916 agreement carved up the Ottoman Empire between Great Britain and France (and Russia), guaranteeing control over oil extraction and exports and seeding conflicts that endure in West Asia today. Initially planning to use period audio, the artists instead recorded sites where Sykes and Georges-Picot lived and worked after the archivist they were collaborating with was killed by the IDF in Lebanon this April and the archive was destroyed. One captured detail—the trickle of raindrops through a Lebanese cedar at the Sledmere Estate, the Sykes family seat in Yorkshire—casts pastoral sound against irrevocable loss.
Across the program, pleasure yields to unease. Rather than offer tidy affirmation, Repercussions asks which channels are amplified or muted—and what remains just out of earshot.
