May 2014: two unarmed Palestinian teens are killed by Israeli soldiers on the West Bank. Abu Hamdan made an audio analysis to ascertain whether rubber or live bullets were used. The film centres on the gunfire, yet no shots are heard. "Rubber Coated Steel" does not preside over the voices of the victims but seeks to amplify their silence, questioning the ways in which rights are being heard today.
The All-Hearing shows two local sheikhs delivering sermons on noise pollution in Cairo at the artist’s request. This unorthodox intervention into the sonic landscape of the ‘loudest city on Earth’ followed on from the military regime’s attempts to restrict such sermons to government-sanctioned topics (that week, the Prophet’s Ascension to Heaven). Cutting between close-ups of the sheikhs’ idiosyncratic addresses and wide shots of their congregations and the loudspeakers amplifying their voices in the streets outside, Abu Hamdan’s images show how the sheikhs’ message is disseminated in a way that contradicts its content.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan finds in a former GDR state radio station a perfect conduit for his ongoing cinematic interrogation of the political dimensions of sound. Centered on a series of court cases that used auditory or sensory evidence based on information gathered through walls, the film is staged within two soundproof booths, in which a live narrator recites witness testimonies while projected text and images create organic superimpositions. It’s an exploration of the fundamental abstractions of seeing and listening.
