Once removed

"Once Removed" is a portrait of the time-travelling life of Bassel Abi Chahine, a thirty-one-year-old writer and historian who managed to obtain an unparalleled inventory of extremely rare objects, photographs and interviews related to the People’s Liberation Army and Progressive Socialist Party during the Lebanese Civil War. Considering himself a reincarnation of a dead soldier, he has the remarkable ability to recall details from the war, which mostly took place before his lifetime. Abi Chahine embodies the suppressed trauma hidden to his generation. 

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, born in Jordan and based in Beirut, is an artist and audio investigator, whose work explores ‘the politics of listening’ and the role of sound and voice within the law and human rights. He creates audiovisual installations, lecture performances, audio archives, photography and text, translating in-depth research and investigative work into affective, spatial experiences. Abu Hamdan works with human rights organisations, and with international prosecutors to help obtain aural testimonies for legal and historical investigations. In 2019 he was nominated for the Turner Prize for his exhibition "Earwitness".