WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > THE DIARY OF A SKY

UNIT 4
THURSDAY 1 – SUNDAY 4 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 45′ (looped)

Content warning: contains sustained intense sound; discussion of war, colonialism, violence; depiction of weapons. 

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In The Diary of a Sky, Turner Prize winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan accrues a data-driven portrait of sustained belligerence, by the Israeli Air Force, in the airspace over Beirut. Despite air traffic being brought to a standstill by the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist heard and observed, in what ought to have been the eerily quiet skies above the Lebanese capital, Israeli fighter jets, helicopters, drones, flares, gliders, balloons, missiles.

Abu Hamdan lists these violations unemotionally, as if they ought to speak for themselves. ‘May 2020… June 2020… July 2020…’ To ground the data, the artist intersperses these breakdowns and dispatches with snippets that suggest a more personalised perspective, recalling for instance that the day on which F-35 jets were most numerable was the day of his PhD supervisor’s birthday, and that on the day of his daughter’s birth, an unmanned aerial vehicle circled Beirut for two hours and 35 minutes. These revelations are complemented by the artist’s decision to zoom in on and out of the vehicles in question, the manual interventions upon his camera lens’s focal length revealing a kind of forensics that is contingent on and fraught with human curiosity.

This interplay, between the factual and the partial, points to the ways in which subjective fear can be systematised, in which a collective psyche can be strategically manipulated. In one of the film’s more essayistic asides, for instance, Abu Hamdan remarks that while Israeli jets will occasionally fly so low as to break the sound barrier and shatter windows, most fly-bys are ‘not loud enough to be terrifying but frequent enough to fuel a near constant dread’. They function in other words as an assertion of power that is not so much iterative as never-not-there.

True to its title, The Diary of a Sky transcends its strict reliance on data to grow into something more ruminative. Abu Hamdan situates the ongoing atrocities and extreme gall of the Israeli project within broader subjects – science, music, spectacle. As the argument meanders, we come to understand Israel’s deployment of aircraft as an intrinsically propagandistic endeavour – until their sounds suddenly cease, and the silence deafens with its implications of destruction elsewhere.

Presented in partnership with Square Eyes.