From Ear to Ear to Eye

From Ear to Ear to Eye: Sounds and Stories
from Across the Arab World
Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK
16.12.17 – 04.03.18

I trace the contour of my throat from ear to ear. A hint of perfume on my fingers, the slight pressure unpleasant against my tonsils. I do this instinctively as I listen to a translator working on the English subtitles for the videos of Abounaddara, a collective who produce videos from the Syrian civil war and disseminate them online. The translator is stuck on a moment of incredible violence, the description of a prisoner whose throat was slit ‘from ear to ear’, trying to find the right words, something that won’t sound like a smile. Another translator featured in the same video installation – Joe Namy’s Purple, Bodies in Translation – Part II of A Yellow Memory from the Yellow Age ( 2017 ), which interviews translators working on these videos, often produced by and featuring people they have never met – points out another impossible-to-translate term: the word shahid. It literally means ‘to have been witnessed’. By God, that is. It means that to be witnessed is what gives life meaning ( and by extension, what gives self-sacrifice cause ).

To witness, Susan Sontag writes in her book On Photography ( 1977 ), precludes intervention. Yet forms of witnessing can still be active: listening, reconstructing, sharing. In Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s film, ISMYRNE ( 2016 ), Hadjithomas and the poet and painter Etel Adnan ( whose drawings are included in this show ) try to reconstruct an image of the city of Smyrna ( today, Izmir in Turkey ), where both their families are from. Together, looking at maps and photographs, they tell their family histories, trading memories of a place now gone. Adnan and Hadjithomas are joined in this by several other artists in this exhibition, whose work traces histories of bygone places, lost heritage, or stories that shaped their childhoods and sense of place. An exhibition of art from across the Arab world is bound to ask questions about flux and shifts, and many of the works on view deal with migration and the reconstruction of a sense of place thereafter. Basma Alsharif, born to a Palestinian family in exile, presents The Story of Milk and Honey ( 2011 ), an attempt to write a love story about the Levant not marred by politics – the impossibility of this task becomes the subject of her wonderful, nuanced video, which shifts quickly from fiction to life.

From Ear to Ear to Eye focuses on sound and stories from the Arab world, and music as a form of shared culture resonates throughout. In Jumana Manna’s video, A Magical Substance Flows into Me ( 2015 ), the artist plays excerpts from ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann’s radio show, Oriental Music, to musicians of Kurdish, Samaritan, Palestinian and Sephardic Jewish backgrounds. Their interactions, as they listen together, are very personal: the interviewees tell Manna about tradition and memories; they reflect together on an expired image of the local culture of the region, and the remove is twofold – the recordings date back to the 1920s and 30s, and their originator, Lachmann, was a German Jew who studied French and Arabic language and culture, and became interested in Middle Eastern music when serving as a simultaneous translator at a POW camp during the First World War.

These spliced histories in Manna’s feature-length video encapsulate a message that the exhibition communicates across the selection of works: that no single account is ever whole, that witnessing is a continuous narrative. The parsing of global politics – because nothing that happens in the Middle East is contained within the region, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is a push-pull of international influence played out by governments and religious organisations, to the bloodshed in Syria, where Cold War powers still vie for influence at the expense of civilians, a huge number of whom have sought refuge in Europe – into legible, relatable individual stories is a recognisable strategy from other exhibitions about Middle Eastern art in recent years, notably New York’s New Museum’s 2014 show, Here and Elsewhere. Indeed, From Ear to Ear to Eye does not make its viewers too uncomfortable: the stories are engaging, the music echoes across the exhibition halls ( and some people dance ), yet it doesn’t allow them to remain at a safe distance. Curator Sam Thorne’s decision to focus on works that explore sound and listening presents two answers to the insoluble question of how a viewer in a contemporary art space in Northern England experiences a region that is so present in daily discourse, yet still undeniably far and misrepresented. The first is an assertion that the histories that have been reflected in so many clichéd images, from news to art, can be told a different way, simply by focusing on time-based media rather than single images. The second is the exhibition’s emphasis on listening, which implicates the viewers’ bodies, generating intimacy and empathy, while also allowing for a complex view of this history, like its title: a reminder that what seems poetic can be rife with blood.

The exchange between music and national identity is further explored in Haig Aivazian’s project, Hastayım Yaşıyorum ( I Am Sick But I Am Alive, 2016 ), which is based on the story of Turkish-Armenian oud player Udi Hrant Kenkulian ( 1901 – 1978 ), a proponent of Turkish art music, which fuses Ottoman and Western classical music and was adopted by the Turkish Republic as a hallmark of its new modern state. In Ruins in Space ( 2014 ), Raed Yassin tells a tale, which may or may not be true, about a lost record he supposedly found on eBay of an unknown performance by the hugely popular Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, which was aired on Korean radio in 1968. It’s such a good story it makes you want to believe that which you cannot verify – until you remember that evidence instigates change.

The first work on view in the show is Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Earshot ( 2016 ), a sound, video and data installation imagining the trial of two Israeli soldiers who in 2014 killed two Palestinian teenagers in the Occupied Territories. An acoustic analysis of the recorded gunshots, which Abu Hamdan produced in collaboration with the Forensic Architecture research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, serves to discredit the soldiers’ claim that they used rubber bullets. Part of Forensic Architecture, the Forensic Oceanography project presents Liquid Traces – The Left-to-Die Boat Case ( 2014 ), a visual report comprising video, sound, interviews, maps, photographs and other material documenting the tragedy of seventy-two refugees aboard a dingy that ran out of fuel halfway between Tripoli and the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2011. The boat drifted for two weeks in the most surveilled waters in the world, in and out of Italian, Maltese and NATO-run search and rescue zones, without receiving any offer of assistance. Forensic Oceanography’s report is a testimony to the restriction of movement and the limits of compassion, as the European Union faces an unprecedented refugee crisis, which plays out in the Mediterranean as much as on the footpaths of Eastern Europe.

To witness has a legal connotation, but also an ethical one. The works in this show do more than make politics, history or place relatable: they add a multiplicity of sounds, stories and voices. Malak Helmy’s sound installation, Music for Drifting ( 2013 ), is installed within the narrow confines of the staircase in the three-storey museum building wedged into one side of a hill. It’s a 42-minute compilation of soundscapes recorded across sites of historical importance across Egypt – a port used as an embarkation point for emigrants, a battlefield and the designated site for a nuclear power station. Helmy intended to send the recordings to a lost lover by homing pigeon, but the plan was interrupted by the 2013 military coup. To listen to the sound of a faraway wind from years ago is a reminder that the experience of conflict is always personal. People still fall in love in times of war and revolt – an eternal truth, but almost inexplicable. This serves as a reminder that our lives are complex and multifaceted, and that their stories are always worth listening to.