Double-Take: Leader of the Syrian Revolution Commanding a Charge
2014
Installation
Materials:
Collection: Courtesy of the artist.
This new work by Abu Hamdan is a sound piece illustrated by a series of photograph. It centres on a contemporary version of Théodore Géricault’s painting Officer of the Chasseurs Commanding a Charge (1812, in the Louvre) where the artist replaced the French imperial officer with Sultan Basha Al-Atrash (1891–1982), the leader of the Syrian uprising against the French in 1925–1927. The painting was commissioned by a wealthy businessman from Syria for his British country house. Anglophilia is the unusual reason behind this paradoxical anti-colonial image that uses the aesthetics of the coloniser. The sound piece appropriates a traditional method of storytelling set to music, in which Sultan Basha Al Atrash often features, and together with the photographs the work provokes us to see how colonial violence is represented, celebrated, embodied and appropriated.
Abu Hamdan uses the doubleness of the story told by the paintings (the beginning and end of French imperialism) to understand the ways in which people build a complex and contradictory relationships to their colonial past. The two hundred years separating Géricault’s painting from its perversion are condensed in one moment of double-take, into which a whole history of the colonial project can be read. (AK)
