Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Latest Exhibition Brings the Blast of Golan Heights Wind Turbines to Oslo

You hear Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s new exhibition before you see it. In Oslo’s gleaming Munch Museum, the faint sound of a saxophone drifts out into the 10th floor’s open promenade. The source of the music is found within Gallery 10, an unorthodox space featuring a 28-foot-high ceiling and a slanting wall that mirrors the building’s own signature tilt. It’s here that Abu Hamdan has staged “Zifzafa,” a politically charged new exhibition that explores how sound can serve as both a celebration of life and a tool of displacement. Taking its title from the old Arabic word for a fierce wind that shakes and rattles everything in its path, “Zifzafa” revolves around Abu Hamdan’s forensic audio investigation into the impact that 31 wind turbines will soon have on the native population in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights, or Jawlan, as it’s known in Arabic and referred to by the local Jawlani population.

The saxophone comes from one of the three video works on view, the hypnotic single-channel video projection Wind Ensemble (2024), which pumps out the sounds of Jawlani saxophonist Amr Mdah. In a small video projected onto the mesh of an amplifier, Mdah performs a composition on the balcony of a home that will be around 164 feet from one of the new turbines. Across from Wind Ensemble is Tilting at windmills i, ii & iii (2024) which features three short, looping CGI animations that visualize the sound pollution that will soon hover over Jawlan like rainclouds. But the star of this show is the 45-minute film Zifzafa: Livestream Audio Essay (2025) which takes center stage as four projectors beam it across the gallery’s expansive back wall.

For Zifzafa: Livestream Audio Essay (2025), Abu Hamdan used the popular online video format of “video game walkthroughs” as a framing device to make his own video game, one that re-creates the buildings and sounds of the occupied Jawlan, as well as the planned turbines. Open-source and available online, the game allows anyone to explore the area and experience the sonic impact of these future structures as they drown out the sounds of cultural life. Some of the turbines will be as close as 115 feet away from homes, effectively rendering these spaces uninhabitable once they’re operational.

“Right now, [the game] is the only place where you can turn on the turbines and simulate what it will sound like in the future,” Abu Hamdan said during an introduction to the show, ahead of its opening on September 18. “But, in the future, it may be the only place where you can turn them off and remember what life was like before.”

There are two key auditory ingredients in the work: the noise from comparably sized turbines in Gailsdorf, Germany, recorded by engineer Adam Laschinger, and hours of field recordings in Jawlan, recorded by local composer and sound artist Busher Kanj Abu Saleh. Moving around the map, players will hear, for example, a man on megaphones inviting anyone within earshot to a wedding; the music of flautist and shepherd, Ibrahim Zen; and the methodical dip of water pumps. It’s the sound of water that most deeply impacted Abu Hamdan, though it would take some time for him to understand the full significance. Because the Israeli state has expropriated access to all water sources, the Jawlani people have built an autonomous network of pipes, ponds, reservoirs, and pumps—a small but vital victory against military occupation. “In a way, listening to these sounds isn’t just about listening to that environment,” he said. “It’s about listening to acts of resistance.”

Alongside the visual and sonic experience of moving through Jawlan, a “live chat” box, a staple of video game walkthroughs, functions as a medium for a roving, context-heavy monologue delivered by the user “Earshot_.” One minute, the chat talks of “the satisfying plop of the famous Jawlani apple landing in a basket,” before transitioning into explanations of the water restrictions or background on Energix Renewables, the Israeli energy company building the turbines. As the turbines switch on, a string of vivid descriptions for what the noise will be like—“having a truck pass over your head,” for example—are fed into the chat.

While the two other works are of varying quality—the physical effect of Wind Ensemble’s setup is transfixing, if mostly unintentional; the texture of the amp, combined with the darkness of the room, makes the musician look as if he’s been encrusted in diamonds—the three works taken together offer a strong sensory entry point to the Jawlani peoples’ ongoing struggle against Israeli military occupation. The path that brought Abu Hamdan to the region and subsequently to Munch for this exhibition began in 2019, when he won the Edvard Munch Art Award. Though the prize came with the promise of a solo show, construction on the building and the global pandemic pushed back plans.

In the meantime, the Jordanian, Turner Prize–nominated artist solidified his reputation as “private ear” for his immersive art installations and forensic audio investigations into human and environmental rights abuses. Al Marsad, the Arab human rights center in Jawlan, contacted the artist’s nonprofit Earshot in 2023 about simulating the sonic disturbance of proposed wind turbines. For the Jawlani people, the turbines mark another chapter in a long struggle that began with Israel’s seizure of two-thirds of their land in the 1967 Six-Day War. While Energix Renewables claims the turbines will occupy just under 1 mile of space, Abu Hamdan’s research shows their acoustic footprint is nine times larger—roughly a quarter of the land still available to Jawlanis today.

Staging a show so overtly critical of Israel in this particular moment—when speaking out against the country’s war of extermination against Palestine has led to pulled funding and outright cancellations in the art world—points to a continuation of an ongoing, if entirely unintentional, throughline in the Munch’s programming. Last November’s Vanessa Baird exhibition, “Go Down With Me,” partly addressed the suffering of Palestinians through multiple floor-to-ceiling tapestries depicting the brutality of war. And in mid-September, the institution’s Munch Award was given to New York–based Palestinian artist Samia Halaby.

For Senior Curator Dr. Tominga O’Donnell, the timing of these events is coincidental, yet still reflects a wider dedication to honoring artistic freedom of expression. “There is direct censorship and cancellations, obviously, but there’s also this internalized form of self-censorship, which is almost even more insidious,” she told ARTnews. “As an institution, the only thing we can do is to provide a platform which is as safe as it can be in the current political climate.”

The “Zifzafa” project has been shown in other forms in other spaces, but in this particular space it feels as if it’s found a home. And though Abu Hamdan’s sprawling video game occupies the most physical space in the show, it may be the sound of Mdah’s saxophone that lingers the longest after leaving the museum. As Abu Hamdan said of the faint notes drifting out of the gallery, “[I wanted] to help people understand that there are people whose whole sonic world is shaped by that place. It’s an exuberant act of sonic self-determination, and it’s also somehow funerary because we know it’s going to be lost.”