Eliana Willis

Many Lebanese will tell you how they hear a buzz in the air. Sometimes it’s faint and sometimes it is more prominent, but it’s always there. The monotone has become a constant within the backdrop sounds of everyday life, along with the regular hum of the generators now providing electricity (to those who can afford it) in a country locked in an extreme economic and political crisis. 
The source of the continuous drum is the thousands of Israeli fighter jets, missiles, drones, and planes that have been making incursions into Lebanese airspace over the past 15 years. 
Lawrence Abu Hamdan has long decoded the world through sound. The Jordanian, Dubai-based artist’s work, as he once described it, is concerned with the “politics of listening.” A self-proclaimed “private ear,” since his youth, he uses surveillance technologies, sound recordings and archival materials to investigate the role of sound as a tool used to silence, suppress, and heal. 
In his latest body of work, the Turner Prize-winning artist explores the impact of the continuous sound of the Israeli fighter planes on the Lebanese population. The result is Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky), an ambitious 3D sound and video installation on view at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy, until February 5, 2023.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The conflict between Israel and Lebanon is decades old, but became particularly pronounced when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 during a period of civil war, and then again during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shia Islamic political party and militant group. These noisy illegal flyovers, averaging around four and a half hours in duration, are intended to leave the Lebanese in a perpetual state of psychological distress and uncertainty.
Speaking to Artnet News, Abu Hamdan said the reactions to the sound generated from the massive explosion at Beirut Port on August 4, 2020, partly inspired him to make the work.  
“When the explosion happened, there was a big debate over whether there were planes in the air before the explosion, with people continually stating that they heard planes,” he said. “The question kept being raised as to whether the explosion happened due to a missile strike from an aircraft.”
At the time, Abu Hamdan had been doing work analyzing the sound of Russian airstrikes in Syria. He knew that the sounds heard during the Beirut explosion weren’t continuous with the sequence of sounds heard when an airstrike happens. “It was just too quick,” he said. “You wouldn’t have heard the plane so closely for an explosion like that and have no one see a plane.” 
But if it wasn’t a plane, what was it? Just before the Beirut Port blast there was a sound in the air akin to that of a plane. According to research conducted by the likes of Dutch investigative journalism group Bellingcat, just before a pressure wave of that magnitude, there is a vast suction of oxygen that makes a sound like that of a jet. Abu Hamdan presented this belief on Instagram to discuss the idea with those who were convinced they had heard a plane. 
“I realized that whether there was a plane or not, the idea of this constant presence in the atmosphere emerges in moments of peak anxiety in Lebanon,” Abu Hamdan said. For Lebanese the planes have become so routine that they “have lost their discursive value—they are no longer spoken about,” Abu Hamdan tells Artnet News. “They are just there. It is a terror that is a given.”
But all that changes when things get really bad, and all of a sudden, the planes “leave their status as objects humming and rumbling in the background, and come to the forefront to trigger questions as to what is happening in the country.”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Abu Hamdan worked on Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky) over the last two years during lockdown in Lebanon, after receiving the third edition of the Fondazione and Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media. Building the multimedia installation began by capturing and analyzing hundreds of recordings of Israeli military jets, missiles, drones and planes across Lebanon’s skies. He also conducted recordings on the ground and crowd sourced real-time footage on social media with the Arabic hashtag # حربي_بالاجواء which means “war in the air.”
The project also includes information gathered from 243 letters recording all the radar information including: the time, duration, type and trajectory of each aircraft violation, submitted by permanent Representatives of Lebanon to the United Nations between 2006 and 2021. Transcribing and analyzing this data was a challenging process, Abu Hamdan said, as the filing of these letters in the UN’s digital archive was unsystematic.
He archived his research on the website Airpressure.info, which now documents how over the last 15 years, 22,111 Israeli military aircraft have violated Lebanese airspace. The site makes public the violations in detail for the first time. Crucially, Abu Hamdan’s project marks the first time anyone has documented the ongoing incursion of Israeli fighter jets, which neither journalists, nor the Lebanese government, nor the United Nations has undertaken to do. 
“I wanted to put all the information in one database so we could finally see the scale of this issue—how long these aircrafts are spending in the atmosphere and how many planes there were,” he said. The numbers are shocking—adding up the flight time of the more than 22,000 Israeli aircrafts in the atmosphere over the past 15 years is eight-and-a-half years itself. “That means that over half of the last 15 years there has been an Israeli combat vehicle in the Lebanese sky.”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The 3D installation, which through sound and film hauntingly captures the buzzing sound and views of Lebanon’s airspace, encourages reflection on the contemporary conditions of aerial warfare. It is testament to Abu Hamdan’s continual investigations into the still largely undocumented and discussed political implications of listening during times of war. 
“Activating the atmosphere through sound has always been a part of an arsenal of weaponry,” said Abu Hamdan, adding that he hopes the information can be used to contextualize any possible future aerial strikes, or in the context of other discussions such as the maritime border dispute happening now between Lebanon and Israel.
The work, like that of other similarly powerful sound works of Abu Hamdan prompts us to rethink the role noise and listening plays in our daily lives and in accordance with specific world events. As he puts it, it prompts us to ask: “What can this teach us about the history of aerial warfare which has always been about disproportionately creating noise in the sky rather than hitting targets on the ground?”
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Air Pressure (A diary of the sky) (2022). Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Research gathered from Abu Hamdan’s work, which is due to be shown at the UN Security Council, has already become a resource for political debate not only in the public sphere but among government agencies and bodies at the United Nations.
Above all, the work is also about how something supposedly neutral like air, and nature itself, can be made violent through man’s interference. “The work is about how air is turned violent more than the question of whether or not the planes had a right to enter a country and whose air belongs to who,” Abu Hamdan said. “The work raises the question of atmospheric violence and how to understand this as a category of warfare that is not about targeting one person but actually creating broadcasting and fostering collective punitive action and collective fear.”
“Air Pressure (A Diary of the Sky) (2022)” is on view through February 5 at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin.
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Tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay are among the famous faces going on show on November 10 in the “Portrait of a Nation” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
The portraits of the three famous Black women are by up-and-coming Black artists, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Robert Pruitt, and Kenturah Davis, respectively. 
Odutola’s portrait of Serena Williams shows the tennis champion cheerful and relaxed, as though mid-conversation. Her head leaning on one muscular arm is the only hint at her renown athletic physique. 
The works were commissioned as part of the Smithsonian’s Portrait of a Nation Award—a biennial prize established in 2015 that recognizes extraordinary individuals who have made transformative contributions to the U.S. 
They will enter the museum’s permanent collection alongside images of President Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci, chef José Andrés, and music executive Clive Davis. Also entering the collection  is a 2013 photograph of the children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, taken by Ruven Afanador. 
Hugo Crosthwaite’s multifaceted depiction of Fauci consists of both a series of drawings and a stop motion animation.
The seven honorees worked with curators at the National Portrait Gallery to decide which artists would represent them. 
“Since 2001, the museum has collected portraits of living sitters and continues to expand its work with contemporary artists,” said the gallery’s director of curatorial affairs, Rhea L. Combs. 
Here is a sneak peek of the images in the exhibition.
Robert Pruitt, Venus Williams, Double Portrait (2022). Photo courtesy of theNational Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution;© 2022 Robert Pruitt.
A drawing from the series by Hugo Crosthwaite, A Portrait of Dr. Anthony Fauci (2022). Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
David Hockney, Clive Davis, May 23rd (2022). Courtesy of the artist; © 2022 David Hockney.
Kenturah Davis, AVA (2022). Photo courtesy or National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
Kadir Nelson, José Andrés and the Olla de Barro that Feeds the World (2022). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; © 2022 Kadir Nelson.
“Portrait of a Nation”, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, November 10, 2022–October 22, 2023. 

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For the first time in nearly 100 years, Sarah Biffin, a Victorian painter who achieved artistic greatness despite being born without arms or legs, is the subject of a solo show, at London’s Philip Mould and Company.
“Sarah Biffin really was the most extraordinarily inspirational figure,” Mould said in a video promoting the show. “She overcame such challenges—her rural background in Somerset, the fact that she was a woman artist in an age dominated by men, and those extreme physical challenges. That she transcended to become a luminary in her profession, in this respect Sarah Biffin can be seen at the very forefront of female independence of the period.”
Born with a rare congenital anomaly called phocomelia, Biffin overcame her lack of limbs by learning to perform many tasks—including writing, painting, and sewing—with her mouth.
With few other opportunities available to a young woman with disabilities from rural Somerset, Biffin joined the circus, where she became known as “The Limbless Wonder.”

Her artistic talents were so great, however, that George Douglas, the 16th Earl of Morton, became her patron. (First, he sat for a portrait and stored it in between sittings to ensure no one else was responsible for the work.) The Earl arranged for Biffin to take lessons under the Royal Academician William Marshall Craig, at a time when women were not yet permitted to study at the London academy.
“Craig was recognized as an exacting draftsman on a small scale that suited her technique,” Mould said. “The impact of Craig upon Sarah Biffin was clearly profound. I mean, if you compare a self-portrait she did in 1812 with one done five or 10 years later… the distinction is so marked.”
Frances Cooper, Sarah Biffin at Bury Fair (1810). Collection of the South West Heritage Trust and Somerset County Council.
The exhibition includes nearly every known self-portrait of the artist, including one that recently achieved significant success at auction, when it went for the record price of £137,500 ($180,125) at Sotheby’s, London in December 2019. The result was remarkable considering its high estimate was just £1,800 ($2,360) and her previous auction record, unbroken for a decade, was just £2,040 ($3,383), according to the Artnet Price Database.
Philip Mould director Lawrence Hendra is said to have been an underbidder at the sale—no word on whether the gallery has since purchased the work, or if it is once again on the market in the current show.
Sarah Biffin, Young girl, standing, wearing a white dress (ca. 1812). Collection of the South West Heritage Trust and Somerset County Council.
But it was that sale that sparked the gallery’s interest in Biffin’s work, planting the initial seed for the current exhibition. The formal planning for the show began nearly two years ago, and involved securing loans both from private collections—including works that have never been published or publicly exhibited before—and institutions, where most pieces were not on view.
The gallery also enlisted the contemporary painter, Alison Lapper, who was born with the same condition as Biffin, to serve as as advisor on the exhibition.
Sarah Biffin, Self Portrait (ca. 1825). Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
“She seemed to transcend her disability and almost convince people that this wasn’t what it was all about,” Lapper told the Financial Times. “I’m still struggling now to break through the same barriers Biffin faced.”
In the course of research, Philip Mould and Company was able to track down many lost works after realizing that for some 20 years, Biffin painted under the name Mrs. Wright—her husband’s name. (The circumstances of the marriage are still being researched, but the gallery told the Guardian that its initial findings indicate that Wright was a fraudster, and may have absconded with his wife’s life savings.)
Sarah Biffin, Sarah Biffin Self Portrait Before Her Easel (ca. 1821). The watercolor on ivory sold for £137,500 ($180,125) on a high estimate of £1,800 ($2,360). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s, London.
A tireless and ambitious businesswoman, Biffin worked hard to promote herself, placing notices in newspapers, signing her works “without hands” to call attention to her unusual skill, and creating self portraits that advertised her abilities as a painter by surrounding herself with her wares and the tools of her trade.
“She was so canny and so commercially minded in a way that I don’t think women of the period are often really given credit for,” said Ellie Smith, a researcher at the gallery.
Self-portrait Sarah Biffin, Forget-me-not (1847). Courtesy of Philip Mould and Company.
Biffin’s clientele included royal and noble figures: King George III even appointed her as the miniature painter to his second daughter, Princess Augusta Sophia. And she was even immortalized in fiction, receiving several mentions in novels by Charles Dickens.
In addition to her prowess in portraiture, Biffin was also known for her hyperrealistic feather still-life paintings. The show includes her second-most expensive work at auction, Study of Feathers (1812). In July 2021, the watercolor sold for £65,520 ($90,335), crushing the £6,000 ($8,272) high estimate. (No word if Mould was the winning bidder that time around.)
Sarah Biffin, Study of Feathers (1812). The watercolor sold for £65,520 ($90,335), on a high estimate of £6,000 ($8,272). Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s, London.
But regardless of market interest, the gallery believes that Biffin is artistically worthy of the renewed attention her oeuvre is attracting.
“This work is hugely accomplished. There is a fineness of detail, a quality of characterization,” Mould said. “This is exactly the sort of miniature that could hold its own in a highly competitive and crowded market of distinguished miniature painters.”
“Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin” is on view at Philip Mould and Company, 18-19 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5LU, U.K., November 1–December 21, 2022. 

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The tourist arrives at an iconic attraction, turns their back, and snaps a selfie. It’s a behavior that’s preoccupied larger-than-life photographer JR for years. In 2016, he disappeared the Louvre’s glass pyramid using a giant anamorphosis lowered from a crane. At the Eiffel Tower, he did something similar. Now, at the Giza pyramid complex, the Frenchman is making the visitor selfie redundant altogether.
In the foreground of the Egyptian monuments, JR has installed his own pyramid: it’s a black-and-white photo booth where passersby are invited to enter and have their portrait taken. These images are turned into five meter (16 feet) posters and pasted onto billboards backed by the pyramids. “The participant[s],” JR’s press release states, “become co-creators, collaborators, and protagonists in the long artistic history of this site.”
It’s the second year in a row JR has created work at Giza and this latest installation forms part of Forever is Now, a festival organized by contemporary art promoters Art D’Egypte that spans the month of November. In its second edition, the event has invited 10 international artists, including sculptor Lorenzo Quinnto and Egyptian painter Moataz Nasr, to install large-scale pieces around the perimeter of a site that attracts 14 million visitors annually.
“It is a site of global influence,” Art D’Egypte founder Nadine Abdel-Ghaffar said. “We work to revitalize the glory of ancient civilizations with public art and contemporary significance, linking the old and the new, the past and the future through artwork.”
Meta’s AR filters created for Forever is Now. Photo courtesy of Meta.
This year’s art also has a technological bent with the festival’s organizers partnering with Meta to launch 11 augmented reality (AR) filters on Instagram. Guided by a digital Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of the home and fertility, users explore the backstory of each installation through on-screen illustrations, images, and videos.
“Through the AR capabilities we are introducing at the exhibition, we want to merge ancient cultural and artistic heritage with immersive technologies to elevate our communities’ experience on site and online,” said Fares Akkad, Meta’s MENA Regional Director, on the subject of Meta’s first XR investment in Egypt.
In 2021, Meta announced a $50-million fund to invest in metaverse-related projects around the world; Arte D’Egypte is one of more than 20 organizations with which it has established agreements.
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Magic is afoot at the New-York Historical Society, where a new exhibition revisits a dark chapter in U.S. history: the Salem Witch Trials. Between early 1692 and mid-1693, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, and 20 people were executed.
“The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” which originated last fall at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the latest offering of the historical society’s Center for Women’s History. It examines the legal proceedings in light of the role that race and gender played in the deadly affair, as well as the impact it made on descendants of the accused.
“Women were overwhelmingly the ones accused of witchcraft both in America and in Europe in the time period,” Anna Danziger Halperin, the center’s associate director, told Artnet News.
The Salem Witch Trials were an outburst of witch-phobia that followed a vogue for witch trials across Europe in the early modern period. The hysteria overtook the town and village of Salem (the latter is called Danvers today), implicating the poor and vulnerable as well as some of society’s most respected citizens.
Artist in London Sundial (1644), owned by John Proctor, one of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials. Photo by Jeffrey R. Dykes. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, gift of Abel H. Proctor, 1907.
“The first three people who were accused were women who were ostracized and easily scapegoated in the community, but from there, it spirals out,” Danziger Halperin said. “In some ways, the fact that men were also accused is part of what makes the Salem story exceptional.”
“It’s really a defining example of American intolerance and injustice—a terrible chapter in our history,” she added.
The trials created an intense climate of fear and uncertainty for the people of Salem, who never knew who the next target would be. (The accused included a four-year-old child.)
Setting an appropriately spooky tone for the show is an atmospheric soundtrack of crackling flames, howling winds, and eerie bird calls. The ambient noise plays as you approach a recreation of the Salem hearth where the tragedy all began. The daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris accused Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados, of being a witch and causing the mysterious fits they claimed were afflicting them.
Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
Though Tituba managed to avoid execution, the historical record offers no trace of her fate. In lieu of surviving artifacts, Danziger Halperin represented her with a colonial map of Barbados, where Tituba was enslaved before joining the Parris household.
The original Peabody Essex show drew from the museum’s collection of primary documents. In lieu of trial transcripts and other papers, the NYHS has brought in other historical manuscripts, such as a copy of the Malleus Maleficarum, or Hammer of Witches, a handbook on how to identify and kill witches, originally published in Germany in 1486.
Also on view are some of the personal belongings of Salem residents, such as a window from the home of the Towne family, whose three sisters were all among the accused. (Two were executed.)
Heinrich Institoris, Malleus Maleficarum (1669). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, Patricia D. Klingenstein Library.
“It has its own kind of eerie power,” Danziger Halperin said. “The window is this place where people could eavesdrop and see evidence and hear rumors.”
Other artifacts include a large chest that belonged to the Osborn family and a tape loom from the Putnams. Sarah Osborne was one of the first three people accused of witchcraft, likely targeted because of an inheritance dispute following the death of her first husband, a relative of the influential Putnam family. (Osborne died in jail before her trial.)
“The Putnams were really one of the most vehement proponents of accusing their neighbors,” Danziger Halperin said. “Which makes this small decorative tape loom that was used by Rebecca Putnam a really amazing artifact—it has these incredible symbols carved into the handle that are symbols of folk magic. It’s a protective amulet, which would have went against puritanical belief!”
Artist in Salem, Massachusetts, Tape loom owned by Rebecca Putnam (1690–1710). Photo by Kathy Tarantola. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, museum purchase made possible by an anonymous donor, 2001.
Existing conflicts between neighbors and families were among the tensions that bubbled to the surface as the trials picked up steam, fueled by political uncertainty and upheaval, a military conflict that brought in refugees from other parts of New England, and crop failures and disease amid a harsh winter.
“Historians use the phrase a powder keg,” Danziger Halperin said. “There’s so many different conflicts and tensions coexisting in the community, once there’s this spark that ignites it, it just explodes.”
The trials end almost as suddenly, with reason seemingly prevailing in January 1693, when a new court ruled that spectral evidence was no longer legally admissible.
Alexander McQueen, dress from the “In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692” collection (2007). Photo by Bob Packert. Collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, gift of anonymous donors in London who are friends of the Peabody Essex Museum, 2011.
A powerful addition from the museum’s own collection closes the show: Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s massive painting Witch Hill (The Salem Martyr) (1869). The model for the woman being executed was a descendant of a woman who was hung as a witch in Salem.
The exhibition also brings the story of the trials into the 21st century, with bodies of work by two Salem descendants who have embraced witchcraft in ways that their ancestors could never have imagined.
The late fashion designer Alexander McQueen dedicated his 2007 fall/winter collection to his ancestor Elizabeth How, who was put to death as a witch, creating garments that incorporated symbolism of witchcraft, the occult, and tarot cards.
Frances F. Denny, Keavy, Brooklyn, New York (2016) from “Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America.” Courtesy of the artist and Clamp Art, New York.
And then there are portraits of modern-day witches—women who have embraced elements of witchcraft and magic—shot by New York photographer Frances F. Denny, a descendant of Samuel Sewall, one of the judges who oversaw the trials.
“There’s a huge difference between being accused of being a witch and claiming it on your own as a religious or political identity,” Danziger Halperin said. “These women do call themselves witches, and some lay claim to long historical roots in witchcraft practices and different kinds of traditions. It shows that witch doesn’t have to be this dirty word—magic doesn’t have to be this evil incarnate kind of power.”
“The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming” is on view at the New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West at Richard Gilder Way (77th Street), New York, New York, October 7, 2022–January 22, 2023. 
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