About The Exhibition
Can you hear me now?! (2024) is a durational piece based on content shared on the artist’s social media, linked to the resulting genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023.
It aims to highlight the massive amount of information shared in a time of urgency and of massacre, while also amplifying the inactivity and lack of responsiveness that is accompanying such man-made atrocities.
The artist incessantly dubs and repeats “can you hear me now?" over the stories that she had shared between October 7, 2023, and March 7, 2024, the sentence almost transforming into a prayer. The voice and repetition convey the sense of burn-out the situation has pushed her into, exacerbating feelings of helplessness and despair that parallel the hope that accompanied each shared story, the hope that someone would listen, react, and that something would eventually change.
The work raises the question of political idleness and the efficiency of news-sharing, asking how a voice can be heard when the system is built to work against it.
Laetitia El Hakim is a featured artist that the NIMHAF ARTISTS met whilst on residecy in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Artists
Laetitia El Hakim
Laetitia El Hakim (b. 1993, Lebanon) is a multidisciplinary artist working in Photography, Installation, and Performance. Laetitia explores socio-political dynamics through an anthropological perspective, more specifically through the notions of rituals, memories, and history. Her practice takes performative and storytelling aspects in its execution, oscillating between reality, fiction, the occult and the fantastic. She formed a duo with Tarek Haddad in 2019. Their work was shown in Lebanon, France, and Belgium. They received the Boghossian Visual Arts Residency Award in 2022 for their work. She had residencies at Diaphane pôle photographique x Frac-Picardie, France (2021); at L’abbaye de Jumièges, France (2022); at ESW x Hospitalfield, Scotland (2022); and at Cité Internationale des Arts, France (2023-2024). She presented her first solo exhibition “In mud, rust, and blood” in 2022, in Beirut. She received the Lebanese Grant Prize at the festival "Les femmes s'exposent”, France.