From killings in Gaza to the alleged use of a sonic weapon on a vigil in Belgrade, the Lebanese-British artist reveals how his work for activist group Earshot is inseparable from his art
Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a double identity. He is an artist who, in 2019, jointly won the Turner prize; and one of his works is, for my money, among the most striking on show at this year’s Venice Biennale. But he is also the director of a young NGO, founded in 2023, called Earshot, which investigates human rights abuses using sound evidence. In less euphemistic language, that means, on occasion, investigating horrific killings. He and his team might analyse the direction and position of bullets Israeli soldiers have fired at emergency workers in Gaza, or build evidence that a sonic weapon was likely used to disperse a mass silent vigil in Belgrade.
The foundational work he did in this field was a project with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture for Amnesty International. Back in 2016, he interviewed rare survivors of the unimaginably barbaric conditions in Syria’s Sednaya prison. There was a paradox at play in this murderous place – prisoners were held in complete darkness, and enforced silence, killed for making any sound. Listening was both the inmates’ only source of information, and a tool for survival and resistance. Their acute sonic memories of screams of distress and pain; keys turning in locks; bread being slapped down outside their cells; even of lice being snapped – helped Abu Hamdan and his colleagues build a picture of the prison architecture and its conditions, nearly a decade before it was opened to the light after the fall of the bloody Assad regime.
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