Lawrence Abu Hamdan Turns Sound Into Powerful Evidence
With forensic precision and poetic impact, the artist uses audio to challenge visual dominance, expose injustice and redefine how power is heard
With forensic precision and poetic impact, the artist uses audio to challenge visual dominance, expose injustice and redefine how power is heard
On a Thursday evening in early spring, a crowd packed into the Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut. Located on the fourth floor of an industrial building, the long, narrow space has huge windows along one side that afford views of the city and its surrounding hills. While not exactly lovely, the vista can be breathtaking, when every surface on every structure suddenly reflects the shocking pinks, reds and oranges of the sunset, which occurs, unseen, on the other side of the building.
For his second solo show at the gallery, Lawrence Abu Hamdan has installed a new work, Planned Obsolescence (2025), in the space beside the windows. After scouring Beirut’s vintage shops and Souk al-Ahad (Sunday market) for ten old television sets that miraculously still work, he has placed them on rickety stands. Each plays the final footage recorded by a camera belonging to a journalist or news agency, such as that used for a Reuters live stream, which was intentionally shot at by Israeli forces in Gaza. To darken the room, the windows are covered with deep red filters. At the time of the opening, the combination of these filters and reflected sunlight made everything in the gallery glow pink.
To unlock the auditory imagination demands a lot of work. You need to reimagine your sonic surroundings.
Planned Obsolescence was made in collaboration with Earshot, a non-profit organization Abu Hamdan started in 2023 with the intention of investigating human-rights violations and environmental crimes using sound-based, open-source intelligence. Unique in the fi eld, Earshot’s services include sound authentication, speech analysis and audio ballistics: a multifaceted approach to the origins of gunfire. Before the war in Gaza, Earshot used journalists’ recordings to gather sound evidence; now, those journalists are themselves Israeli targets. Walking through the show with Abu Hamdan, he tells me Earshot is working to expose not only Israeli crimes but also the systematic negation of those crimes – as when a drone is sent to destroy a camera that may have recorded the death of its operator.
Compelling viewers to regard a series of glitched images while wandering through an arrangement of nearly defunct technological objects, Planned Obsolescence documents galling violence, conveys the tenacity and fragility of the press, reflects on media archaeology, tests the boundaries of what counts as sculpture and toys with the history of video art. Mostly, though, it is emblematic of the sweet spot for experimentation that exists in the overlap between Abu Hamdan’s work as an artist and his involvement with collaborative investigations that play out in courtrooms, legal jurisdictions, advocacy campaigns and community resistance.
Born in Amman to British and Lebanese parents and raised in the UK, with close ties to and long stints of living in Beirut, Abu Hamdan completed his master’s degree in research architecture at Goldsmiths University, London, under Eyal Weizman, becoming a research fellow with Forensic Architecture from the time of its founding by Weizman in 2010. Abu Hamdan irked some corners of the art world in 2019, when he was nominated for the Turner Prize and rallied the other nominees to form a temporary collective and accept the award en masse, eschewing individualism for team spirit. Such refusal to accept convention is typical of Abu Hamdan’s practice. Just as important to him as his representing galleries are his connections to organizations and institutions such as Amnesty International and the International Criminal Court.
For nearly 15 years, Abu Hamdan has been enacting performances, making films and writing essays of bracing precision. Seven of his texts, mapping the ideas that have animated his practice, are collated in the publication Live Audio Essays (Primary Information, 2023). Each essay, which is the transcript of a film or a performance, represents a set of works clustered around a topic: the fearsome sonic architecture of the Saydnaya Prison in Syria (Walled Unwalled, 2018), say, or the practice of taqiyya in Shia jurisprudence, which allows a believer to deny their faith under duress but is often regarded as lying (Contra Diction: Speech Against Itself, 2015).
Each cluster of works is expressed in a variety of forms. Air Pressure, for example, is an essay, performance and dedicated website, which extends to a series of photographic prints (‘Air Conditioning’, 2022) and a related but highly site-specific performance (Daght Jawi [Atmospheric Pressure], 2022). What makes Abu Hamdan’s overall project so striking is that each story of sonic phenomena opens up a new angle on an old problem: considering child soldiers in relation to the history of general amnesty and amnesia aft er the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), for instance, or rethinking environmental policy by casting as annexation by unbearable sound the imposition of wind turbines in the Golan Heights in the unabashedly beautiful essay, performance and installation Zifzafa (2024), which involves the collaborative construction of a live gaming simulation that viewers can play with a handheld controller.
Across his art and advocacy, Abu Hamdan’s obsessions are sound, speech and close listening. He scatters both his writings and casual conversation with terms like ‘earwitness’ and ‘the mind’s ear’ – intentional provocations to make us reflect on our overreliance on visuality and the veracity of sight. ‘A lot of my work is about taking people on a journey,’ Abu Hamdan tells me when we meet prior to the opening of his show at Sfeir-Semler. ‘I’m very honest about the limits of my own listening, so that the audience also opens its ears. To unlock that sonic imagination demands a lot of work. It needs you to reimagine your sonic surroundings.’ Abu Hamdan tells me he sees himself not as an artist, but ‘a private ear’, as he calls it. ‘I’ve come to understand that my work is shown in galleries, but that’s not the part I’m interested in: there’s a journey I want you to go on.’
In person, Abu Hamdan, who turned 40 this year, is affable and easy-going. When I passed by the gallery to see him, he was wearing an incredible black cotton jacket, festooned with tassels and embroideries of a wiggling green snake, gold stars, winged sneakers and a bulbous pink head with five eyes. Abu Hamdan’s voice is deep and honeyed, modulating between soft and booming. His accent is at once British yet unplaceable, as when he emphasizes, seemingly for fun, the second syllable in the word ‘ad-VOC-acy’.
The craft is in understanding the significance of listening as a tool of resistance.
Around 2014, Abu Hamdan started a series of closed-door critiques – now legendary among Beirut artists of his generation – that built on a long tradition of similar such gatherings organized by the 98weeks Research Project, run by the artist Marwa Arsanios and her writer cousin Mirene Arsanios, and the Group Tuesday collective, made up of the artists and writers Walid Sadek, Bilal Khbeiz and Fadi El Abdallah, who now works at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
‘The objective for me was really simple,’ Abu Hamdan recalls. ‘98weeks was an amazing hub of discourse, and it was really important for me – and for a lot of artists – at the beginning of my career. By the time I moved here, however, Mirene and Marwa had more or less moved on, so I thought: How do we continue these conversations about people’s practice in a way that’s not part of any institution but just in a studio?’
At the time, Abu Hamdan’s studio was a corner desk in the office of Makram el Kadi, co-founder of the architecture firm LEFT. In terms of what was happening artistically in Beirut, Abu Hamdan tells me: ‘It wasn’t like critique was missing, but the spaces where we would do it communally had diminished. So, we did that it for three or four years, and it was really good.’
For each session, an artist would present their work to their peers for feedback. In addition to Arsanios and Sadek, numerous other well-known artists participated, including Haig Aivazian, Ali Cherri, Ahmad Ghossein and Rayyane Tabet. ‘Everyone presented,’ Abu Hamdan recalls. ‘Everyone was stuck, coming always with the same work. The amazing thing is that, even though there would be a totally different artist presenting at each session, someone would always bring baggage from the last one, so we would just pick up where we’d left off. The continuity was not just in the conversation but through time. You get the sense that’s how community builds: even if you’re arguing half the time, overall it’s good.’
Abu Hamdan’s first solo show at Sfeir-Semler opened just weeks before the start of the thawra (revolution) in October 2019, when mass demonstrations against government corruption and ineptitude broke out in Beirut. The protests accompanied a 90 percent drop in the value of Lebanon’s currency, followed soon afterwards by the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 2020 Beirut port explosion, which Abu Hamdan refers to as ‘the ammonium nitrate massacre’. ‘Now it would be a totally different discourse,’ he tells me. ‘Everything’s changed. It was interesting to show here in 2019, and it’s interesting to come back here now to show again.’
The title of Abu Hamdan’s current exhibition, ‘Someone Chewing’, is named for a sound that is universally accepted as one of the most annoying, which feels in keeping with his approach to art as an irritant to the status quo. In addition to Planned Obsolescence is the expansive installation of Zifzafa, consisting here of a video of the performance playing on a massive screen and three animations visualizing wind-turbine noise titled Tilting at Windmills (2024), in reference to a line from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (1605). The looping, six-second animations feature whirling abstract shapes, a kaleidoscope of blues and purples, which accurately represent the sounds of the turbines while flirting with the possibility of their aestheticization. ‘What I’m documenting in these audio essays,’ Abu Hamdan tells me, ‘are moments I thought were insignificant that, through the process of listening with communities of people, suddenly take on massive representative force. The craft is in understanding the significance of listening as a tool of resistance.’
Such instances of collaborative process are fundamental to Abu Hamdan’s practice. Earshot is made up of a team of five, all of whom were in town for the opening, yet Abu Hamdan seemed at ease amid the increasingly complex negotiations for the install of Planned Obsolescence. ‘To represent effectively all the voices that influence and shape a project demands meticulous architecture,’ he tells me.
In the cinema room at the back of the gallery screens Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel (2022), starring the inimitable actor and filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. From within the various spaces of the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, which straddles the border between the United States and Canada (you can enter from the state Vermont on one side or from the province Quebec on the other), Fleifel tells the story of a gun-smuggling operation that exploited the library’s peculiar structure to move weapons from one country to another without anyone having to cross the border. From there, Fleifel pivots to another story about a different border, this time involving the fatal shooting of a Mexican teenager in Ciudad Juárez by a US border agent in El Paso. The film then opens out to consider the legal ramifications of drone strikes carried out by US forces in countries such as Iraq, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Like Walled Unwalled, which stepped nimbly from a famous recording studio in Berlin to Syria’s most fearsome prison, 45th Parallel combines riveting and precise storytelling with a languid visual style that lingers on architectural oddities and the very human quirks of Abu Hamdan’s subjects and surrogates.
Each story of sonic phenomena in Abu Hamdan’s work opens up a new angle on an old problem.
As night fell at the opening, and the gallery’s pink glow dissipated, attendees crowded into the cinema room for a performance of Abu Hamdan’s A Thousand White Plastic Chairs (2020). The work requires total darkness, as the storytelling moves nimbly from his incorrigible Uncle Farhan (renowned for stealing the stories of everyone else in the family and passing them off as his own) to the sonic dimensions of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. Eventually, the performance lands on the subject of simultaneous interpretation at the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46. The trials employed a system of flashing red and yellow lights to guide the speed of delivery both of those giving testimony and their translators. That system was replicated here to punctuate the performance, jolting the audience at intervals.
As an interlude, Abu Hamdan added an engrossing back-and-forth with one of his Earshot colleagues, Fabio Cervi, also an artist and accomplished guitarist, who ran through a series of riffs where one musician almost certainly copied another. (Think of Nirvana’s 1992 hit ‘Come As You Are’ compared to Killing Joke’s 1985 track ‘Eighties’, for instance). From this ear-opening gambit, Abu Hamdan took us on a journey involving misrecognized sounds and translation strategies that had the effect of shielding listeners from the horrors they were simultaneously hearing in the Nuremberg trial testimonies. The piece ends with the contemporary outsourcing of trial recordings to transcribers in Ahmedabad, with no such aural mechanisms to protect them. Here, the darkness was palpable.
After a long silent pause, Abu Hamdan enunciated quietly, ‘Khalasna’ (We’re done). Light filtered back into the room. The crowd erupted in applause. Abu Hamdan smiled, mischievously, sharing both our appreciation for the work – and our relief at its conclusion.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 252 with the headline ‘Lawrence Abu Hamdan’
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s ‘Someone Chewing’ is on view at Sfeir-Semler Karantina, Beirut, until 1 August
Main image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Zifzafa: a livestream audio essay (detail), 2024, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut/Hamburg
