Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born 1985, Amman) is a contemporary artist based in Dubai. His work looks into the political effects of listening, using various kinds of audio to explore its effects on human rights and law. Because of his work with sound, Abu Hamdan has testified as an expert witness in asylum hearings in the United Kingdom. His work has been featured in major group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions at Tate Modern, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art or The Showroom, and is included in the collection of several major institutions. He jointly won, with Tai Shani, Oscar Murillo and Helen Cammock, the 2019 Turner Prize for his work based on interviews with former detainees at a Syrian prison. In September 2023, he plans to open Earshot, "the first agency for sound and acoustic analysis dedicated to open-source investigators and the field of human rights." Born in Amman, Jordan to a Lebanese father and an English mother, Abu Hamdan grew up in York, attending Bootham School, a private day & boarding school in the UK. In the 2000s he played in a series of DIY bands, including Isambard Kingston Brunel, Poltergroom and Cleckhuddersfax, who released records on the London-based label Upset The Rhythm. Abu Hamdan received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. Abu Hamdan describes his work as concerned with the "politics of listening." Describing himself as a "private ear", his work confronts specific instances and examples of listening and the voice as they related to legal and political contexts. In his 2012 radio documentary The Whole Truth, he explored new technologies that were attempting to act as lie-detectors for voices. In a 2015 commission for The Armory Show in New York, he distributed bags of potato chips in foil wrappers. The work built on research undertaken by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which they were able to turn common objects into listening devices by capturing vibrations recorded on physical objects and transferring them back into speech. His audio investigations have been used as evidence in UK asylum and immigration courts, and in support of organisations such as Amnesty International and Child Protection International, as well as researchers in forensic architecture.