Born: 1985 Amman, Jordan
Year of Migration to the UK: 1990
Biography
Artist and sound analyst Lawrence Abu Hamdan was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1985 to a Lebanese father and an English mother. During his childhood, his family relocated to the UK, where he grew up in York. He first pursued a BA in Sonic Arts at Middlesex University in London, graduating in 2007, and later completed an MA at the same institution in 2010. In 2017, he earned a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he focused on the technology and techniques of forensic audio analysis. Owing to his extensive research in the field of sound, Abu Hamdan has served as an expert witness in asylum proceedings within the UK. He has provided expert testimony before the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and contributed crucial evidence for advocacy efforts by organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International. His scholarly work on sound and acoustic phenomena has been key in the advocacy initiatives of various human rights organisations, including al Haq, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, Forbidden Stories, Forensic Architecture, and others. He has additionally been engaged by media outlets, such as ITV and the Washington Post to deliver audio analysis for their investigative teams. Abu Hamdan calls himself an ‘ear witness’ or a ‘private ear’ who investigates crimes that might not be seen but can be heard. Abu Hamdan has attributed a profound shift in his worldview to the influence of Eyal Weizman, the British-Israeli architect and founder of the Forensic Architecture art collective, who also taught at Goldsmiths. Abu Hamdan has worked as a Research Fellow for Forensic Architecture.
Abu Hamdan’s art practice is focused on the ‘politics of listening’ or ‘forensic listening’, meaning the connections between audio and the various socio-political themes, such as borders, forced migration, human rights, surveillance, testimony, and truth. He engages with these issues through a diverse range of media, including documentaries, essays, audiovisual installations, video art, graphic design, sculpture, photography, workshops, and performance. His fascination with sound and its political implications is rooted in his early involvement in the underground DIY music scene in Leeds. He has carried out audio investigations across various regions globally, including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, France, and England. Speaking about the limitations of the judicial system in Europe he stated in an interview with The Art Newspaper: ‘There exists, all over northern Europe, a policy to check the accent of asylum seekers to see if where they come from is where they claim to actually come from. [...]. It does not understand the fundamental conditions of the ways refugees and people who have itinerant lives live […]’ and explained how voice is ‘not like a birth certificate or a passport; it’s more like a network,’ while giving detail about working with a Palestinian facing deportation (Abu Hamdan quoted in da Silva, 2019).
Abu Hamdan exhibits widely. In 2018, he held a solo exhibition Earwitness Theatre at London’s Chisenhale Gallery. This exhibition, commissioned by Chisenhale, explored the experiences of earwitnesses. By interrogating how voices gain political significance, Abu Hamdan examined the intersection of sound and human rights. Drawing from interviews with Syria's Saydnaya prison survivors and various sound libraries (including the BBC), he introduced a unique collection of sounds specifically curated to investigate earwitness accounts. This expanded library was unveiled for the first time at the exhibition. His 2023 MoMA exhibition Walled Unwalled and Other Monologues consisted of a monologue examining key legal cases and events where auditory evidence, gathered through walls or doors, was crucial. Examples include the 2001 Supreme Court case Kyllo v. United States and the 2014 Oscar Pistorius murder trial. The exhibition also included the experiences of Saydnaya prison survivors, who relied on sounds through walls for connection. The piece, filmed through the Funkhaus sound studios’ window, a Cold War-era East Berlin recording studio once used for state propaganda, highlighted the paradoxes of borders and privacy, while offering the viewers the possibility to consider the role of ‘ear-witnesses’ in legal proceedings, where listening can both exonerate and incriminate. The piece was initially presented as a video installation at Tate in 2018. The following year, Abu Hamdan participated in May You Live in Interesting Times, a group show held at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Abu Hamdan has received several prizes, including the Nam June Paik Award and the Edvard Munch Art Award. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. In response to the political climate following Brexit, Abu Hamdan and the three other nominees, Helen Cammock, Tai Shani and the Columbian-born Oscar Murillo, requested that the jury view them collectively as a group, in protest against what they perceived as the rising tide of racist nationalism in the UK. At different periods of his life Lawrence Abu Hamdan has lived in Berlin and Dubai and is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon. In the UK public domain his work is held in the Tate collection.
Related books
- Fabian Schöneich, ed., Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Dirty Evidence (Stockholm: Bonniers Konsthall, 2022)
- Omar Kholeif, Lawrence Abu Hamdan: the Sonic Image (Sharjah: Sharjah Art Foundation, 2022)
- Skye Arundhati Thomas, Lawrence Abu Hamdan (Dubai: Art Jameel, 2020)
- Fabian Schöneich, ed., Lawrence Abu Hamdan: (Inaudible): A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016)
Public collections
Related organisations
- Goldsmiths, University of London (student )
- Middlesex University (student )
Related web links
- Art Basel
- Doreen St. Félix, ‘How Lawrence Abu Hamdan Hears the World’, The New Yorker, 15 July 2024
- Forensic Architecture: Research Fellow
- José da Silva, ‘Interview: Lawrence Abu Hamdan—a self-styled “private ear”’, The Art Newspaper, 14 June 2019
- La Biennale di Venezia
- Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Politics of Listening
- MoMA
- Official Page
- Sharjah Art Foundation
- Testimony, 2013
- Turner Prize 2019
Selected exhibitions
- Walled Unwalled and Other Monologues (solo exhibition), MoMA, New York, USA (2023)
- Cross-Border Crimes (solo exhibition), Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2023)
- The Sonic Image (solo exhibition), Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2022)
- Dirty Evidence (solo exhibition), Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2021)
- Artist's Rooms: Lawrence Abu Hamdan (solo exhibition), Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2020)
- Lawrence Abu Hamdan (solo exhibition), Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2019)
- Lawrence Abu Hamdan (solo exhibition), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2019)
- May You Live in Interesting Times (group show), 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2019)
- Walled Unwalled (solo exhibition), Tate Modern, London (2018)
- Earwitness Theatre (solo exhibition), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2018)
