The artist who testifies: Lawrence Abu Hamdan's sound evidence for the courtroom and the gallery

Lawrence Abu Hamdan does not draw a line between his art practice and his human rights work, because there isn’t one. The Lebanese-British artist, joint winner of the 2019 Turner Prize, is also director of Earshot, an NGO founded in 2023 that treats sound as forensic evidence. His team has examined the trajectory of bullets fired at emergency workers in Gaza and built a case that a sonic weapon was deployed against a silent vigil in Belgrade. The findings sit somewhere between an investigative dossier and a gallery installation, and Abu Hamdan seems entirely unbothered by the ambiguity.

From prison walls to courtroom evidence

The method has a clear origin point. In 2016, working with the London research agency Forensic Architecture on behalf of Amnesty International, Abu Hamdan interviewed survivors of Syria’s Sednaya prison - a facility run on total darkness and enforced silence, where making a sound could get you killed. Listening became, for inmates, both their only channel of information and a means of resistance. Abu Hamdan’s team used their recollections - screams, keys, bread hitting the floor outside cell doors, even lice being crushed - to reconstruct the prison’s physical layout nearly a decade before it was finally opened up following the collapse of the Assad regime. That reconstruction has since fed into wider documentation of the regime’s atrocities.

It’s a striking demonstration of what acoustic testimony can do when visual evidence is absent or suppressed. It’s also, unmistakably, the kind of work that wins Turner Prizes: methodologically rigorous, morally serious, and built from material - sound, memory, architecture - that conventional documentary film or photography struggles to capture.

The catch: art world funding, human rights stakes

The obvious tension here is one of resourcing and accountability. Earshot is a young NGO, only two years old, operating in a field - open-source and forensic investigation - increasingly populated by better-funded outfits and state intelligence services with far greater technical capacity. Sound-based forensic work of this kind is slow, painstaking and expensive, and there’s little detail available on how Earshot itself is funded or how its findings are verified independently before they’re presented as evidence, whether in a report, a courtroom submission, or a Venice Biennale installation. The Guardian’s profile doesn’t interrogate this, understandably given its focus on Abu Hamdan’s practice, but it’s the question that matters for anyone treating this as more than an art story: what happens to sound evidence once it leaves the gallery and is meant to stand up in front of a tribunal, a UN body, or a hostile state actor disputing the findings?

There’s also the reputational risk that runs both ways. Abu Hamdan’s credibility as an investigator lends institutional weight to his art; his standing as an artist gives Earshot’s findings a public platform - a Venice audience, gallery press coverage, curatorial validation - that a conventional NGO report rarely gets. That’s a genuine advantage for getting difficult material seen. It also means the two identities are not easily separable, and scrutiny of one inevitably becomes scrutiny of the other.

The takeaway

What’s checkable and substantial here is real: a Turner Prize-winning artist has built, and now directs, an NGO doing acoustic forensic investigation into documented incidents in Gaza and Belgrade, building on a body of work already used in Amnesty International’s documentation of Syrian state violence. What remains untested, at least in what’s publicly available, is the institutional architecture behind Earshot itself - its funding, its verification standards, and how its evidence performs once it leaves the gallery for a body with the power to act on it. The art is compelling. Whether it changes anything for the people whose testimony it’s built on is a separate, harder question.