Lawrence Abu Hamdan

A major new co-commission by Beirut-based artist and ‘private ear’, Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Earwitness Theatre develops Abu Hamdan’s enquiry into the political effects of listening, presenting two installations that capture the psychological, bodily, spatial and sometimes hallucinatory world of the earwitness.

Working with sound, installation, performance, text, video and graphic works, Abu Hamdan’s work examines the contemporary politics of listening. Often building on audio analysis that Abu Hamdan has made for legal investigations and advocacy for humanitarian organisations, his work is acutely attentive to sound. Proposing new strategies for listening, Abu Hamdan’s work questions the ways in which rights are being heard and the way voices can become politically audible.

Building on the premise that crimes are more often heard than seen, Abu Hamdan’s new commission explores techniques to access sonic memories, where not all things look the way they sound or sound the way they look. For Abu Hamdan, testimonies describing gunshots like “the popping of balloons” or the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy like “somebody dropping a rack of trays”, are just as important as the sonic evidence itself.