The ear witness: Turner-winner Lawrence Abu Hamdan and his ‘sound evidence’ exposés of human rights abuses
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the Lebanese-British artist who jointly won the Turner prize in 2019, leads a dual career as founder and director of Earshot, a human rights NGO he set up in 2023 that investigates abuses using sound evidence. The organisation examines cases ranging from Israeli soldiers' shootings of emergency workers in Gaza to the alleged use of a sonic weapon to disperse a silent vigil in Belgrade, treating audio analysis as a forensic tool comparable to visual reconstruction techniques already familiar from news coverage. Abu Hamdan sees his artistic and investigative identities as inseparable, with the meticulous research underpinning both formal reports and gallery works.
His approach was shaped by earlier work with Forensic Architecture for Amnesty International, when in 2016 he interviewed survivors of Syria's Sednaya prison, where inmates held in darkness and enforced silence used acute listening to piece together the prison's brutal conditions years before it was exposed following Assad's fall. Earshot, based in a small south London office staffed largely by architecture graduates, combines open-source data, "earwitness" testimony and recorded sound to reconstruct events, including reopening a cold-case political assassination in which the team believes the convicted shooter was a decoy and the real perpetrator remains unidentified.
- Turner-winning artist runs Earshot, an NGO using sound to investigate rights abuses
- Cases include Gaza shootings and an alleged sonic weapon in Belgrade
- Work traces back to 2016 interviews with Syria's Sednaya prison survivors
New here? Start with this
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist who works with sound, best known for winning the Turner prize jointly in 2019. Alongside his art career, he set up Earshot in 2023, a human rights organisation that uses recordings and audio analysis to investigate alleged abuses, treating sound in the same way that other groups use video or satellite images to reconstruct events. Its work has covered incidents including the shooting of emergency workers in Gaza and the alleged use of a sound weapon against protesters in Belgrade.
His method draws on earlier investigative work, including a 2016 project with Forensic Architecture for Amnesty International, in which he interviewed former prisoners from Syria's Sednaya jail. Held in darkness with no talking allowed, those prisoners had learned to make sense of what was happening around them purely through listening, and their accounts helped build an early picture of conditions inside the prison, well before it became widely known after the fall of the Assad government.
Earshot is a small operation based in south London, mostly staffed by people trained in architecture rather than journalism or law, reflecting its roots in techniques developed for reconstructing physical spaces and events. It matters because it represents a growing use of sound as evidence in human rights investigations, sitting alongside Abu Hamdan's continued work as an artist, which draws on the same research and raises questions about where investigative and creative work overlap.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Advocates of treating audio forensics as legitimate human rights evidence argue that sound has been unjustly overlooked despite its rigour: acoustic analysis can pinpoint weapon types, distances and timelines with a precision comparable to photographic or satellite reconstruction, and it can surface abuses that leave no visual trace, as with the Sednaya prisoners who had only their hearing to document conditions in enforced darkness. They value expanding the evidentiary toolkit available to victims in closed or contested environments where cameras are absent, confiscated or too dangerous to use, and see Earshot's methodology as a serious, peer-reviewable complement to existing investigative techniques rather than a novelty. They further argue that pairing this forensic rigour with artistic presentation, as Abu Hamdan does, need not compromise its evidentiary value and can instead broaden public understanding of hard-to-visualise abuses.
The case against
Sceptics of this approach raise concerns about the reliability and independence of sound-based reconstructions, noting that audio evidence is more easily degraded, mistimed or ambiguously sourced than video or physical forensics, and that conclusions such as identifying a decoy shooter in a decades-old assassination rest on inference chains that can be difficult for outsiders to verify. They also question the blending of an artist's practice with a body positioned as producing human rights evidence, worrying that gallery exhibition and advocacy framing may shape how findings are selected or presented, even unintentionally, and that this dual role could invite doubts about impartiality when the findings implicate parties to active conflicts such as Gaza or state actors in Serbia. Their underlying value is safeguarding the credibility and neutrality that formal human rights documentation depends on, particularly when findings are used to challenge powerful institutions.