Jordan. Audiovisual installations, graphic design, sculpture, photography, performance.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a London-based artist and researcher whose projects explore the politics of listening and the relationship between sound and urbanity. He is currently completing the doctoral program at the Center for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College (London) where he is part of the research team for the Forensic Architecture project.

His works have been exhibited or presented at international institutions and events such as the Sydney Biennale 22 (2020); the 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Tate Modern, London (2018); the Sharjah Biennial 14 & 13 (2019-2017); the Center Pompidou, Paris (2017); the Contour 8 Biennial, Mechelen, Belgium (2017); the MACBA, Barcelona (2017); the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2017); the 11th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2016); the Liverpool Biennial 9, UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2016); the Beirut Art Center (2015); and the 10 Shanghai Biennial (2014), among others.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a co-winner of the Turner Prize in 2019. He has also been awarded the 2020 EMAF Award, the Edvard Munch Art Award, in 2019, the Baloise Art Prize 2018, and the Abraaj Art Prize 2018. In 2017 won the short film award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and in 2016 received the Nam June Paik New Media Award. He has recently received the 2022 Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media awarded by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

The artist has specialized in a branch of knowledge that has historically been underestimated in Western culture: he reaps the deep and complex informational wealth of noise, and has mastered the power of listening as a private ear; that is, a kind of private sound investigator who works in international legal fields and who collaborates with human rights organizations such as Forensic Architecture, Defense for Children International and Amnesty International. According to Abu Hamdan himself, one of the experiences that most marked his artistic production was the grueling interrogation he was subjected to by the UK Home Office, when he was called as an expert witness at the deportation hearing of a Palestinian asylum seeker.

In 2012, with Conflicted Phonemes, he showed that variations in accent of asylum seekers are not enough to determine where they were born and consequently deny them the possibility of living in the Netherlands. Four years later, his acoustic analysis led him to conclude that a group of Israeli soldiers fired not rubber bullets at two Palestinian teenagers - as they alleged - but real bullets. Lawrence Abu Hamdan's installations capture the otherness of Western societies as a sonic trail, as an echo reproduced and analyzed within new auditory control laboratories.

In Walled Unwalled he makes a performative lecture that covers a series of legal and historical cases - whose central debate revolved around evidence heard through walls - to arrive at a diagnosis on the political and social use of all kinds of walls. He is interested in the multiplication of border walls and the permeability of the walls of houses, pyramids, prisons and even the planet's atmosphere. While states build border fences to exclude migrants, their police and armies spy on what goes on behind the walls, violating people's privacy.

To go deeper into this, Abu Hamdan introduces us to the concept of muography: a technique that generates images of what is behind walls without physically altering them. Muons are highly penetrating elementary and cosmic particles that constantly bathe our planet; they can be harvested for archaeological and volcanological studies because they penetrate rocks, cement, lead. The other side of the coin is that they open the door to the best surveillance system ever.

On the other hand, Abu Hamdan argues that there exists that we have an ambiguous and highly distorted relationship with noise. A large part of our sound imagination and vocabulary are artificially constructed by radio, film and television, so much so that many of us would not recognize, for example, the real sound of a shot. The video Walled Unwalled takes place in a recording studio, where artificial sounds are constantly being produced that seek to recreate the authentic sounds.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan's recent projects incorporate a broader range of strategies in a demonstration that audibility is a regime at least as tense that the forms and dangers of "visibility" are much more discussed. Either devising ways of visualizing sound, its frictions and topographies, as with the remarkable Tape Echo recently presented at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, or unpacking political events such as new configurations of voices, audiences and their respective legalities, such as the performative series Contra - Dicción, Lawrence Abu Hamdan reveals a cacophonic map of our present, made up of unconventional borders and unstable jurisdictions, exclamations, silences and preventive listening.

The artist maintains that, in past times, when swearing to tell the whole truth before a court of law, it underwent a transformation and the speech was transmuted to responsible testimony. However, we currently take an oath when we agree to the terms and conditions of a particular communication software or email provider.