Lawrence Abu Hamdan decodes the world through sound. A self-proclaimed “private ear,” the Dubai-based artist leads audio investigations that uncover often unsavory truths, such as goods trafficking or the realities of a Syrian prison.

“Ear-witness testimony, as opposed to eyewitness testimony, is the most prevalent source of evidence,” says Abu Hamdan, who has collaborated with institutions including Amnesty International and Defense for Children International. “Why?” he adds, “because sound leaks.”

It is precisely those leakages that the artist captures and dissects, such as the pops of murderous bullets or regional accents used to determine asylum seekers’ legitimacy. For Abu Hamdan, sounds are telltale signs of the many invisible—and usually oppressive—political forces at play.

For this new episode of Meet the artists, Abu Hamdan welcomed Art Basel to his studio in Dubai’s former industrial quarter, Alserkal Avenue. The Turner Prize-winning artist talks the viewer through Earwitness Inventory (2019), a collection of 96 custom-designed objects to facilitate re-enactments of crimes. These objects encompass sounds that have been used in his interviews with “earwitnesses” to induce auditory memory recall.

Other projects include The Hummingbird Clock which has existed since 2016 as an installation opposite Liverpool’s law courts and now as an online project to help people verify the date and time a recording was made. A tool that was previously only available to governments.

Abu Hamdan’s work also encompasses broader topics, such as in The All Hearing (2014), a video documentation of noise pollution in Cairo and two Sheiks’ fight for freedom of speech concerning it. For The Otherwise Unaccounted (2020) investigates the idea of birthmarks corresponding to reincarnation, and Disputed Utterances (2019) is a series of charcoal drawings and photographs that mimic the linguistic process of palatography. In summary, Abu Hamdan’s work views the human body as a living testimony; a way to keep and share stories in this life, from past lives, and for generations to come.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is represented by Mor Charpentier (Paris, Bogotá), Sfeir-Semler (Hamburg, Beirut), and Maureen Paley (London, Hove)