Turner Prize winner uses sound evidence to expose human rights abuses

Lawrence Abu Hamdan lives in two worlds that most people would consider incompatible. He is a Turner Prize-winning artist whose work commands attention at the Venice Biennale. He is also the director of Earshot, a human rights organization founded in 2023 that investigates atrocities using sound as evidence. These are not separate careers. They are two expressions of the same conviction: that listening, done carefully and systematically, can reveal what silence and destruction have hidden.

The foundation of this work reaches back to 2016, when Abu Hamdan collaborated with Forensic Architecture on a project for Amnesty International. He traveled to interview survivors of Sednaya prison in Syria, a place of such systematic brutality that prisoners were held in absolute darkness and enforced silence, killed for making any sound. Yet in that horror lay a paradox. The inmates' only source of information was what they could hear—the screams of others, the turning of keys, bread slapped against cell doors, even the snapping of lice. Their sonic memories became the raw material for reconstructing the prison's architecture and conditions, nearly a decade before the facility was opened to daylight after the Assad regime fell.

That project shaped everything Abu Hamdan has done since. Earshot's work now spans from Gaza to Belgrade to cold cases that families have carried for years. The organization operates from a bright, orderly office in south London, staffed mostly by architecture school graduates. On the surface, it looks like any other research space. But on the computer screens, investigators are building three-dimensional models of streets where murders occurred, analyzing recordings that were never examined at the time, discovering that convicted shooters may have been decoys while the actual weapon was wielded elsewhere.

The Belgrade case illustrates how Earshot works and why it matters. In March 2025, as many as 300,000 people gathered for a silent vigil—one of many held since a railway station accident killed fifteen people the previous year. The protesters maintained fifteen minutes of silence, one minute for each victim. Into that grief-filled quiet came a sound that witnesses described as terrifying: first like a vehicle approaching at speed, then as if it were being produced inside their own bodies. The Serbian government denied using any sonic weapon. But Earshot received hundreds of emails the morning after the protest, many from individual participants who had learned the organization might help. The team collected thousands of witness statements, played audio samples to survivors to eliminate false leads—fireworks, drones, other explanations the government had offered—and concluded that an LRAD 450XL, a US-made device, had likely been deployed.

Abu Hamdan describes the silence itself as a kind of weapon. "That silence was just so unbearable to the state that they had to find a way to undermine it," he says. The vigil's quietness had created extraordinary listening conditions. When the sound erupted, the protesters were uniquely attuned to its qualities. They heard it with the acuity that comes from sustained attention. This same acute listening emerged in Sednaya prison, where survival depended on hearing everything. The parallel is not accidental. Both spaces produced what Abu Hamdan calls "an acute type of listening."

The work is relentless. After our conversation, Abu Hamdan was meeting with New York Times journalists to analyze killings by ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. One of Earshot's most significant investigations examined the killing of ambulance workers in Gaza. On March 23, 2025, Israeli soldiers fired at least 910 rounds in Tel Al-Sultan, near Rafah. At least 789 of those rounds were directed at aid workers. The evidence included a recording made by one of the killed people, his phone recovered from a mass grave with fifteen bodies. The destruction around the site—only three walls standing, everything else rubble—actually helped the team map the shots. In an intact urban environment, such analysis would be nearly impossible.

When asked how he and his team cope with such material, Abu Hamdan is direct. Working on the cases, taking an active role, is easier than the alternative. "Ambiently scrolling—that is so much more destructive," he says. There is agency in listening, in building evidence, in refusing to look away. And there is always more to listen to than just gunshots. The world contains music, field recordings, the sounds of communities and nature. Earshot's work extends to environmental cases, to demonstrations, to the full spectrum of what sound can reveal about power and harm. The organization is staging a takeover of the Barbican in London in September, running workshops on gathering sound evidence, screening films about listening, hosting musicians creating new work from field recordings. The art and the investigation are inseparable. Both require the same thing: ears that are sharp, attentive, and willing to hear what others have missed.