In January, Al Jazeera English aired a segment with a sound analyst named Lawrence Abu Hamdan. He was asked to assess a video that had gone viral online. In the clip, a woman wearing a hijab claimed to be a nurse at a hospital in Gaza. She said that Hamas was attacking the hospital and ransacking its supplies. The sound of bombs could be heard in the background.
In the Al Jazeera segment, Abu Hamdan explains how he knows the video is bunk: “The way that those explosions resounded were not consistent with the way her voice was resounding in that room and resonating.” He determined that the sound of the explosions had been added on to the video after the fact.
Abu Hamdan goes on to tell the host that governments are often “complacent when it comes to sound,” even though sound analysis is sometimes the only tool that can be used to verify a contested act. There are truths that can be heard but not seen. He also cautions that it takes much longer to prove the falsity of a video than it does for such a video to be created. He is alarmed but not an alarmist; he noticeably does not resort to using jargon like “fake news.”
Many people online had already assumed that the video was fake. Watching the so-called nurse, they had a sense. Why was she brandishing her stethoscope like that? Why didn’t she pan the camera around to show us her surroundings? What did she not want us to see? The effort of analyzing this video, a piece of artless misinformation, was beneath Abu Hamdan, who has dedicated himself to unveiling the violence of the world through the medium of sound.
Abu Hamdan, who is thirty-nine years old, has conducted audio investigations all over the world, including in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, France, and England. He often works in collaboration with non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Defense for Children International, and B’Tselem. He has also been commissioned by media organizations, including the Washington Post and ITV, a British television channel, to provide audio analysis to their investigative teams. Abu Hamdan calls himself a “private ear,” which calls to mind classic detective narratives. But he often works on investigations that challenge traditional notions about the nature of proof.
What is the sound of pain as it is kept in the reserves of memory? One of Abu Hamdan’s best-known projects is an investigation of Saydnaya Military Prison, some thirty kilometers north of Damascus. The prison, a military facility run by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, has been called a “human slaughterhouse.” According to human-rights organizations, many thousands of Syrians, some of whom were arrested for protesting the regime, have been tortured and executed there. Saydnaya is an informational abyss: no photographs of its interior exist, and the prisoners, who are reportedly blindfolded upon entering and leaving, are kept in darkness. In 2016, Abu Hamdan, working with an investigative outfit called Forensic Architecture, was commissioned by Amnesty International to travel to Istanbul and interview five former detainees. (Over the years, some detainees have been released after receiving presidential amnesty or through a prisoner exchange.) Abu Hamdan, speaking with the detainees in Arabic, collected what he describes as “earwitness testimony.” He asked questions designed to trigger memories: “How many cell-door hatches in your wing did you hear opening at meal times?” “Could you hear footsteps from the floor above you?” He asked if there were distinctions between the percussive sounds made by the different weapons guards used—the dolab, constructed from a tire, and the alakhdar brahimi, made from a ventilation pipe.
It is difficult to describe sound without relying on abstractions. A lawnmower is “loud,” at a hundred decibels, but so is a jet taking off, which is a hundred and fifty decibels. When Abu Hamdan realized that verbal language was insufficient to convey the sounds of Saydnaya, he got creative. He and the witnesses re-created sounds with their belts, their pens, their mouths and feet. He used Foley sounds as a reference point for certain noises, such as doors slamming. In the prison, the guards enforced a strict regime of silence; the detainees spoke to one another only in whispers. Abu Hamdan established a baseline volume for these whispers by playing a series of tones and asking the former detainees whether the volume was too low or too high. Ultimately, Abu Hamdan and his collaborators posited that there was a central staircase in the prison which distorted and amplified sounds. This allowed the guards to hear what went on in the cells around them and the detainees to hear people being beaten in other parts of the facility.
The final report on Saydnaya, published by Forensic Architecture, credits Abu Hamdan as an “acoustic investigator.” In the Al Jazeera segment, he was introduced as an “open source intelligence researcher,” in reference to a school of investigative techniques that relies on publicly available information: cell-phone footage, social-media testimony, satellite imagery. But Abu Hamdan is not just a researcher; he is an international art star. He works across a battery of media: sculpture, film, performance, photography, and, of course, sound. His pieces are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim; he has shown his work at the major biennials—South Korea, Berlin, Venice, Sydney. It is in the art world that most people encounter his investigations.
“Saydnaya (The Missing 19dB),” commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation, in the U.A.E., in 2017, is a sound piece examining how the whispers of the detainees dropped by nineteen decibels after 2011, when mass protests erupted throughout Syria. The piece speculates that the drop marks the transformation of Saydnaya from a prison to a death camp. “Earwitness Theatre,” co-commissioned by the Chisenhale Gallery, in London, in 2018, is a sound library made physical—an installation of nearly a hundred objects that have been used to describe sounds in legal cases and investigations. A popcorn-maker represents the testimony of a witness who compared the sound of a building collapsing, in Florida, to that of kernels popping. Some of the objects are presented without context, making them feel innocent, if not mundane. In “After SFX,” first performed at Tate Modern, in London, in 2018, Abu Hamdan put some of these objects to use, demonstrating how the sound of a stack of pita breads dropping onto the ground indicated to prisoners whether or not they would eat that day. “Walled Unwalled,” a short film from 2018, was also installed at Tate. In the film, possibly his most impressive work, Abu Hamdan acts as a kind of angel of sound history, presenting cases in which auditory evidence was collected through walls, such as that of Oscar Pistorius, the Paralympic runner who was convicted of killing his girlfriend after his neighbors heard screams and gunshots.
Abu Hamdan has received, among other prizes, the Nam June Paik Award and the Edvard Munch Art Award. In 2019, he was nominated for the U.K.’s Turner Prize, the most prestigious contemporary-art award. Abu Hamdan and the three other nominees told the jury that, in the wake of Brexit, they wanted to be considered as a group—a rebuke to what they saw as the racist nationalism that had overtaken the country. In a video of the ceremony, Edward Enninful, then the editor of British Vogue, looks somewhat stunned as he reads aloud that all four nominees have won. The camera pans to Abu Hamdan, who is in the act of the ultimate British gesture: sipping a cup of tea.
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In his art, Abu Hamdan makes assertions that he would not include in an investigatory report. He imagines conversations that did not happen. He is clear about his political views. He questions the idea of expertise. Abu Hamdan has emphasized that his two practices are distinct. Yet his switching between the mode of research-based claim-making and that of looser, more interpretive storytelling has made at least some critics uneasy. In 2019, a review in Art in America asked, “Is this art in the service of forensic investigation and systemic justice, or the other way around?”
In December, I travelled to Barcelona, where Abu Hamdan was preparing for a show called “Air Pressure.” It is an hour-long analysis of what he describes as the atmosphere of violence in Lebanon. Abu Hamdan, who was born in Amman, Jordan, is married to a curator named Nora, with whom he has two daughters. The family splits their time between London and the Middle East. In the twenty-tens, they lived in Beirut, where Abu Hamdan had a studio.
In Lebanon, locals often speak of a buzzing noise. It is a by-product of Israeli incursions into Lebanese airspace—an increasingly regular occurrence since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006. Abu Hamdan’s research for “Air Pressure” focussed on the period between 2007 to 2022, during which more than twenty-two thousand unmanned aerial vehicles, drones, helicopters, gliders, and fighter jets breached the Lebanese border. Some came and went in just a few minutes. Others circled for as long as thirty hours.
Abu Hamdan’s performance—a combination of monologue, sound, and visuals—was taking place at a venue called Hangar. He was crashing at Hangar, too. As he rehearsed, his luggage lurked in a corner. When you meet Abu Hamdan, a retired punk, you sense instantly that he knows fashion. He wears a delicate silver charm in the shape of a human ear on a thin chain around his neck. This past spring, he was on the cover of GQ Middle East; the issue contained a photo shoot in which he wore Balenciaga, Prada, and Loewe. The son of a Lebanese father and an English mother, he is pale-skinned and blond. People feel the need to speculate about his identity. He has been mistaken for Syrian. Once, a man on the street in London heckled him, thinking he was Jewish.
On the evening of the performance, roughly seventy people filed into the venue. An image of the sky was projected onto a large screen. It looked like a stock photo, banal in its beauty. Then a sound filled the room—a low, enervating hum. A vibration felt, if you kept your body still, deep in the chest.
“Air Pressure,” like Abu Hamdan’s other art works, had a previous life. It began with letters submitted to the U.N. Security Council by its permanent representative of Lebanon, who had attempted to document each Israeli Air Force violation of Lebanese airspace during a fifteen-year period. The information was scattered, and launched Abu Hamdan on his own search. “I’ve had my head buried in these documents, downloading, reading, transcribing, and compiling all that I could find,” he told the crowd.
A couple of years ago, Abu Hamdan published a collection of his monologues, including “Air Pressure,” in a book called “Live Audio Essays.” But it is not the way to experience his work. Something is lost when you are reading rather than listening. This is his world view—that meaning comes from the voice, its pauses, the background noise. As Abu Hamdan performed “Air Pressure,” a sound designer toggled with the audio output, sometimes making the hum so loud that you had to strain to hear Abu Hamdan.
He moved into the path of the projection, throwing his shadow against the sky. He told the audience that the data had leaked into his life. “The most fighter jets I counted in a single day was the day of my Ph.D. professor’s fiftieth-birthday party,” he said. “On the day my daughter was born, in Beirut, an unmanned aerial vehicle circled the south of the country for two hours and thirty-five minutes.” His text sharpened to a point: the noise of these vehicles is “not loud enough to be terrifying, but frequent enough to fuel a near-constant dread.” In May of 2021, there was a break from the noise—only four fighter jets flew overhead. Abu Hamdan said, “Our air is quiet because those same aircraft are realizing their maximum capabilities for sonic and material destruction elsewhere.” That month, Israeli air strikes killed a hundred and twenty-nine civilians in Gaza.
“Air Pressure” is almost psychoanalytic: it is a diary of contemporary life in Lebanon, where civilians navigate the oppressive caprice of two powers. “They need each other in some perverse game,” Abu Hamdan has said, of Hezbollah and Israel. In reference to the Lebanese government, he added, “I don’t think the air belongs to them, either.”
Most of the attendees stayed for a post-show discussion. A young woman from Chile commented on how hard it is to ignore sound. “You can turn off the TV,” she said. “You can skip the story on Instagram because it’s talking about Gaza, and you already know what’s happening there. You can close your eyes. But you can’t close your ears.”
Abu Hamdan shook his head. “You can close your ears very well,” he said. “Anyone who is ever in a law court or a police interview room knows that it is very easy for someone to close their ears.”
Abu Hamdan was born in 1985, when Lebanon was riven by violence. He and his brother, Shakeeb, were the third generation of the Abu Hamdans to live in Jordan because of armed conflict in Lebanon. Their great-grandparents were resistance fighters who fought against French colonialism. Abu Hamdan’s paternal family, from the Chouf, in Lebanon, is Druze, an ethnic and religious minority that believes in reincarnation. Abu Hamdan recalls as a young boy being scooted toward a man who claimed to have once been his great-grandfather. A recurring story in his art is that of Bassel Abi Chahine, a writer and historian, whom Abu Hamdan met through his aunt. For most of his life, Abi Chahine has had what he describes as flashbacks—visions that he interprets as memories from a past life, in which he was a child soldier named Yousef Fouad Al Jawhary, who died in Lebanon at the age of seventeen. These flashbacks prompted him to amass a comprehensive trove of materials related to the military wing of the main Druze party in Lebanon, the Progressive Socialist Party. In “Natq,” a monologue, Abu Hamdan explains that Abi Chahine, as a reincarnated witness, “is in a unique position to traverse a silence that spans two generations.” The older generation dutifully avoids speaking about the country’s sectarian war and its brutalities, including the use of child soldiers. The younger generation, Abu Hamdan’s, cannot speak to a history that they were never taught.
In Amman, Abu Hamdan’s mother, who is British, collected paintings by Ahmad Nawash, Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, and Ayad Al Nimar. When Abu Hamdan was seven, his parents divorced, and he and Shakeeb moved with their mother to Yorkshire, where she had grown up. The change was jarring. “I remember when we first moved to the U.K., I answered every question with ‘What?’ ” he told me. This went on for so long that his mother took him to get a hearing test: “Suffice to say, there was nothing wrong with my hearing, but I remember the day very clearly, as it was my first time in an audio laboratory.”
Abu Hamdan recalled, of those early years in the U.K., “Political consciousness, for me, developed around having a mixed background growing up in Yorkshire, not really being like anyone else.” He and Shakeeb eventually got involved in the local punk-and-D.I.Y. underground music scene. The ethos was anti-industry, anti-capitalism, no gods, no masters. The brothers played in a few bands, the best known of which was Cleckhuddersfax, named for a triangle of towns in Yorkshire: Cleckheaton, Huddersfield, and Halifax. Vice noted that the band sounded like Devo—the New Wave group behind “Whip It”—“if Devo were covering the Blackadder theme tune with a bag full of MDMA strapped to their foreheads, leaking into their eyeballs.” Abu Hamdan, the lead vocalist, was, and still is, a bit of a joker. As a performer, he veered toward the exhibitionistic. He wore an orange singlet with an open torso, and a crocheted face of a bearded man affixed to his groin, evoking pubic hair.
After graduating from high school, Abu Hamdan moved to Leeds, where he organized shows for musicians who were interested in the point at which music became noise. He decided to enroll at Middlesex University, where he majored in Sonic Arts, a program that combined acoustic phenomena and artistic experimentation.
Abu Hamdan remembers going with a friend to Manifesta 7, a roving art biennial, in Italy. There, he first encountered the work of Eyal Weizman, a British Israeli architect. Weizman was a gadfly in the worlds of art and architecture. In 2002, he and another Israeli architect, Rafi Segal, had been commissioned to design Israel’s official entry to that year’s World Congress of Architects, in Berlin. They created an exhibition called “A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture,”about settlement planning in the West Bank, where architecture had been co-opted by the Israeli state as a “strategic weapon.” On learning of the exhibit’s contents, the Israel Association of United Architects cancelled the show; Weizman and Segal brought it to the U.S., where it was shown at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, in New York.
At the time, Weizman was developing a theory of architecture that engaged with a brutal fact of contemporary conflict: most casualties of war die inside of buildings. Abu Hamdan remembers telling Weizman that he was interested in sound and in architecture. “What sound? What architecture?” Weizman countered.
Abu Hamdan followed Weizman to Goldsmiths, University of London, where Weizman had established the Centre for Research Architecture. He and his fellow-researchers were discussing ways to shed light on the violations of the government. They were frustrated with forensics—the science of investigating crimes and producing evidence—which is typically seen as the responsibility of law enforcement. The researchers theorized a practice of counter-forensics, in which they would use some of the surveillance technologies of the state, but against the state. In 2010, Weizman founded Forensic Architecture, an agency that is composed of lawyers, architects, human-rights researchers, and scientists, who use architectural technology, such as satellite imagery, 3-D modelling, and light detection, in addition to witness testimony, to deliver a larger picture of violence—one that takes into account historic context and social structures. The group has published more than seventy investigations, including an analysis of the Grenfell Tower fire, in London, and a report on the genocide of the Ixil Maya, in Guatemala. The investigators developed their own niches: Lorenzo Pezzani worked on cases involving violence in contested border areas, like the ocean; Nabil Ahmed and Paulo Tavares worked on environmental incursions, such as deforestation and mining. Abu Hamdan did sound analysis. “It was all so new,” he told me.
One of the earliest cases Abu Hamdan worked on involved Nadeem Nawara and Mohammad Abu Daher, two Palestinian teen-agers who were shot dead by Israeli border police in the occupied West Bank during a Nakba Day protest. The Israel Defense Forces claimed that the officers had shot the boys with rubber bullets, to quell the demonstration, and that the cause of the deaths could not be determined. Abu Hamdan used sound analysis to differentiate the sonic signatures of various kinds of ammunition. In this case, the sounds were of neither rubber-coated bullets nor live ammunition “but something in between,” he said. “A kind of amalgamation of the two sounds.” Abu Hamdan ultimately found that the officers had fired live ammunition out of a rubber-bullet extension. This finding led to the indictment of Ben Deri, one of the Israeli border officers, on manslaughter charges. (In 2016, Deri accepted a plea deal for the lesser charge of negligent homicide and received a nine-month prison sentence.)
When Ben Deri was arrested, in 2014, it was the first time that a member of the Israeli forces had been charged with killing a Palestinian child. But how could Abu Hamdan feel anything like resolution? The pursuit of legal justice, however limited, had forced him into a cowed posture. “I was immediately asked to do something that, for me, was politically compromising, which was to argue that the Israeli soldiers were not firing rubber bullets but live ammunition,” he said—the implication being that rubber bullets were acceptable. “Rubber bullets, especially in the Israel-Palestine context, are constantly being shot in people’s faces at close range,” Abu Hamdan explained. They maim, as a form of deterrence.
Two years after the bullet analysis, he created an installation called “Earshot,” which reflects on the killings of Nawara and Abu Daher. The centerpiece is a video called “Rubber Coated Steel.” The film was shot in an indoor gun range, where the sounds of gunfire cannot be heard from the outside—a metaphor for violence done in a kind of aural darkness. There is no speech, but text runs along the bottom of the video: a transcript from an imaginary civil trial. And yet, even in this space of speculative justice, Nawara and Abu Daher are not given “a voice”; the boys are not made to ventriloquize a fantasy of justice from beyond the grave. Abu Hamdan challenges a maxim forced onto the marginalized: that their voices are a source of power.
Central to Forensic Architecture’s ethos is a belief that aesthetics inevitably plays a role in how violence gets narrativized—in court, in the news, and even in the organization’s own work. Investigations are not enough; people are not moved by mere knowledge of crimes against humanity. Forensic Architecture presents its findings in multiple forums: online, in court, in the human-rights arena, and in the art world. At the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the group planned to show a film called “Triple-Chaser,” an exposé of Safariland, a company that manufactures tear gas that has been used to terrorize civilians in Palestine, in Ferguson, Missouri, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. The company’s owner, Warren Kanders, was a member of the museum’s board at the time; he stepped down after Forensic Architecture and other artists withdrew from the event, which would become known as the Tear Gas Biennial.
Research-based works have taken over the contemporary art scene. In 2023, the art historian Claire Bishop, writing in Artforum, attributed this phenomenon to the rise of doctoral programs for artists, particularly in Europe, where artistic practice is supplemented by written research. Bishop notes the risk of art being turned into something “systematic” and “professional.” (In the U.S., the conversation about academia pressing out the spirit of the contemporary artist is centered on the M.F.A.) But she mentions Forensic Architecture as a group that is pushing research-based art further. “Rather than being noncommittal to avoid didacticism or authoritarianism,” Bishop writes, “Forensic Architecture believe that ‘having an axe to grind should sharpen the quality of one’s data rather than blunt one’s argument.’ ” The art is not diluted by the research; the research strengthens its argumentative power.
In 2017, Abu Hamdan got a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths in forensic sound analysis. His dissertation, which made a case for a kind of political listening, citing playwrights next to post-structuralists, is still circulated among students and researchers there. “We would say, ‘This is Lawrence Abu Hamdan Studies,’ ” Weizman told me.
Last year, Abu Hamdan started his own investigative group, called Earshot. It describes itself as the first not-for-profit group that is devoted solely to conducting audio analysis of human-rights abuses and state violence. The team is small. Abu Hamdan works with Caline Matar, an audio researcher who serves as his second-in-command, and Fabio Cervi, a trained architect and an audio investigator. Cervi lives in London, and Matar lives in Beirut; the three often work remotely, videoconferencing with one another. Open-source investigators sometimes do field work, but more often their place is remote. They do their work from a distance, analyzing the leftover traces, the evidence that can be found online.
After the Hangar show, I visited Abu Hamdan and Cervi at the Forensic Architecture offices, in London, where they were collaborating in person. (Earshot often works closely with Forensic Architecture.) Cervi, like Abu Hamdan, is a musician. He recalled struggling when he first joined Earshot, and realizing, as he worked with Abu Hamdan, “Whatever you’re hearing, I can’t hear it.”
“I think I remember what it was,” Abu Hamdan said. They had been analyzing electromagnetic bumps in a recording, which is one way to verify the authenticity of a piece of audio.
When I visited, Cervi and Abu Hamdan were investigating an attack on seven journalists in southern Lebanon, on October 13th. A Reuters journalist, Issam Abdallah, had been killed, and six of his colleagues injured. Earshot, after analyzing cell-phone videos and footage from a videographer near the scene, determined that for forty-six minutes prior to the incident the noise of a drone could be heard in the background. According to Earshot, the drone circled the journalists at least eleven times before the attack, which suggests that the I.D.F. had sufficient information to know that the journalists were civilians. Now Earshot needed to create a visual representation of this sound data.
Cervi pulled up a file that showed the changing volume of the sound waves emitted from the drone. There were parts of the wave pattern where the color was faint, and parts where it was dark. Abu Hamdan explained, without looking up from his laptop, that the darker waves corresponded with the moments in which the drone’s propeller had been facing the camera. Cervi could use this information to animate the drone’s movements, to show how it had circled the journalists.
Since October 7th, most of Earshot’s work had been focussed on Israel and Palestine. On October 17th, there was an explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, in Gaza City. Gaza’s health ministry had estimated the death toll to be more than four hundred people, most of whom were Palestinians sheltering in a humanitarian zone. U.S. ministries estimated that between a hundred and three hundred people had been killed. Hamas blamed the explosion on an Israeli air strike; the I.D.F. claimed that a salvo of seventeen rockets had been fired from southwest Gaza and that one had misfired, with the unspent rocket propellant causing the damage to the hospital.
Shortly after the explosion, Earshot performed an initial analysis using two separate videos taken near the hospital, which cast doubt on Israel’s claim. By analyzing the Doppler effect—the observed frequency emitted by a sound source relative to the observer—the researchers found that the pitch frequency didn’t line up with a missile coming from southwest Gaza. “We’re saying that this is reducing the probability of this coming from the west,” Abu Hamdan explained at the time. “It’s rocket science after all, so we can’t rule it out.”
Four months later, Forensic Architecture published its full investigation, demonstrating that all seventeen Palestinian rockets had finished burning their propellant while in flight. The investigation was not meant to prove that Israel had destroyed Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. It is still unclear what caused the explosion. What the investigation did was show that the I.D.F. had fostered an environment of uncertainty by putting out misinformation about a misfired Palestinian rocket. “We tend to be conservative about our findings,” Weizman told me. “Although, to be absolutely frank, the way it works in reality, we can put in as many caveats as we want. We could say that it’s more likely than not that something has happened, and the entire Internet would go, like, ‘Whoa, Forensic Architecture established the facts around that.’ ” He continued, “The response is either people are kind of cheering, or people are going, ‘You motherfuckers! You manipulate this!’ ”
Myriam Ben Salah, a curator who worked with Abu Hamdan on one of his installations, told me about a video meeting that she attended with Abu Hamdan and other artists and curators this past November. At the time, the Western art world was imploding, with artists voicing concerns about censorship. Many people on the call were emotional. Abu Hamdan was coolheaded. “He’s always operated knowing that you couldn’t say certain things, or bring up certain subjects, such as the ‘Palestinian question,’ without consequences,” Ben Salah said. “Because of the nature of his work, he was already in parallel networks of people who think differently from the mainstream Western perspective.”
At the Forensic Architecture offices, Abu Hamdan was characteristically low-key. I watched him lean all the way back in his swivel chair and fiddle with the zipper on his BrainDead hoodie. But at one point he logged on to X, where he noticed a photo. It was of a group of Palestinian men, naked and blindfolded, being made to kneel. “This isn’t real, is it?” he asked. “Is this A.I.?” The photo was authentic, which Abu Hamdan surely knew, even if his instinct was to question its provenance. A look of disgust crept over his face.
Later, we visited Dalston, an area of East London where Abu Hamdan used to live. We went to a Turkish restaurant, which wasn’t as good as he remembered, and then settled into a quiet section of a loud bar nearby. “For a lot of Arabs and many other people, Palestine is a kind of . . .” He paused, circling the top of his beer glass with his thumb. “It’s a curriculum.”
A common critique levelled against Forensic Architecture and Earshot is that they are biased, particularly against Israel. Abu Hamdan said that he and his fellow-investigators have to be “way more rigorous” than the state does, because he knows how easily their findings can be dismissed. He told me that he worries his critics will “find something, an article, that says I’m an artist or whatever, without understanding all that I’ve done. There’s been a kind of discourse of ‘How can he do this work objectively?’ ”
Though Forensic Architecture and, now, Earshot investigate acts perpetrated by states and by corporations, they also inevitably interact with the same legal, journalistic, and governmental apparatuses they are trying to challenge. In 2013, Abu Hamdan was called as an expert witness at the U.K. Asylum and Immigration Chamber. The U.K, like many other countries, uses a kind of accent analysis to determine whether applicants for asylum are telling the truth about fleeing from conflict zones. The model purports to have a kind of scientific impartiality. But it is a shibboleth: accents are not stable, and accent testing cannot account for how a voice changes as a person moves from place to place—the fluidity of life in a world brutally organized by orders. Abu Hamdan analyzed the case of a man named Mohamed Barakat, who had come to the U.K. from Palestine, and who the U.K. government had concluded was actually from North Africa or Lebanon, based on an analysis of a twelve-minute phone call. The government issued a deportation order, and Abu Hamdan testified at Bakarat’s eventual trial.
At the trial, Abu Hamdan explained why the accent analysis was faulty. The judge followed up by asking him if there was anything that could be done to fix the model and make it usable, or whether he found the process to be “wholly wrong.”
“I think it needs to be much more thorough if it is to work,” Abu Hamdan said. “I think that twelve-minute interviews are not sufficient. I think it needs to take into account the people’s biographies much more than simply where they come from.”
Later, the lawyer for Bakarat’s defense told Abu Hamdan that he believed the judge, with this line of inquiry, was trying to ferret out political bias, and to see if Abu Hamdan believed that accent analysis, as a concept, was odious. “Had I answered yes, taking his language or similar into my response, then the entirety of the evidence I had presented that day would have been nullified,” Abu Hamdan told me.
The question of bias inevitably comes up in cases like these. To Abu Hamdan, the question is nonsensical. It presupposes a fantasy in which traditional institutions—say, newspapers and immigration offices—don’t have biases of their own.
In October, Abu Hamdan, along with thousands of other artists, signed an open letter, published by Artforum, condemning Israeli violence in Palestine. I signed a similar letter, organized by Writers Against the War on Gaza, expressing support for Palestine and calling for a ceasefire; I also dropped out of an event at the Brooklyn Museum, co-sponsored by PEN America, because neither institution had called for an end to violence in Gaza. (Almost three weeks later, PEN issued a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire.)
I wondered if Abu Hamdan felt a kind of despair doing his work. He told me that he generally believes his feelings are not of importance. He understands his investigations as cracks in a disintegrating edifice, one in which violence against Palestinians is tolerated to maintain a status quo.
Recently, Abu Hamdan told me that he feels “out of synch” when he performs “Air Pressure.” The project is not far enough in the past to be historical, yet not close enough to the present to feel salient, and this creates a kind of dissonance. “The war now has escalated from background noise, and material destruction is once again foregrounded,” he said.
I met up with Abu Hamdan in April at Washington Square Park, in New York City. While in the States, he was giving a lecture at Washington University and running a workshop for investigative reporters at the Times. He had just come from meeting with Ana Janevski, a curator in the department of media and performance at MoMA, who had curated a run of his performances at the museum last spring. We walked over to the nearby campus of New York University, to see what remained of the pro-Palestine student encampments, which N.Y.U. and other universities across the country had been clamping down on, often using police to forcibly eject protesters. We walked by N.Y.U.’s business school, which had been boarded up, the plywood walls painted green. Abu Hamdan put his finger to the surface. “Just dried,” he said. A man riding a scooter and carrying a guitar on his back asked Abu Hamdan if the school was closed. “In a sense,” Abu Hamdan replied.
The student protests had inflamed the punditry class; the media was now talking about speech and language instead of displacement and killing. At Columbia, students occupied Hamilton Hall, the main administration center, unfurling a banner on its balcony that read “Hind’s Hall.” The center named for the Founding Father was commandeered, if briefly, in honor of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab. In January, Hind, her aunt, her uncle, and her three cousins had been displaced from their home in Gaza City, and had attempted to flee in their car. Everyone in the vehicle but Hind and one of her cousins was killed. Afterward, Hind called the Palestinian Red Crescent Society hotline—an emergency-services organization—and her conversation with the operators later leaked online. “I’m so scared, please come,” she tells the dispatchers. There are gunshots. The emergency organization was given clearance by the Israeli Defense Ministry to send paramedics. But after the paramedics reached Hind they lost contact with the hotline operators. It would be twelve days until Hind and the paramedics were found. Her body was shot through with bullets. The ambulance that held the paramedics was discovered nearby, burned beyond recognition.
Earshot had been commissioned by the Washington Post to help investigate whether Hind and the paramedics had been intentionally murdered by the I.D.F. Key to this investigation was an analysis of the gunshots audible in the phone call. The I.D.F. had consistently denied that it had any forces in that area of Gaza City and had attributed Hind’s death to rogue or errant Hamas rockets (hence the burned-up ambulance). Audio ballistic analysis of the shots heard in the phone call and the CCTV recordings suggested that the I.D.F. tanks had in fact been in the area and had likely shot at the family. The Washington Post article that drew on Abu Hamdan’s work depicts the last hours of Hind’s life. In late June, Al Jazeera released a documentary, called “The Night Won’t End,” that builds on the original investigation. It presents findings from Forensic Architecture and Earshot, including that the gunfire in the attack was consistent with Israeli weaponry, and that the shooter would have been somewhere between thirteen and twenty-three metres away.
Abu Hamdan told me about his experience of working, last summer, on an investigation of the death of Nahel Merzouk, a seventeen-year-old boy who had been shot dead in Nanterre, outside Paris, by police during a traffic stop. The boy was a French national of North African descent. A local lawyer argued that Nahel had not coöperated with police officers during the stop and that the killing was justified, igniting protests across the country. (The officer who shot Nahel was arrested; he is currently out of jail under supervision, pending further investigation.)
In an audio recording of the killing, two pieces of dialogue could be heard: “Coupe, coupe,” (“Cut, cut”) and “Pousse-toi” (“Move over”). Many French publications had attributed the “pousse-toi” to Nahel, but the Earshot team couldn’t figure out why Nahel would have said these things, or why the officer would have said them to Nahel. They decided to re-create the incident, using Abu Hamdan’s car, which he stood beside, in the position of the officer. After processing and analyzing the audio, Matar and Abu Hamdan realized it was unlikely that anyone inside the car had said, “Move over.” Another theory, posited by Earshot, was that “pousse-toi” was actually one police officer speaking to his colleague, instructing him to move out of the way of the shot to come. Abu Hamdan wrote, “This would indicate the killing was predetermined.”
The thousands of protesters, of course, did not wait for Earshot’s audio analysis before expressing their anger over Nahel’s death. They knew how the police treated people who looked like him. The scrutiny applied by Abu Hamdan may have meaning in a legal context, but the people were past garnering legitimacy from the law.
In New York, we made our way south, to the Bowery. As we walked, Abu Hamdan told me about an interaction he’d had with a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. For more than a year, he had been working on a show with the museum. After October, he recalled, he heard nothing from the curatorial team. He said that a couple of weeks ago the team had written to him, saying that they could no longer put on the exhibition. He told me they had said that “the world was a different place.” Wryly, he paraphrased his response. “I sent them an invoice for all that we had done,” he said. “And I signed it ‘from the other side of history.’ ” ♦
