Listening for Silence

Abstract

Silence is a method of torture in Saydnaya Military Prison. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, audio investigator and artist, interviewed former prisoners as part of investigations into the detention facility by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. Abu Hamdan heard testimony of torture that would neither be admissible in a law court nor appear in the news media. In response he created several works of art for which he was jointly awarded the Turner Prize in 2019. The artworks invite a critical examination of the basis on which the law of evidence enables testimony to be evaluated and excluded from legal trials. The world is assumed by the law to be comprised of people, objects and words that are ontologically discrete, and which exist independently from each other. The extent of the participation of the law in the way in which the world is constituted by mutually implicated practices of knowing and becoming is overlooked. There is inadequate engagement with the significance of the processes of legal systems for the outcomes of trials. By contrast, the work of Abu Hamdan opens encounters with a world in which subject and object are co-constituted through material and discursive entanglements. His art is an invitation to listen for the silences of others and the sounds of the law.