The non-profit organisation Earshot has been awarded a three-year studio bursary on the Gasworks. Based by Jordan-born artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earshot makes use of sound within the defence of human and environmental rights. The bursary, backed by the Spanish patron Mercedes Vilardell, offers an annual stipend and covers month-to-month hire for a studio area on the south London exhibition and residency area.
Abu Hamdan tells The Artwork Newspaper that the residency at Gasworks offers Earshot a platform to function independently following an “incubation interval” working with the analysis group and artwork collective Forensic Structure.
“Virtually, it means finishing up our day-to-day work—investigations, analysis, commissions, cultural tasks—from an area that displays what Earshot truly is: an organisation working throughout authorized accountability, scientific rigour, and cultural manufacturing,” he says. “Gasworks is the appropriate surroundings to check and consolidate that mannequin, and to develop into the organisation we got down to be.”
Abu Hamdan is thought for work that explores and makes specific politics of sound and surveillance, whether or not or not it’s the witness accounts gathered from prisoners tortured at Syria’s Saydnaya jail underneath former dictator Bashar Al-Assad, or work critiquing the usage of accent checks to validate asylum claims in Europe.
Based on the Earshot web site, the organisation “transforms sound right into a device of justice and restores the soundtrack as a website of evidentiary energy. From the sharp crack of gunfire to the oppressive hum of drones, our investigations deal with sound as each an acoustic hint of violence and a method of management.” Analysis on this discipline has performed a key function in advocacy campaigns for organisations comparable to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Worldwide, together with the latter’s Saydnaya jail marketing campaign.
When requested about Earshot’s present tasks, Abu Hamdan says: “A number of issues are operating in parallel. We’re creating our earwitness interview device: a strategy and instrument for working with individuals who heard, somewhat than noticed, an incident, which sits on the core of what we do.”
“We even have an authentic piece of analysis on coral reefs underway that takes our strategies into an environmental register, and from early October we’ll be operating a library in residence with Ibraaz [in London],” he provides. “Alongside all of that we’re persevering with our core investigative work, and the transfer to Gasworks offers us the area to carry it collectively.”
In one other vital London occasion, Abu Hamdan and Earshot will take over the Barbican Centre this autumn (23-26 September). The occasion, titled Repercussions, will embody installations, performances, screenings and stay music.
“The bottom is shifting underneath the establishments that have been meant to carry states and armies to account, and that makes the query of the place accountability truly occurs extra open than it has been in a very long time. A programme like Repercussions issues as a result of it treats listening itself as a civic act and brings investigative work into contact with audiences who aren’t obligatory reached by authorized or journalistic channels,” Abu Hamdan says.
A key mission is a efficiency within the centre’s cinema, which can “draw on our earwitness investigation right into a reported sonic assault throughout a silent vigil in Belgrade in March 2025,” he provides. The piece, commissioned by the humanities organisation Figura, will embody a textual content by Abu Hamdan, visuals by Earshot’s Hyeongji Yang, and a stay rating by James Hoff.
