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 lease for a studio house on the south London exhibition and residency house.
Abu Hamdan tells The Artwork Newspaper that the residency at Gasworks provides 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 initiatives—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 suitable atmosphere 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 express politics of sound and surveillance, whether or not or not it’s the witness accounts gathered from prisoners tortured at Syria’s Saydnaya jail below former dictator Bashar Al-Assad, or work critiquing the usage of accent assessments to validate asylum claims in Europe.
In response to the Earshot web site, the organisation “transforms sound right into a instrument of justice and restores the soundtrack as a web site 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 position in advocacy campaigns for organisations equivalent to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Worldwide, together with the latter’s Saydnaya jail marketing campaign.
When requested about Earshot’s present initiatives, Abu Hamdan says: “A number of issues are operating in parallel. We’re growing our earwitness interview instrument: a technique and instrument for working with individuals who heard, reasonably than noticed, an incident, which sits on the core of what we do.”
“We even have an unique 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 provides us the house 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 dwell music.
“The bottom is shifting below the establishments that had 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 vital reached by means of authorized or journalistic channels,” Abu Hamdan says.
A key challenge 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 dwell rating by James Hoff.
