Eyewitness account of Syria jail up for Turner Prize

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a Beirut-based artist, has been nominated for the 2019 Turner Prize for his audio installation developed from interviews with former detainees at a regime controlled prison in Syria.

The prize, which is considered one of the highest honours in the art world, judges artists on an “outstanding exhibition”,

“Earwitness Theatre” was produced as part of a joint investigation by Amnesty International and the Forensic Architecture research group into conditions at Saydnaya, a prison 25 kilometres north of Damascus.

Independent investigators have not been allowed access to the prison since the Syrian Revolution started in 2011. The earwitness testimony helped Abu Hamdan “reconstruct the prison’s architecture and gain insight as to what is happening inside,” his website reads.

The capacity of detainees to see anything in Saydnaya was highly restricted as mostly they were kept in darkness, blindfolded or made to cover their eyes.

“As a result, the prisoners developed an acute sensitivity to sound,” it says.

Many of the sounds, like a body being hit with a bottle or the guard’s stamping boots, were made later to match the detainees’ reported experiences.

Amnesty estimates that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed by Syrian regime forces in the prison from 2011 to 2015.

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Abu Hamdan’s work explores how art, politics and humanitarian issues intersect. He has also been called as an expert audio witness in a number of court cases.

In May 2014, he analysed acoustics of the gunshots that killed two Palestinian teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohamad Abu Daher, in the occupied West Bank.

He was asked to determine whether the ammunition used by the Israeli soldiers were live rounds or rubber bullets as they claimed.

From his audio analysis, he discovered that the boys had been shot with live munitions.

He later used his findings for an exhibition called “Earshot”.