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Art Museums and Audibility

This article engages with the representational problems staged by Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 2017 sound installation Saydnaya (the missing 19db). The project of this artwork is to visualize an inaccessible site, a prison 30 km from Damascus and staged by Abu Hamdan as a place wherein detainees are held in a regime of enforced darkness and silence. Approaching this installation in the context of the Turner Prize-winning exhibition Earwitness Theatre (2018), this essay situates Abu Hamdan’s practice in relation to a broader shift from visual to verbal images taking place across performance and the visual arts. Aural representation is well suited to subject matters that have only ever been heard. The artist’s approach is premised on accounts from those who have been within but not seen this place; on reports based not on visual perceptions but on actions overheard. Addressing the installation’s key aesthetic strategies, this study evaluates the presentation of Abu Hamdan’s practice both as art and as evidence, and explores the ways in which acts of acoustic reporting are proposed as a means of making legible disappeared sites, sounds and bodies. It is this proposition, I argue, that marks Saydnaya (the missing 19db) as part of an emerging body of sound and performance works developing new dramaturgical approaches to trauma and making claims that go beyond affective representation. The declaration of the artwork as evidence highlights connections between techniques of reported action emerging in contemporary performance practices and domains associated with investigation and accusation. The essay contends that Abu Hamdan’s project resituates the task of accumulating and presenting evidence as discursive or live art. It complicates the ways in which testimony makes claims to truth-telling and to acts of, in this case sonic, representation. Here, acoustic reports – premised on detachings and recouplings of sound and image – offer as a means to gain creative access to invisible and unimaginable situations and experiences.