Lawrence Abu Hamdan: The Sonic Image

This guide documents the works of the Turner Prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan that were part of the exhibition, The Sonic Image, the largest institutional solo exhibition by the artist to date. It includes a foreword by Hoor Al Qasimi and an introduction by curator Omar Kholeif.

Tracing the contours of immaterial forms of surveillance and control, The Sonic Image presented a distinctive form of visual expression exploring concepts of ‘atmospheric violence’ and the politics of listening. In the exhibition, the artist maps out an aesthetic atlas for how we see sound—that leaking of substances which cannot be held by the membrane of either state or person, body or apparatus. The exhibition featured new iterations of recent multisensory works, including an ambitious new commission titled Air Conditioning (2022) and a site-specific performance Daght Jawi: A Live Audio-Visual Essay (2021-2022), presented at the Foundation’s venue, The Flying Saucer.