Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Walled Unwalled is a selected response to Brian Maguire La Grande Illusion from the Hugh Lane Gallery Collection. Curated by Michael Dempsey and Barbara Dawson.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan describes himself as a ‘Private Ear’ working as an artist and audio investigator. His work explores ‘the politics of listening’ and the role of sound and voice within law and human rights. He creates audio-visual installations, lecture performances, audio archives, photography and text, translating in-depth research and investigative work into affective, spatial experiences. For Walled Unwalled, the artist was approached by Amnesty International to investigate the various prisoner testimonies from their experiences inside Sednaya Prison, Syria. As he worked with the multi-disciplinary research group Forensic Architecture, sound became one of the essential tools to digitally reconstruct the interior of the prison, interlinking the series of prisoner narratives gathered as evidence for investigating human rights and violations, heard or experienced through walls of the blindfolded detainees cells.