Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Overdub

Until May 4, mor charpentier in Paris hosts Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Overdub, an exhibition that turns sound into a tool for measuring erasure, suppression, and acoustic violence. The exhibition unfolds almost like a forensic laboratory, except the evidence here hums, reverberates, and occasionally looks more like a medical scan than a courtroom exhibit. Through 3D-printed spectrographs, echographies, and cathode-ray televisions, Abu Hamdan studies accents that have been neutralized, homes reduced to dust, landscapes acoustically transformed, and witnesses silenced. The aim is not to restore what has vanished in full—nothing so neat—but to insist that these suppressed realities do not disappear entirely from perception.

A key work of the exhibition cleverly focuses on the politics of voice with Waterfalls (India, Haiti, Philippines, Pakistan)(2026), made with the sound-investigation collective Earshot. The work addresses an emerging AI technology used in call centres to modify workers’ voices in real time, flattening accents in order to conceal geographic origin and produce what is effectively a “voice without a place.” It is a rather elegant technological solution to a deeply inelegant prejudice. The installation consists of four 3D-printed spectrograms representing dialects from India, Haiti, the Philippines, and Pakistan. Using the “waterfall” technique, voice becomes topography: accent is turned into physical relief. Light placed beneath the resin structures distinguishes the original voice from the altered one—where the light passes through, the worker’s unmodified voice is heard; where the resin darkens, the synthetic vocal signal takes over.

With Echography of Tel Al-Sultan, Abu Hamdan shifts from accent to territory. Since October 2023, he and his colleagues at Earshot have been listening closely to Gaza and its surroundings, noting that the sound of the territory itself has changed. The work borrows the visual language of ultrasound imaging, but instead of tracing the formation of life, it registers its erasure. In these before-and-after echographies of the Tel Al-Sultan district, hard surfaces appear white, softer surfaces grey, and spaces through which sound passes freely appear black. Applied here to a neighborhood transformed from a rural community in 2023 to a devastated zone by 2025, the technique becomes a way of measuring destruction when conventional images from war zones are difficult to access, circulate, or trust.

The exhibition concludes with Planned Obsolescence, where the witness becomes the target. Abu Hamdan and Earshot have observed that, unlike earlier conflicts documented from a distance, cameras and journalists are now increasingly attacked directly. The work presents the last images captured by such devices before their destruction. These stills are shown on cathode-ray televisions—machines that have long outlived their supposed usefulness. There is a certain irony here: the contemporary image, in conditions of urgent necessity, is at risk of disappearance, while the outdated television set stubbornly refuses to die. Abu Hamdan uses that contradiction to frame the work as a tribute to the persistence of free information under conditions designed to erase it.

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Last Updated on March 25, 2026