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Silence or death: Turner finalist Lawrence Abu Hamdan on recreating a horrific Syrian jail

Saydnaya prison is a black hole of abuse where inmates are forced into silence on pain of death. The artist reveals how his library of sound effects helped survivors recount their shocking stories

Three years ago, Lawrence Abu Hamdan spent a week in a room in Istanbul that would transform the way he understood the world. “The things I thought going in and coming out were completely different,” he says. “There was a radical shift. That’s why I made the works I have made.”

Abu Hamdan – 34, neatly bearded, fashionably bespectacled – tells me this in Beirut, where he lives with his wife and daughter. It is a few days before he travels to the UK to install his entry in the Turner prize show in Margate, which will feature the work of three other finalists. We are in an office in the echoing, post-industrial Sfeir-Semler gallery, where many of his works, recent and not-so-recent, are on view until January.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2o7M5gU
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