Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s latest project emerged from his involvement with an extensive—and emotionally harrowing—2016 investigation by Forensic Architecture into Saydnaya Prison in Syria, commissioned by Amnesty International. (The investigation was presented in Forensic Architecture’s exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier this year, for which they were nominated for the Turner Prize.) Given the lack of images of Saydnaya, and that prisoners were often kept in darkness or blindfolded, the investigation made use of the inmates’ memories of sounds heard within the prison, sensory experiences made all the more acute given the silence that was brutally enforced. Although the work became one of Amnesty’s biggest campaigns of recent years, and arguably helped to shift perception of the Syrian regime in the West, much of the testimony gathered was of little use in court, although it was not without meaning; such might broadly be considered the status of art, and it was within the space of art that Abu Hamdan found somewhere for that which was previously inadmissible. As with Abu Hamdan’s earlier video Rubber Coated Steel (2016), in which the artist analyzed audio recordings of a 2014 protest in the occupied West Bank to ascertain whether live rounds or rubber …

In an art fair week, when it seems like everyone around is constantly discussing where they were, what they saw, and how it was, discourse is dependent on physical participation, on the encounter with art in a space, strengthening the primacy of the exhibition as a mode of experiencing artwork. While there is still a lot of thinking to be made about how display has historically shaped production and continues to do so, Frieze week in London is a great moment to assess whether there is something about the exhibition that makes it such a lasting form. So why do we still go see exhibitions? Chisenhale Gallery is showing Jumana Manna’s A magical substance flows into me (2015), a 70-minute film screened five times a day. It is an exploration of traditional local music in Palestine/Israel, based on Manna’s research into the work of the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann (1892-1939) in Mandatory Palestine. Manna plays radio recordings made by Lachmann on an iPhone to the participants in her film, ranging from a young Jewish musician singing the Arabic songs her Moroccan grandmother taught her to a Palestinian flute maker who explains that traditional Palestinian music is more fashionable in the West …