| The artist and audio investigator, who calls himself a “private ear,” investigates crimes that are heard but not seen.  Photograph by Gabriel Zimmer for The New Yorker Syria’s Saydnaya Military Prison, run by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, is a secretive facility where thousands of detainees have been tortured and executed. Yet despite its notoriety, little is known about its architecture or inner workings—no photographs of the interior are known to exist, and prisoners are kept in darkness. To learn more about the conditions inside the prison, human-rights groups needed to get creative. In 2016, the audio specialist Lawrence Abu Hamdan interviewed five former detainees, collecting what he calls “earwitness testimony” from their memory of life inside the prison. As Doreen St. Félix writes in this week’s issue, Abu Hamdan has “dedicated himself to unveiling the violence of the world through the medium of sound.” Yet he is not only an investigator; he’s also an international art star. “Abu Hamdan has emphasized that his two practices are distinct,” St. Félix notes. “Yet his switching between the mode of research-based claim-making and that of looser, more interpretive storytelling has made at least some critics uneasy.” | 
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