John Cage learned, inside the anechoic chamber, that silence does not exist. Even in a room engineered to abolish sound, he heard the hum of his nervous system and the low throb of his pulse. The lesson he drew was to let sounds be themselves, unburdened by intention or meaning: listening as a discipline of pure attention, remote from power, politics, or justice. As much inheritor as subverter, Lawrence Abu Hamdan—the self-styled “Private Ear”—has spent more than a decade examining how sound and silence operate as instruments of power.

This May, the Turner Prize-winning artist’s new site-specific installation, 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound (2026), presented in the group show “Canicula” in Venice, is built around a sound that, by official account, never happened. On March 15, 2025, some 300,000 mourners gathered on Belgrade’s Kralja Milana Boulevard for a 15-minute vigil honoring the victims of the Novi Sad canopy collapse. Near the end, the crowd abruptly split down its center, as if fleeing a force that scarcely left a trace on camera and microphone. Predictably, the Serbian government denied that anything had occurred at all. Earshot, the audio-forensic human rights organization Abu Hamdan founded, pieced together the event from more than 3,000 written statements and 15 “earwitness” interviews, eventually identifying the culprit as an LRAD 450XL: a sonic weapon whose signature terror was, by nearly every description, the sound of a vast engine bearing down.