Though they are silent, the recent works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Saâdane Afif on view here are all about sound. On the gallery’s ground floor, Hamdan’s Earwitness Inventory, 2018–19, places some ninety-five objects, both found and designed, on warehouse shelving in an installation that draws from legal testimony and historical disasters to capture the complex nature of sonic memories. The contents, which could stock a Foley artist’s library, include stilettos, boxing gloves, a watermelon, celery stalks, frog guiros, plastic soda bottles, and a popcorn popper; Earwitness Inventory (Animated Text), 2018, the accompanying black-and-white video (silent, of course), notes that one tourist remembers hearing the sound of Pop Secret just an hour before her hotel collapsed into a South Florida sinkhole. Nearby, Hamdan’s sculptural doors, Earwitness Inventory (Metal Door Instrument) and Earwitness Inventory (Wooden Door Instrument), both 2018, adorned with locks, keys, and a foldout scissor slide, are like memorials to the domestic sounds that have suddenly been amplified around the globe.

Downstairs, Afif—whose collaborative practice sees songwriters responding to his objects with lyrics, which the artist then translates back into sculpture—evokes not only music and sound, but also the pulsing bodies that, until recently, crowded concert venues and museums. In L’S Bells—The Tool of Busker of the Gray Line, 2012, musician Mount Moon’s guitar, entombed here under glass, is covered with a handwritten list of songs: “Sancho Panza,” “Sun Burst,” “Yes He Pump.” Meanwhile, the ceramic vase in Afif’s installation Salle n°11 de l’exposition Blue Time, Blue Time, Blue Time, IAC (2013) (Room No.11 of the Exhibition Blue Time, Blue Time, Blue Time, IAC [2013]) was inscribed by craftsman Antonio Frias Ornelas with a time stamp marking the work’s collaborative production in Guadalajara, around its rim. One can only imagine what it would sound like if the fragile object were suddenly, unexpectedly smashed. Like a material, silence takes shape, sometimes as tool to help us hear.

— Lillian Davies