In 2011, a few months after the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Tania El Khoury saw an image of a Syrian woman digging a grave for her son in the garden of her home.

^{Unearthing stories in Gardens Speak. Photograph © Jessi Hunniford}

El Khoury, a Lebanese-British artist who works between Beirut and London, discovered that there were similar backyard burials happening all over Syria, as families and friends interred the bodies of activists and protestors in private gardens. The domestic burials were a way to protect living relatives, for the Asad regime had begun targeting funerals. It was also a way to protect the stories of the victims, because some families were begin forced to sign documents that exonerated the regime by falsifying details as to how their loved ones had died.

El Khoury gives 10 such victims their voice back in Gardens Speak, a beautifully conceived interactive sound installation, which premiered in 2014 and which is now being performed at the Adelaide Festival. It contains the oral histories of 10 ordinary Syrians killed during the first two years of the Syrian uprising. Their testimonies have been carefully constructed by El...