Exhibit A: How a team of artists, architects, and theorists are exposing state violence
Feature essay for Frieze magazine, February 13, 2016
Forensic Architecture, THE LANDSCAPE OF BATTIR VS. THE STATE OF ISRAEL, the presentation of the 'wall' in Battir before the Israeli High Court, 2014, illustration by Samir Harb. Courtesy Forensic Architecture, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and the Anthropocene Project
Excerpt
Forensic Architecture resembles a CSI unit more than an artist collective, though its activism would set alarm bells ringing in any police department. So why forensics? Weizman links his team’s digital detective work to a ‘forensic turn’ in culture and politics, which he finds on TV and in war crimes investigations that prioritize objective traces over human witnesses. Weizman and his frequent collaborator Thomas Keenan explain in their book Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics (Sternberg Press, 2012) how, in the mid-1980s, forensic anthropologists led a highly publicized effort to determine whether bones exhumed in Brazil belonged to one of the last fugitive Nazi war criminals, Josef Mengele. The media fanfare placed scientists in the position of persuading an international public that a skeleton was ‘guilty’ (of having been a high-ranking Nazi), a feat accomplished with video-imaging tools that superimposed photos of a living Mengele’s face onto his skull. This technique exemplifies what Weizman, writing in the hefty catalogue for HKW’s ‘Forensis’ show, calls ‘prosopopoeia – the mediated speech of inanimate objects’ – a twist on the rhetorical device in which forensic experts enlist digital technologies to bring inert matter to life. Following in these scientists’ footsteps, Forensic Architecture’s aim is less to speak truth to power than to infuse material remains with the power to speak truth.