This research group, founded in 2010 by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman and consisting of over 20 artists, architects, journalists and researchers who investigate human rights violations, has never been busier. The group has long worked in Palestine, and in January the first exhibition of its Ramallah-based offshoot, the Forensic Architecture Investigation (FAI) Unit, was staged at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences. The exhibition displayed its trademark analysis of found field recordings, media imagery and satellite pictures, as well as 3D animated reconstructions used to create second-by-second retellings of contested events. The unit, set up in 2020, is a collaboration with Al-Haq, a human rights organisation, but one that has been designated a terrorist group by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, and Forensic Architecture has been the subject of much criticism from commentators, particularly in Germany. Shows at Württembergische Kunstverein Stuttgart and Museum im Kulturspeicher (MiK), Würzburg, both concerning racist and anti-immigration violence in Germany, went ahead, however.
The methodology they pioneered, in applying aesthetic analysis to news and events, has proven widely influential, while affiliates and former members, including artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan and curator Anselm Franke, have spread this further in their own work. Positioning artistic tools and interdisciplinary creative research as means to generate evidence of what they term ‘state and corporate violence’, their work’s proposal of art as something that can be instrumentalised is apparently an alluring one for many artists, suggesting art installation as antidote to an image-dominated, post-truth landscape. The current show at CIVA, Brussels, shows their 2023 work on prehistoric architecture in what is now Ukraine; their work on former plantations in Louisiana, USA, becoming petrochemical factories on view at the Wellcome Collection, London; and a selection of their ongoing work on medical staff in Gaza over the past year being exhibited in Vienna. Alongside museum exhibitions also in Istanbul, Portland and Cali, and biennials in Rotterdam and Yogyakarta, their work continues to have both global focus and audiences.
