As with most of his works, a voiceover accompanies the dance. It has a narrative that doubles as prompts for the dancers, but also bleeds into the realm of description. This comes naturally for Núñez, who is visually impaired, though he also includes a separate, live audio description track conceived specifically for blind audiences. For The Square, Núñez, who was born and raised in Costa Rica and is currently a fellow at Princeton University, instructs his dancers to feel the elements, the vibrations of their ancestors, and their third eye. He sounds more like a yoga instructor than a ballet master, encouraging dancers to listen to their bodies rather than dominate them. He wants them to get into a trance.

Núñez says he is unlearning his training in the school of German expressionism as typified by Pina Bausch; in that context, he was taught that to dance is to suffer, an attitude he regards as both Western and ableist. When his dancers generate momentum, they’re instructed to let the energy carry them where it may—a method he describes as decidedly decolonial. Rotations and undulations mark his choreography, dancers revolving around one another as they move, their spines billowing like inchworms. Núñez said his “vortex” method evolved from his trouble judging distances: when everyone rotates around one point, it helps him predict their positions to avoid collisions.

The Square has a score by Alfonso “Poncho” Castro, who uses indigenous Central American instruments like the carraca, basically, a donkey jaw modified by ants; the insects slowly remove the flesh and loosen the teeth. Played with a stick, the carraca produces a sound that Poncho mixes electronically to intone at 432 hertz, “the frequency of the universe,” as Núñez describes it. He presents the frequency as a gift to both the dancers and the audience, saying it “automatically invites people to rest.”

Despite all this, Núñez insists his practice is not one of healing. “I want to nurture and energize my body,” he said, “but I also love this state of feeling the wounds.” He added that, “in marginalized communities, when you are communicating to the world that you are healing, you risk removing the responsibility from all the oppressive structures.” His nuanced approach to the dynamic is a sort of extension of his “vortex” method, with a focus on neither nurturing nor wounds but, rather, both, swirling together. 

In a time when so many artists dabble in video, Nguyen-Chi stands apart for her mastery of cinematic storytelling. Like a true filmmaker, she collaborates with skilled cinematographers and musicians in beautifully shot works built around compelling narrative structures. In Violet Belly, her mother is onscreen telling her story, so it’s understood that she survived, but we’re never told how—just left suspended in blue.

Before studying at Germany’s famed art school Städelschule, Nguyen-Chi, now based in Berlin, worked for a Swiss NGO helping people exposed to Agent Orange. Violet Belly completes a trilogy that deals with Cold War history from her Vietnamese and German perspective. All three personal, poetic videos ensconce viewers in a blue expanse, and she plays with modes of display. When she showed Violet Belly last year in a former refugee center in Amsterdam, now an art space called de Appel, Nguyen-Chi shoved a large, jagged mirror through a slanted projection screen. One evening, a musician performed a live version of the soundtrack on a cello as the projection danced across her instrument. 

This summer, Nguyen-Chi will cover the floor of Norway’s Kunsthall Trondheim with hundreds of ping-pong balls, where she will show two works from the trilogy together for the first time. A mirrored game table will bounce the light from video projectors instead of balls, in reference to Cold War “ping-pong diplomacy.”

Meanwhile, Nguyen-Chi is at work on a new trilogy about three Vietnamese women: her mother (once again) plus an activist and a filmmaker. She said that each of them “embodies some form of resistance, and defines their own freedom despite limitations.” She has borrowed footage left behind by the filmmaker, who documented the Vietnam War, some of it literally drenched in blood. Nguyen-Chi is an artist who handles haunting stories without reducing or sensationalizing them, so it’s hard to imagine such delicate material in better hands. 

To capture this familiar feeling—of needing to do several things at once, of there not being enough hours in the day, of commuting in a state of zombielike exhaustion—the Danish artist Hannah Toticki has created a series of garments that double as life hacks. Her debut museum solo, on view at the National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (EMΣT) through May 28, includes apparel that allows you to sleep anywhere: puff coats that expand into sleeping bags, a sweater with decorative stitching that culminates in ear plugs.

Toticki made another group of garments to ease your housekeeping burden, and her craft is stunning: You might not even notice that a peplum-y tunic, titled Reproductive Labor (2022), comprises dish towels and sponges. With this outfit, there’s no problem if your shirt gets wet, and you will never wonder where you left the towel. It also lightens your laundry load.

I asked Toticki, who has a background in theater, why she decided to make these pieces artworks—edition of one, shown on mannequins in museums—rather than a line of clothing she could sell. (I asked partly for this article, and partly because I wanted one.) She said convincingly that reusing found fabrics to create unique editions is one thing, but trying to mass produce an affordable fashion line ethically and sustainably was its own beast. For my part, I think the garments work better as sculptures anyway: they are more about making a point than they are earnest, labor-saving gimmicks. Plenty such gimmicks already exist—like slippers that can be used to clean your floor as you walk around the house—but they have yet to save us.

In addition to the sleep and housework attire, the EMΣT show, titled “Everything, Everywhere, All the Time, has a set of outfits devoted to production. Prayers for Protection (2016) renders clergy garb in safety orange, drawing a continuum between the protestant work ethic and the cult of capitalism. The exhibition text characterizes our obsession with productivity as a kind of “religious devotion.” A set of gloves features keyboard keys on the fingertips, so you can type on the go. One pair spells out PAY: RENT.

But the show’s standout work is not a garment at all. Instead, RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: (2021) is a kinetic sculpture in which a series of flappy green “hands” ascends a yellow conveyor belt to smack a keyboard that sits at the top. Figures from Karl Marx to Elon Musk have claimed that robots will liberate us from work and free us to create art. But in our time brimming with both technology and workaholism, the opposite seems true. Door Dash drivers and Amazon workers can attest that, instead, robots often demand that humans work more like machines.

In fact, Toticki said the work was inspired by injuries born of industrialization, like carpal tunnel syndrome, which often results from long-term repetitive movement. “We need to develop a new working culture, not just more machines,” she said.

It’s become almost boring to complain about capitalism, or how busy you are. (First off, same. Second, we already know.) But Toticki said she was pleasantly surprised by how many strangers reached out about RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE: to say “that piece is like … my life.” The defeated apathy with which the lifeless hands keep hitting the keyboard in an infinite loop of email replies is almost as silly as it is sad. Certainly, it is an artwork that captures the feeling of exhaustion endemic to our times.

The project has two parts—a video installation, currently on view at both the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Momentary in Arkansas, plus a live performance, premiering at the latter venue on April 21. The green screen’s presence in the performance is especially unusual, as no after-effects can be added live. In the hour-long video, performers move behind green scrims or are cast in green light. It’s easy to imagine them disappearing, but they remain decidedly present.

Below, Rawls talks about the green screen’s meaning. —Emily Watlington

With [siccer], I wanted to make a stop motion film of a dance, which is almost never done! It highlights impossibility of truly capturing a dance. The technique allows you to pause and restart, to tailor what exactly gets captured. It also means the camera operator is kind of dancing with the performer.

Stop motion draws attention to what is missing from an image, and what happens between the frames. The project is very much a product of the pandemic, of continually asking, how do you keep something alive?

I’m often trying to collapse the labor of stagecraft into dancing. I wanted to draw attention to the labor of production, which often involves as much of a choreography as dances themselves. Usually, green screens are made to disappear, along with the labor of the people involved in the production.

People say the color green is supposed to look bad on skin, but that’s predominately true for white performers: so much of stagecraft has been calibrated to look good for white skin, but brown skin can look really beautiful in green. Still, green is thought of as sickly, alien, witchy.

The video includes a Ray Charles cover of Kermit’s anthem “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Ray Charles appeared on Sesame Street with Kermit, so even Sesame Street was thinking through Blackness and the Blues in relation to the color green. I’m a child of the 1980s, so my imagination was really formed by these kinds of playful meetings of the animated with the real life. Sesame Street segments often involve significant teaching moments.

The title refers to [sic], which is what you use when you’re quoting something that is not standard English, or is misspelled, or is in a dialect. The gesture proves your credibility as a good writer by pointing out that you know your source is incorrect. I’m always interested in the relationship between language and performance, and I was thinking about how, when you repeat a phrase or a gesture over and over, it often starts to fall apart. Also, citations followed by [sic] are usually pulled out of context, and that sort of decontextualization is analogous to what mass media does to the gestures and creativity of Black people.

[Siccer] is a title that applies to two works of art: I’m trying to undo what a single title points to, in terms of the object referents. The title is a nerdy grammatical reference, but it also alludes to the question of who gets sicker in the pandemic. The stop motion technique alludes to who gets lost in this attempt for continuity, this demand to keep going.

At the MCA, I installed speakers along the spiral staircase, so the sound sweeps up and down. The film is kind of a portrait of the making of the film. It has five individual portraits, one of each performer, and a then group portrait. Each character has a special effect moment, but it always snaps back to reality. In Katrina Reid’s, her body becomes pixelated and then comes back together. I’m really excited about pixelation as an aesthetic because it’s the moment when the image starts to lose its integrity.

The film also has “behind-the-scenes” footage where you see the film being produced; these scenes are their own aesthetic experience. I re-organize the footage for each installation, which is my way of trying to keep it alive.

How would you describe your research process?  

I’m trained in architecture, and architects do this thing called site analysis: when you’re assigned a site, you study it from economic, political, social, geological, and other perspectives. I eventually began to apply the same logic to found objects, excavating stories that are all around us. But I have to admit that I never really thought about my work as research-based, because my research isn’t very academic. It’s more that, sometimes, I encounter random things and then just kind of follow them. I’m drawn to the accidents, anecdotes, rumors, and detours. I have to confess that I failed my theory classes—but I’m a big fan of short stories.  

One reason your work stands out under the umbrella of artistic research is that so much other art in that vein can be didactic or even moralistic, whereas you place an emphasis on nuance, like in “Arabesque.”

I don’t want my work to simply announce itself. For me, it’s not the case that, if only you knew what I know, then you’ll get what I’m doing. It’s less about passing on knowledge and more about research as a method of meandering. My work is political work in the Greek sense of the word “polis”: it’s a place where people have a conversation. 

“Arabesque” (2020) was born of an accident. In a thrift store in Beirut, I came across this 19th-century manuscript by a French ornamental specialist named Jules Bourgoin. As somebody who was born in 1983, I was mostly taught history as something that happened from World War II onward, but with this project, I became fascinated by how much we still live in the shadow of the 19th century.

Bourgoin was part of these French archaeological missions to Egypt. He was sent to make drawings of buildings and ornaments; the French were obsessed with Orientalism at the time. His drawing wound up being utilized by interior decorators in Paris, who made fake oriental interiors, and he realized that his studies were being instrumentalized in a pastiche way. In 2020 I showed the work in a show called “Arabesque” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. The title is a European concept; it doesn’t exist in Arabic. I took every page of that book and cut out forms, then folded them back. So you’re actually looking at the back of the print. Basically, I abstracted the abstractions. There’s a sense in which I’m destroying the manuscript too. I wouldn’t quite call it reverse Orientalism, but it’s a form of exaggerating the problematics of that way of thinking, hopefully.

How about “Fragments”?

“Fragments” (2016–ongoing) is a multiyear project that looked at an archaeological dig that took place between 1911 and 1913, and then again, between 1927 and 1929, in Tell Halaf, on the border between Syria and Turkey. The dig was led by an amateur archaeologist named Max von Oppenheim. My great-grandfather worked on this dig in the summer of 1929, as Oppenheim’s personal secretary and translator. I found photos of them together, and correspondence between them. In 2016 I was headed to Berlin for a residency and thought, Well, this guy is German—maybe I should look into it. A lot of the material that he excavated wound up at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, so I sent an email to something like info@pergamonmuseum [saying] “I’m the great-grandson of somebody who worked to dig up objects in your collection.” I wound up meeting with these two incredible conservators who told me “we’ve been waiting for you.”

They had photos from the dig with my great-grandfather in the background, but they had never identified him. They’d been researching Oppenheim since the ’90s; he was quite a character. He opened his own museum in Berlin with the material that he brought back, but the museum was bombed during World War II, so most of it was destroyed. Then, Berlin was divided and the fragments got separated. But after reunification, the conservators started putting them back together. I was there when ISIS was destroying sites like Palmyra and became fascinated by this story in part because the objects were destroyed in Berlin, not Syria. This complicates the idea that objects are somehow safer in the West. 

How did “Fragments” progress from there?

Six or seven museums throughout the world have objects from Tell Halaf, so I started contacting all of them. The museums share parts of this same large frieze that was made of about 200 stone slabs, now divided and dispersed. I asked for permission to make rubbings of those objects. The project culminated in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 called “Alien Property.” The Met holds four of these stone tablets, which they acquired as a result of the Alien Property Custodian Act. Enacted in World War I and reactivated during World War II, the act said that objects belonging to US enemies on US soil could be requisitioned and put up for auction. 

Between the wars, Oppenheim was short on cash, since he was building a museum, so he brought eight stone reliefs to try and sell them to collectors in New York. He arrived right after the stock market crashed, so he didn’t find any buyers. He stuck them in storage and went back to Berlin. Fifteen years later, at the height of World War II, the alien property custodian police realized that the tablets were in a storage room in New Jersey, and that they were owned by the enemy. The Met acquired all eight of them, and then sold four to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. This transaction was legal, but today it’s no longer considered ethical. 

At the Met, I showed the acquisition documents—the first time the Met ever made acquisition documents public. I also showed personal artifacts from my great-grandfather, as well as rubbings I made of the friezes at the Louvre, the Pergamon, the Walters, and the Met. The show also included a rug, a work called Genealogy (2016–ongoing). My great-grandfather was actually sent to work as Oppenheim’s secretary in order to gather intelligence information on him for the French authorities, because they suspected the archaeologist was radicalizing Bedouin tribes for a possible coup; at the time, Syria and Lebanon were under French mandate. At the end of his mission, my great-grandfather received this rug made out of goat hair. He had nothing else to leave behind when he died, so he decided to cut the rug into five pieces for his children, who then divided it further among their descendants; this will continue until it disappears. In a strange way, the fate of the rug mirrors the fate of the stone slabs. I wanted to parallel a personal story and an institutional story so it isn’t just me pointing a finger. 

Your current research project also relates to matters of looted cultural heritage.

That research is for a show called “The Return,” which opens in Beirut in May, and for a performance I’ll premiere at Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels. In the summer of 2017, a sculpture of a bull’s head was requisitioned from the Greek and Roman galleries at the Met, then returned to the National Museum of Beirut the following year. In 2018 I visited the museum in Beirut and noticed the wall text said something vague, like “these objects disappeared during the Civil War and have been repatriated.” I did some digging and realized that the bull’s head had been returned from the Met to Lebanon after a court case. It was displayed alongside some other objects that had been returned willingly, once the collectors were notified they’d been looted. The case was groundbreaking in that it led to the uncovering of a web of [unethical] antiquities dealers. 

Then there was a revolution in Lebanon, and then a pandemic, and then the port explosion in Beirut, so I forgot about the bull completely. I had put a Google alert on the sculpture, so when the court documents were made public in December 2020, I got a notification. And the story is stranger than fiction. 

How does it go?

It begins in the summer of 1967, when about 600 objects are uncovered at the temple in the south of Lebanon. The Civil War started in 1975; by 1979, the site came under threat, so the head of the National Museum decided to move all the objects north. In 1981, a group of Christian militiamen stormed a storage room and stole the objects. For the next 15 years, the story is mysteriously dark, but, eventually, the bull’s head appears in a Bronx storage room belonging to a now-disgraced British art dealer. In 1996 he sold it to a Colorado couple for $1 million. Then they sold it to someone else, the billionaire Michael Steinhardt. He was renovating his apartment at the time, so rather than taking possession of the object, he lent it to the Met, where it was on display for four years, until one of the curators recognized it as looted and contacted Lebanese authorities. Steinhardt relinquished ownership and it wound up back with the couple. When they refused to send it back, the federal court case began.

When the object was first uncovered in 1967, archaeologists took four black-and-white photos. Then—I’m not making this up—50 years later, to the day, the police requisitioned the bull’s head. By complete accident, they took four extremely similar photos. The entire court case wound up hinging on whether or not the four photos taken in ’67 were of the same object photographed in 2017. 

The object was ultimately returned to Lebanon, but in a sense, the story could not be returned. At the end of the Lebanese Civil War, the peace agreement stipulated that all criminal activity during the war was to be absolved. Everyone was pardoned. In a government institution, you can’t say something like “these objects were stolen” without implicitly blaming someone for stealing them. So all the curators could say was, basically, “this object disappeared, and then reappeared.” 

My installation, at Sfeir-Semler gallery in Beirut, will tell the story while the bull’s head is on view at the National Museum. I’m usually against showing documents as art, but in this case, I’m printing out every single document that I was able to get from the New York Supreme Court, alongside the photos of the bull’s head, shown mural-size. It marks the return of the story.  

The two men presented this and other findings in the exhibition “A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture,” Israel’s official entry to the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. Unsurprisingly, the show was swiftly canceled by the Israel Association of United Architects, which oversees the country’s contribution. But for Weizman—who later published the book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), on this and other designs he sees as instruments of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF)—the findings were formative. He has since devoted himself to using architectural analysis to investigate human rights violations committed by states worldwide.

In 2010, with the help of a European Research Council grant, Weizman formed a research center called Forensic Architecture (FA) at Goldsmiths in London, where he is a professor. Sustained by grants and university funding, the center draws researchers and students from different departments, and offers master’s degrees and PhDs in forensic architecture, along with the chance to join a team of investigators comprising more than 100 current and former members. And, at least according to the books that members have written on their own work—Forensic Architecture (2017) and Investigative Aesthetics (2021)—FA is more than a formal group: it’s a movement and a methodology.

After realizing how much they could glean about architecture and state power from satellite imagery, Weizman and his collaborators developed digital methods for studying buildings and the traces that conflicts leave on them. They have investigated tragedies including bombings in Gaza, migrant death and mistreatment in the Mediterranean, environmental racism in Louisiana, air strikes in Ukraine, and, time and again, abuses by the IDF. The group’s tools include making models and timelines that cross-reference and contextualize clips and images—evidentiary fragments—in time and space. Mapping videos they find online, source from satellites, or gather from activists and witnesses, FA members create panoramas that document crime scenes. Often, they use a technique called photogrammetry, a technique for extracting measurements from a series of photographs to create 3D models.

Weizman says he often arranges fragments to tell a story that “unfolds between images rather than within images.” Citing theorist Katrina Sluis, the group refers to our current time as “post-photographic,” an era when individual images are less telling than the relations between them. And so they build models to fill in the gaps.

THE FIRST PROJECT catalogued in Forensic Architecture’s extensive online archive is a 2012 commission from Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard. He asked the group to survey the West Bank town of Battir and model the impact that a proposed Israeli security wall would have on the residents. FA found the plan would block Palestinian access to an important Ottoman train route connecting Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Petitions and protests proliferated. (When, in 2015, UNESCO granted the region endangered World Heritage status for its striking ancient irrigation system, the security wall project was swiftly canceled.)

Sfard also commissioned FA to look into an earlier incident: the 2009 death of Palestinian demonstrator Bassem Abu Rahma, who was killed by a tear gas canister fired by an IDF soldier. Abu Rahma was protesting the continued presence of a “closed military zone” fence near the village of Bil’in that Israel’s Supreme Court had already deemed unconstitutional. In the video, Sfard says that “expansionist ideas” delayed implementation of the court’s ruling for several years.

The IDF initially decided not to investigate the killing. FA responded by triangulating footage shot by three different witnesses, showing that the shooter, who is outside the frame in all three clips, had pointed his tear gas gun directly into Abu Rahma’s chest. Legally, the soldier was allowed to shoot the projectile only upward, at a trajectory of 60 degrees. The canister’s purpose is to dispense tear gas, not to fire a projectile. The court eventually ruled that the soldier was in the wrong, but it accepted the IDF’s claim that the individual could not be identified. This project, the first of many FA digital spatial reconstructions, kicked off the group’s practice of investigating injustices committed by governments around the world, which often avoid prosecuting their own agents.

FA’s ideas are an effective antidote to the ennui gnawing at many architects. For those fed up with working at corporate firms for long hours and low wages, just to be what architecture critic David Huber has called “designer-minions serving the interests of powerful clients,” the Goldsmiths group represents a way to channel disciplinary expertise toward something more humane. In architecture school, students are often asked to dream up ideal worlds; in firms, they find that only a small sliver of the population has the means to commission new construction, and patrons’ values can sometimes be at odds with their own.

In 2014, Forensic Architecture mounted its first-ever museum exhibition, “Forensis,” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Very quickly, new conundrums arose. The show included projects commissioned by various human rights organizations, plus a self-initiated work that treated the museum, not the courtroom, as its forum; like FA’s other investigations, this latter piece, which concerns the death of 63 Libyan migrants left adrift at sea for two weeks, was shown as a video. But here, viewers don’t see lawyers speaking in offices or shaky on-the-scene iPhone footage. Instead, the screen looks like a game of Battleship; video interviews with the few migrants who survived show up as small frames plotted on a cool blue map. Meanwhile, a voiceover asks unsettling questions, among them “what are the conditions that turn the sea into a deadly liquid?” With its digital renderings and ominous soundtrack, the work is much more produced than FA’s commissioned projects.

Forensic Architecture is always forthright about who instigates and funds a given inquiry. Whether ongoing cases or self-initiated projects, the group hopes that publicity from museums will put pressure on the powers that be, and effect change. In a 2021 Guardian article, the group wrote—collectively, citing no member names—that it exhibits its findings in galleries and museums “when other sites of accountability are inaccessible,” as if art is the last resort. But this is misleading, since projects are often shown in several forums.

Occasionally, commentators seeking to discredit FA’s investigations will dismiss the group as “just artists,” but FA emphatically refuses to distinguish between art and investigation. They argue that craft and performance—what Weizman calls “aesthetics”—are embedded in every story told in courtrooms and newspapers.

Their presence in the art world establishment is only growing: the group’s work has made a splash in nearly every major biennial of late, and in 2018, they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. Weizman reacted to the news with a tweet, asking, “will it help promote FA’s cause and investigations (what matters) or get us subsumed within the arts-financial-complex?” He then declared, “I’d rather lose prizes and win cases.”

WEISMAN’S OFTEN-QUOTED COMMENT expressing suspicion about the award suggests that FA was indifferent to the art world until institutions came along, and only then begrudgingly acquiesced in the interest of greater visibility for their causes. But this is not how it happened. When I reached out to Anselm Franke of HKW, who cocurated FA’s inaugural exhibition with Weizman, Franke said that at the time he was a member of the group (or, in his words, “a double agent”). On its website, Forensic Architecture members designate themselves and HKW as the show’s co-funders.

Weizman said in a 2018 Frieze interview that “the decision to show things in exhibitions is made in consultation with the lawyers and families involved.” But this does not always resolve the uncomfortable dynamic at play when it seems as if FA is making a career exploiting peoples’ trauma. Often, they show the research years after the cases have been closed, and it isn’t always clear who benefits from the display.

These dynamics are most suspect in works that focus more on the group’s innovative uses of technology than on human rights violations. FA almost always presents its findings in the form of interactive online platforms, or as videos with didactic voiceovers that explain the situation and the investigative process. The group says that the goal of these explanations is transparency: they are making their methods open-source so that others can replicate them. But too often, in effect, FA’s impressive handling of the technology becomes the narrative’s protagonist.

In their first investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria, in Khan Sheikhoun, the group endeavored to measure the size of a weapon’s impact crater, hoping to help determine what exactly left the indentation. They used a complex process of photogrammetry—but since the crater is less than 5 feet wide and they had collaborators on the ground gathering fragments, a tape measure would probably have sufficed. When Artnet News critic Ben Davis reviewed Airstrike on Babyn Yar (2022), a project about a missile attack in Ukraine, he pointed out that FA’s investigation basically determined that “the time of a particular Russian airstrike was … the same as the first reports of that same Russian airstrike.”

Other works evoke the saying that, to someone with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Some of FA’s architectural spins on human rights abuses can feel forced, though Weizman’s blunt rationale is that “most people dying in contemporary conflicts die in buildings.” Take FA’s project investigating a Syrian military prison located in Saydnaya, just north of Damascus. Prisoners there were kept in the dark for years at a time, sensory deprivation being just one of many ways in which they were tortured. Journalists were forbidden access to the prison. But FA, with a commission from Amnesty International, managed to get in touch with several survivors. Their most vivid memories were of sounds, which they relayed to FA member Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Like a Foley artist, Hamdan re-created the sounds they described, and worked with other FA members to map the noises on a digital model of the prison’s interior that they based on satellite imagery of the exterior. Some prisoners were kept in solitary confinement with so little stimuli that they memorized exactly how many tiles lined the floors of their cells.

The excruciating testimonies sometimes conflict—which is understandable, since the victims were severely traumatized and couldn’t see—but work’s the final form, a 3D model of the building, allows no room for uncertainty or ambiguity. On the website, you can click on various rooms to hear witnesses recall heart-wrenching experiences of torture, along with Foley sounds linked to their memories. Conceptually, re-creating a space based on sonic memories is a darkly poetic prompt. But since the work isn’t meant to be poetic but rather to effect change, it’s less clear why a model of the building is the medium of choice, given that it is based on conflicting accounts, and thus doomed to inaccuracy.

MOST FA MEMBERS are trained in architecture, but really, what they produce is video art, insofar as they are constantly showing moving image works in museums. In a 2017 Artforum essay titled “Real Fictions: Alternatives to Alternative Facts,” Hal Foster mentions FA’s practice alongside those of German artist-filmmakers Harun Farocki and Hito Steyerl. Each of the three responds “to the near monopoly, on the part of corporations and governments, over what counts as real.” Bringing in the work of Trevor Paglen, Foster argued that, rather than positioning themselves as deconstructionists who merely challenge meanings once thought secure, these artists reconstruct significant facts: they combine artifice with documentary in order to dredge up truths that have been occluded.

These “reconstructionists” seem to conceive the artist as a gifted seer, someone who helps all of us see threats and truths hidden in plain sight. In Weizman’s view, “at a time when there are so many images and so much footage coming out of war zones, the work of the image practitioners on our team—the filmmakers, photographers, and artists—is evidently essential.” Onscreen, reconstructionist filmmakers might freeze frames or draw circles and lines that show viewers where and how to look.

Weizman has himself cited Farocki and Steyerl as influences, but FA’s practice differs from that of the two German filmmakers in important ways. Steyerl’s 2013 magnum opus, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, exposes facts about the omnipresence of surveillance, and responds with an absurdist instructional video that tells viewers how to hide. Her desperate tips, including a quip recommending “being female and over 50,” gesture toward the futility of the goal.

Steyerl’s work helped popularize an understanding of surveillance technology, as well as a view of technocracy. But it isn’t merely didactic (despite the title): it also deals poignantly with the frenetic and helpless feelings induced by the facts it brings up. Watching it, one is never counting on the work to be fully factual.

Earlier, in his landmark work Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989), Farocki told an astonishing story about the links between pictures and conflicts in a landmark essay film conveyed mostly through visuals, especially, aerial photography. Farocki, Steyerl’s teacher, remarked that he tried “not to add ideas to the film” but instead to “look for submerged meaning” in the footage. The finished works are open-ended. He invited his viewers to be active and engaged, and to come to their own conclusions.

Many early video artists—Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham among them—were terrified of how easily the moving image could brainwash viewers, so they endeavored to use the tool to awaken a critical consciousness in their audience, to equip them with a kind of skepticism and media literacy. Farocki, in a similar fashion, embodies a mantra from Filmmaking 101: show, don’t tell. But FA, for their part, makes sure there is no room for ambiguity, effectively suggesting that exploiting the medium’s brainwashing qualities is OK if the politics are good.

FA readily embraces technology as a tool, while the German filmmakers proffered endless warnings. Foster reads Images of the World to mean “that we can no longer hold humanist uses of seeing, measuring, and imaging apart from military, industrial, and bureaucratic abuses of such techniques.” But FA contends that “the politics of images are not predetermined by the technology they were captured in.” In other words, they turn tools of surveillance back on the governments and corporations that seek to control those tools.

FA’s works, however, often contradict their own theoretical arguments. The group calls mapping, perhaps its most frequently used tool, a “colonial technique of power.” It decries sensory overload as a form of torture, even “a foundation of state and empire,” referring to how hyperesthesia assaults our senses and confounds our ability to think. But then, Triple-Chaser (2019), one of FA’s best-known works, assails viewers with a long stroboscopic scene depicting tear gas canisters against brightly colored backgrounds. The video can be painful to watch.

SURPRISINGLY, IN “REAL FICTIONS,” Foster makes no mention of the danger of artist-researchers proffering alternative facts in the age of post-truth. But today, in the aftermath of a blatantly lying president, rampant climate-change denialism, and a lethal anti-vaccine hysteria, the risk is of urgent concern.

Less surprisingly, FA’s stance on the matter of post-truth is rife with contradictions. In its early years, the group managed to avoid the issue almost completely. But when pressed by interviewers, Weizman has maintained that all news involves some kind of “aesthetics” and questions why it should be distinguished from art.

FA seems to take this as permission to muddle index and inference. When one “fact” in their work is a guess and another is known, we are sometimes told as much in a voiceover, but often, both items are treated the same in the final timeline or model. In fact, the group has stated outright that “forensic aesthetics is about reducing the gap between what is certain and what is probable,” and there are countless places in their confident voiceovers that really ought to include a small hedge, words like probably or suggests. Though the group is transparent about its processes, it is seldom so when it comes to raw data. Perturbingly, even the group photo that accompanied the announcement of their Turner Prize nomination appears, upon close inspection, photoshopped: a few members’ heads float behind the shoulders of others, apparently unattached to bodies that might anchor them to the scene. It can be hard to get a global group together in one room, but why not collage individual portraits in a way that makes the composite nature of the image unmistakable? Forensic Architecture chose instead to cover up the seams.

Weizman has said that most of the “fake news” accusations lodged against FA come from parties who disagree with the group’s politics. But even as the group offers proof in conventional forms, it still cites one of Nietzsche’s most controversial claims—“there are no facts, only interpretations”—as a guiding maxim. In their 2021 book Investigative Aesthetics, Weizman and fellow Goldsmiths professor Matthew Fuller even praise Surrealist artists before them who “insist on the real as something that must be invented.”

In Weizman’s 2019 essay “Open Verification,” published in e-flux Architecture, where former FA member Nick Axel is deputy editor, he resorts to mental gymnastics to try to distinguish his methodology from that of the alt-right. Weizman writes that, understandably, he is interested in questioning established authorities: “government experts, universities, science laboratories, mainstream media, and the judiciary.” Then he goes on to say that, rather than descend into resignation or relativism, he proposes a “more vital and risky form of truth production.” But these post-truth relativists are a straw man: wouldn’t most poll watchers and anti-vaccine citizen scientists describe themselves as Weizman does?

While investigative aesthetics “remains suspicious of terms such as ‘fact,’ ‘evidence,’ ‘truth;’ and ‘knowledge,’” Weizman explains, it seeks to “reframe and tease them open rather than abandon them.” Here, as elsewhere, he tries to have it both ways, which is perhaps no way at all. Compounding his contradictions, he claims that, despite the group’s name, what Forensic Architecture really does is “counter-forensics.” This term refers to a practice of Argentinean activists who, in the 1980s, exhumed and analyzed the bodily remains of victims of political repression. Forensics are for police; FA hopes to hold the state accountable for its crimes.

It’s easy to understand why FA members, like many others, are suspicious of “the authority of experts and their institutions of knowledge.” The French philosopher Bruno Latour spent his life urging scientists to consider that their tools for measurement and study are not inherently neutral, but always reflect particular social and political contexts. Latour was influential in asking people to question the ways that knowledge is produced. But late in life, he made an important clarification: in questioning tools and infrastructure, he said, he never meant to pave the way for post-truth. As Farocki and Latour advocated, we ought to abandon our faith not in truth but in tools.

ART DOES NOT HAVE PROTOCOLS for verification or accountability the way other disciplines do. In journalism, there are certainly errors, but there are also mechanisms for correcting errors, even though such accountability can never perfectly right a wrong. FA, however, in refusing to be confined by a single discipline also elides professional infrastructures for accountability.

The conceit seems to be: it’s OK if some details are imperfect; what matters are the results. Each case is detailed on FA’s website, where any follow-up is also logged, and the real-world impact is often impressive. When FA showed Triple-Chaser at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, I was, first and foremost, elated that it helped get Warren Kanders off the museum’s board. The businessman owned Safariland, a tear gas manufacturer, and the video showed his products being used to suppress protests around the world. If that were truly the cost of art, no thank you! But in the spectacular and seductive work—with David Byrne as narrator—the group took shortcuts, like saying “we found evidence” of Safariland’s products in numerous countries, without disclosing what the evidence was. This bears some concerning similarities to moves from the Fox News handbook of demagoguery. The video explains enthusiastically how FA’s advanced algorithm aimed to identify canisters that were Safariland Triple-Chasers. Meanwhile, the detection algorithm displays only 6 percent confidence that it has identified a match in a canister shown on-screen with a label as plain as day.

FA’s work is undeniably important and useful. But the beliefs that underpin it—and that it also propagates—are dangerous. And the group’s influence is spreading. When Artnet News writer Hili Perlson covered FA’s breakout presentation at Documenta 14, she said the work on view was “stretching the definition of what may constitute an artwork.” Five years later, when Davis, the Artnet News critic, reviewed the 2022 Berlin Biennale, which included many works by the group, he noted that their “art-as-investigation genre is one of the most prominent and in-demand genres of art.”

FA is certainly not the enemy. I’m reminded of this in their investigation of Nakba Day shootings in 2014, when two Palestinian teenagers, Nadeem Nawara and Mohammed Abu Daher, were killed by IDF soldiers. Nadeem’s father found the bullet that killed his son inside the boy’s school bag, but the IDF claimed the bullet was rubber and the evidence was doctored. FA found, among other pieces of evidence, a chilling comment in an online forum: An anonymous IDF soldier explained how to make it seem as if you are shooting a rubber bullet when in fact you are shooting a live round. Then he adds that such precautions are probably unnecessary, since “in any case … the Palestinians take the body and there is no investigation.” But that year, thanks in part to FA, there was. The resulting sentence was the very first time an IDF soldier was charged with killing a minor—though the trial lasted almost four years, and the prosecution agreed to a plea deal.

Still, I worry that their fuzzy evidence and debatable conclusions sometimes give fodder to the enemies we have in common, even as I understand that the pursuit of truth can seem pointless when anyway, “there is no investigation.” Today, frankly, art with good politics is unlikely to be criticized. But shouldn’t we be asking our allies to do better? Now, as the FA model of investigative artistic research propagates—taking such forms as a news channel by the artist group For Freedoms, or an artist-led podcast on public health called Death Panel—it’s important to think about the consequences. Though the crisis of the moment may feel urgent, the long-term effects of eroding a shared belief in truth are far more dangerous.  

Correction, 3/17/23, 9:50 a.m.: A previous version of this article referred to Nick Axel as an FA member. He is actually a former FA member. 

The work is a lodestar for the 15th Sharjah Biennial, curated by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi. The theme of this biennial, “Thinking Historically in the Present,” was proposed by the influential curator Okwui Enwezor before his untimely death in 2019. Enwezor’s 2002 Documenta and 2015 Venice Biennale opened up important pathways for artists from the Global South, and started conversations about decolonizing canons and museums.

The artists in this show draw attention to stories from and perspectives on history that remain obscured (in some cases) or overlooked (in others), in works that range from essay films to figurative paintings to monumental sculptures. Spread across 16 sites in the Emirate of Sharjah, the biennial’s greatest strength is that it is emphatically pluralistic and multicultural, but it also demonstrates the side effect of such an approach: namely, the pitfalls of placing artists in the awkward role of cultural ambassadors asked to contextualize references they can’t reasonably expect a “global” audience to get.

The strongest pieces involve artists consciously grappling with their ambassadorial position. The result is a kind of institutional critique taking up the inequities that come with making work for international audiences, skewed toward people with the means (and passports) to jet around the world. In a standout video by Zimbabwean artist mandla, the artist tells stories about having changed their name more than once—in one case, because “how colonized do you have to be to see a baby in Africa and call it Bridgit?” and then again because, after moving to the UK, they grew tired of having to teach Anglophones to pronounce the “nk” syllable. Expressing a twinned desire for opacity and legibility, the story exemplifies the catch-22 that international art festivals ask most participating artists to navigate.

The conundrum is not the artists’ fault, but some solutions are better than others. Some works fell victim to a kind of didacticism in the forms of explanatory voiceovers, wordy works, and lengthy handouts. Sammy Baloji’s installation Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction (2022) responds to a fascinating story set in the Belgian Congo in the 1940s, where the Soviet Union and the United States compete for access to uranium. But it’s too easy to get lost trying to navigate the gulf between the abstractions he shows on the wall—red and yellow geometric gradients laid over grayscale clouds—and the vitrines filled with pertinent archival documents in several languages.

Hangama Amiri tells a story more impactfully in Threshold (2022): displayed next to Fermentation of the Brain, it also comprises a grid of desks. Amiri sewed uniforms worn by Afghani schoolgirls, then hung them in a large black rectangle that approximates a chalkboard. In 1996, when Amiri was six, the Taliban took over her native Kabul and banned the education of girls and women; in 2021, the Taliban did this again. A recent Yale MFA graduate, the artist displayed her new uniforms with torn and frayed hems that connect one garment to another. The gesture is both mournful and defiant.

Other strong examples address the complexities of cultural exchange and cross-cultural solidarity, like Isaac Julien’s enchanting 2022 video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die). The 30-minute, 5-channel work traces the impact that Albert Barnes’s collection of African art—among the first comprehensive examples in the US—had on the art and thought of the Harlem Renaissance. There’s also the sound installation Hum II (2023) by Hajra Waheed, a deserving winner of the Sharjah Biennial Prize. The artist recorded people humming various songs associated with popular uprisings around the world—Kurdish folk songs, K-pop hits—then played the audio in a cone-shaped space. The simple structure effects a kind of amplification that is surprisingly stunning: when a singer draws a breath, it feels almost immersive.

In the UAE, where just over 10 percent of residents are citizens, cross-cultural exchanges constantly occur. As a major economic hub in the Global South, it is home to a significant population of migrants who come to find work, and is notorious for inequality. The royal-run biennial doesn’t entirely shy away from addressing these conditions. At the Sheikh Khalid bin Mohammed Palace (now an art space in the desert town of Al Dhaid), Dubai-based artist Asma Belhamar replaced dilapidated decorative segments of the building’s surrounding wall with warped versions. The eye-catching interventions draw the gaze upward, toward the rooftop railing: the artist seeks to highlight the balustrade’s South Asian origins, and honor the impact that migrant labor has had on Emirati culture. Implicitly, the work asks what it means to celebrate a culture while mistreating its people, and chafes at the distinction between tolerance and equity.

None of this is particularly new. One of the few threads in the show that did feel new involves artists finding traces of human history in nature. The effect humans are having on the environment is not presented as a subject or as news, but as a precondition affecting everything artists explore. In his new film Arcadia (2023), John Akomfrah outdoes National Geographic with sublime landscape shots spanning five channels. A meandering meditation juxtaposing natural scenes with industrial ones, the film shows a sinuous river, a vast panorama of hundreds of airplanes parked in a grid, and a stunning pyramid. Meanwhile, Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme present a striking installation, Until we became fire and fire us (2023), that dwells on Palestinian histories that have been literally buried. Beaches that used to be villages and parking lots that used to be graveyards figure in a poem that is repeated and fractured across videos, sounds, and images tucked into various crevices throughout overgrown ruins in Sharjah’s Al Mureijah square. The work’s fragmented nature is meant to evoke the discontinuous relationship between Palestinians and their land.

That Sharjah’s 15th edition honored Okwui Enwezor’s legacy—a goal expressly set out by Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi—was both a blessing and a curse. Enwezor’s influence is keenly felt in the world of curating, and deserves to be honored, but revisiting his concerns makes the show feel overly familiar in its argument and artist list. The exhibition even recapitulates the underrepresentation of Latin American artists seemingly endemic to decolonial biennials. By contrast, last year’s Documenta and Carnegie International both built on Enwezor’s legacy to radically rethink the global exhibition format, expose the frictions inherent in importing art from the Global South into Western frameworks like biennials. They asked questions that left the art world wondering, where do we go from here? On these heels, “Thinking Historically in the Present” feels more like a recap of the important work of institution building and canon expansion that Enwezor and Al Qasimi have done in the last few decades than it does a way forward. But while we figure out what’s next, the show reminds us that we have plenty of world history to catch up on.

EMILY WATLINGTON How did you land on art as a tool for telling truthful stories?

JILL MAGID I’m more interested in probing the ethical implications of facts than in representing facts themselves—though a true story lends a particular kind of authority to a point. In my work, I’m interested in understanding and posing questions to systems of power; usually, the work is indexical to that system, whether it’s a surveillance system or copyright law. By exploring these systems in ways that are different from traditional research, I can try to peel away or subvert some of the meanings implicit in how they work. I don’t tell stories so much as I produce them.

LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN Clearly, we’re living amid a crisis of storytelling. The conventional ways in which stories are being told seem not to land effectively. So I think it’s necessary to experiment with forms as we speak to issues, hopefully allowing them to be better felt and understood. For me, it’s not really a question of whether I’m using art or not—it’s about experimenting with the ways we listen.

Also, I don’t think art is a place where you add a layer of aesthetic practice to the telling of stories or the relaying of issues. Stories told in the news are aestheticized and adhere to certain conventions. I don’t see art as an exceptional space in that regard. But it is useful for showing that there are other ways to mobilize aesthetics and make things sensible. It’s not that “truth” isn’t in art and is in the news. Neither history books nor news stories are inherently objective. I see my work as being more about claim-making than about storytelling.

MAGID I agree that certain forms of aestheticization happen in all these mediums, not just art. The aesthetics are the politics, they’re same thing.

CRYSTAL Z CAMPBELL But art doesn’t have discipline-centered ethical guidelines or codes of conduct that affect the kind of work that is done or how you work with other people. These exist in other fields. I find this interesting, but it’s also a problem. Though I don’t think an artist should necessarily feel beholden to truth-telling or factual accuracy. Instead, I frame my work as being interested in the perception of different narratives, and in using strategies of art to propose alternative narratives around particular histories.

WATLINGTON For each of you, “artistic research” seems like a way to draw attention to topics that are suppressed by various institutions, systems, or political entities.

MAGID I don’t know about you guys, but I get “Oh, so you’re a research artist” a lot. And I find myself thinking, Well, maybe—but Robert Ryman researched variations of the color white his entire life.

ABU HAMDAN That’s forensic right there!

WATLINGTON If “research” doesn’t quite resonate, what about “investigate” or “uncover”?

ABU HAMDAN Yeah; most of my long-term projects exist in multiple forms: they aren’t shown just in exhibitions but are also part of investigations and human rights reports. When broader political and cultural reflections emerge through investigations, that’s typically what ends up in the galleries. To Jill’s point, what’s most interesting and rewarding is when some piece of knowledge you put into the world has an effect on something else. For example, I did a project, “Air Pressure” [2022], on Israeli planes violating Lebanese airspace, which included a website: airpressure.info. Some of those tools are now being used in Ukraine to identify certain kinds of aircraft. When I made the work, I had a certain audience in mind and a vision for how the work would resonate. But it created its own network and began to inform other kinds of looking that I hadn’t anticipated, in arenas that have nothing to do with art. Revealing or exposing is often part of my advocacy work, but I don’t necessarily associate that with the way my work circulates as art. Over time, I’ve stopped calling myself an artist, really. I just can’t be bothered.

WATLINGTON Crystal, I get the feeling that your approach is less about uncovering and more about recovering, since you often work with historical sources.

CAMPBELL If something is a secret, that means somebody knows it. So I’m often asking, How do we get access to it? I’m fascinated by information that is known, sometimes by many people, but not necessarily spoken about. When it comes to archives, I think about material that is “under-loved”—maybe it has been neglected, or even not believed. I hope my work can create a space for acknowledgment.

A huge chunk of my recent practice revolves around the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Even though I grew up in Oklahoma, I was not taught the history of that tragedy in public school, or even in college. I found out about it through another artist when I was living in New York, so I want to acknowledge the role that artists play in relaying histories that are maybe not shared in the institutions that are supposed to educate us. I ran a workshop at a senior living facility in Tulsa, where an elderly man responded to a book I brought in, Riot in Greenwood: The Total Destruction of Black Wall Street (2003) by Eddie Faye Gates. It contains testimonies by survivors of the massacre, and the man found his aunt listed among them. He hadn’t been aware that she was there. I found it so intriguing that her nephew had no idea that this history was part of his lineage.

MAGID I like what Crystal said: “If there’s a secret, that means somebody knows it.” I’m really interested in systems of power, and it often feels like there’s a secret inside these systems, because they function in ways that are almost invisible. Often, they’re so overwhelming that it’s hard to pinpoint the authority or control. But they are designed to function in a certain way so as to retain power. What I like about using the space of art is that it offers a way to slow down these systems and look at them in a different way.

When I was working on my project about the legacy of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, people often said to me, “If you want to know why the archive is being held by a corporation, or why it’s not being made accessible, why don’t you just ask? Why do you have to make all this work?” But I find that if you ask the same questions in the same way, you will get the same answers. There’s a way to ask questions through different forms that make you trip, and feeling imbalanced can help you look at something that seems sturdy and realize that maybe it’s not. There are all these narratives that seem set in stone that we should be questioning.

With the Barragán project, I wanted to understand how a corporation could buy a set of material objects and papers, and then own all the reproduction rights, not only to the objects in that archive but also everything else. A straightforward example is a series of photographs of Barragán’s buildings taken by Armando Salas Portugal. Vitra, a Swiss furniture company, bought the rights to the negatives. I wanted to show those pictures, which meant I had to pay Vitra. But I found a loophole in the law: since I couldn’t reproduce the photographs, I went to my framer with books that had already printed the photographs and gone through the copyright process. I said, “Frame the photograph in the book—but pretend the book isn’t there.” We drilled right through the books to frame the image, and then the remainder of the books fell outside the frame. The form materializes the constraint of the copyright law. That’s what I mean when I say the aesthetics are the politics.

ABU HAMDAN I’m most interested in questioning those things that we assume we already know, more than I am in revealing “new” things. With “Air Pressure,” it wasn’t that no discourse existed. That’s also true of my project Once Removed [2019], about the Lebanese Civil War. But we needed new frameworks. We often hear that various histories are suppressed, but it’s more that history has completely multiplied. It’s often noise, not silence, that we’re dealing with, and there is no consensus.

Everybody in Lebanon hears those planes in the sky every day. It’s not news. We’ve learned to live with them. The work I did with “Air Pressure” was to uncover the scale and make it sensible, which then added a kind of discursive value that entered the news. The numbers started to produce their own event, but that event was as straining as it was rewarding. The project revealed something, but it didn’t get us any closer to understanding why the situation was so ignorable. Records show more than eight years of Israeli flight time in the Lebanese sky over the last 15 years, and I’m not talking about passenger jets—I mean fighter jets and drones. The most shocking thing is that this is no longer shocking!

In the news, in parliament, in the UN—in all these places where Politics with a capital “P” happen—you hear that Israel is violating Lebanese airspace. But the violation of sovereignty is the least of my concerns. That the Lebanese government claims that air as their own is in some ways a minor aspect of what is actually happening—it’s the ambient violence. In an animation on airpressure.info, you see planes flying over Lebanon, but as their flight lines intersect, you start to understand them as forming a kind of air pressure, as a force turning the air violent.

CAMPBELL Your point about the ambience reminds me of a work of Jill’s I saw in the Netherlands when I was at the Rijksakademie. She bedazzled the security cameras in the city, making this state surveillance system hyper-visible. The rhinestones also associated it with a certain essentialized idea of femininity, asking what it means to soften this invisible state surveillance.

I moved to the Netherlands for that residency just as I was getting priced out of New York City. Around that time, I made a film called Go-Rilla Means War [2017]. I was thinking about different neighborhoods, and had just done a project on Ridgewood. When I moved to that neighborhood, a friend mentioned that it used to be part of Brooklyn. I began researching this in archives of the local paper, and found that after the blackout of 1977, a lot of residents asked to be part of Queens, to avoid Brooklyn’s lowering property values. In those newspapers, I found a lot of discussion about keeping your yard and driveway clean, framing cleanliness as valuable and worthy. Around that time, I found a 35mm film on the floor of the Slave Theater, which was on Fulton Street in Bed-Stuy. The theater was being squatted at the time, and the film had been exposed to all the elements of a New York floor, including rats.

For many years, I tried to get the film digitized, but it was repeatedly rejected because it was too damaged; it was diagnosed with vinegar syndrome. Six years later, I wound up scanning 20,000 frames manually over six months. As I was digitizing the film, it flaked off in my hands. It cracked and tore, and I would have to reconstitute the material as I scanned it. I was thinking about the uptick in gentrification in Bed-Stuy, and the eventual destruction of the Slave Theater itself, which was a very pivotal site for Black civil rights in Brooklyn.

I started to see the film [which was shot in Bed-Stuy but left unfinished and without a soundtrack] as a relic of this gentrification. Digging around in the archive and online, I found a lot about scandals that involved people trying to sell that property illegally, which happened a few times before the theater was destroyed. But in the public record of the regional archives, there was only one mention of the theater’s program, despite its rich history. I often think about these kinds of voids in archival repositories, and what happens to cultural materials and stories that are unfinished or under-loved. Where do they find a home?

WATLINGTON You used the term “under-loved,” and it seems as if meticulously scanning each individual frame was an act of care for this neglected material.

MAGID The film on the floor is a very material example. That’s why I brought up the idea of indexicality, which I’m more drawn to than “truth.” If I use a piece of architecture or get access to certain footage, it’s because there’s something in that material that bears traces of some of the questions I’m asking. “Art” is a catchall word that sometimes feels just as problematic and fraught as “truth,” but I do think our practices involve using various materials that can speak about something that’s always there, but that you might not see.

Crystal brought up my bedazzled surveillance cameras [System Azure Security Ornamentation, 2002], which are a perfect example of an open secret. I saw these giant beige cameras everywhere in Amsterdam, but when I asked people about surveillance, they’d often reply, “What cameras?” I highlighted them, but it’s not as if they had been hidden. Similarly, with my project “Evidence Locker” [2004], I developed a relationship with the Liverpool police department and made a video using surveillance footage they recorded. Everyone asked me, “How did you get access to this footage?” I said, “I just filled out the request form!” It’s about pulling the threads that are there, and being open to what happens when you find things you might not expect attached to that thread. Within the art space, you get a certain freedom to chase those threads even when they get caught on all these other things.

ABU HAMDAN Pulling and following a thread can be a quite effective method because it involves looking for relations. This isn’t necessarily as welcome in other fields. I often work with sound because it’s inherently relational. I want to zoom out and apply a sort of sonic logic to, say, history writing or historiography.

MAGID Crystal, the film you mention was sort of “abstracted” by the forces of nature, but then you went in and further manipulated it. Your use of color and layering becomes, I think, a way to help you see the material better, and prevents it from being dismissed. I read it as a method of making the subject visible, even if it’s already there.

CAMPBELL That’s certainly something I was thinking about with Flight [2021], which involves found archival footage recorded by Solomon Sir Jones. He was an entrepreneur and a preacher, one generation out of slavery. He had the foresight to use a camera to document Black communities in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the 1920s. When I was researching Tulsa, it was hard to find images of what the Greenwood community looked like beyond the massacre. Gradually, public interest in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre picked up, especially on the heels of HBO’s 2019 Watchmen series [which is set in contemporary Tulsa] and some high-profile historical articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. But before then, images of the community having banal everyday experiences were very hard to find. I became very drawn to what Joneswas trying to convey in his film and how much he wanted to show us self-determination among Black community members who were constantly being targeted by acts of violence, especially during the Red Summer of 1919. The most commonly shared images of Black histories show destruction and rubble and death. Even in the present, we’re constantly being bombarded with Black death. That’s why it was important for me to shift the color register for Flight; I made Jones’s black-and-white footage red and green because there’s a theory that our rods and cones can’t easily hold those two colors at the same time. I wanted to think not only about what is there that we’ve overlooked, or that has been willfully kept from public vision, but also perceptually, about the images that we can’t hold.

ABU HAMDAN Crystal brought up an important point about ethics at the beginning. As soon as you deal with material that is of moral concern, you get people thinking that critique is just defining an ethical problem. They might point to a power dynamic, and that’s where the critique stops. I find this troubling—I think sometimes precisely what we need is to experiment with the ethics of the image. With my work, in some cases I know that if I simply do the “right thing” by a witness—if, say, I give them the camera and all the time they need to say everything they want to say—this will not get them the adequate hearing that they need. They might be heard as just a person who had a terrible experience. I don’t want to just capture the sum total of bad experiences; I want the project to have an effect. Sometimes, this requires a kind of ventriloquism, or establishing a particular framework for a witness’s account, so that you can hear the power it actually has. This comes down to framing. It’s like when Angela Merkel announced she was “letting” refugees in. Really, Merkel didn’t have a fucking choice! Those people were coming in whether she liked it or not, through critical mass and a pure force of will. The political agency of the migrants passed many people by. It’s this opportunity to frame things differently that attracts me to operating in the art space.

MAGID That resonates with my experience working on “The Proposal” [2016], a multipart project that more or less culminated in making a diamond out of Luis Barragán’s ashes. That gesture sparked an ethical debate, as it should have! My work had been asking that same question—what does it mean for a corporation to own an artist’s body of work—for three years, but it wasn’t until I made a piece that was so ethically complicated that people started actually talking about the issue. Critics would write nice reviews, but I wasn’t getting a lot of “Wait a second, how does this Swiss furniture company control this Mexican architect’s legacy?” Once I made the ring, there was a two-hour debate on live television in Mexico. I think that sometimes the work needs to ask a question in a really hard way, so that you’re forced to deal with it. There’s an ethics in those gestures too. But it’s less about right or wrong and more about drawing attention to something happening in the world.  

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Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi founded the Sharjah Art Foundation, where she now serves as director, in 2009. The organization—with its closely watched Sharjah Biennial, commitment to regional artists and audiences, and rigorous evolving program—has become a model for institution-building in the Global South. Below, the Emirati royal shares her vision for the Foundation and talks about curating this year’s edition of the biennial. 

Growing up in Sharjah, I witnessed a lot of cultural activities. But when I saw Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta in 2002, it inspired my commitment to relentless experimenting. I want to cultivate a space where creators, thinkers, and young people can come together. With everything we do, we start small, and then grow from feedback we get from the public and from artists. For example, Focal Point, which started as a booth at the Sharjah International Book Fair, has become a huge event of its own. It began with the desire to share artists’s books and other work by small publishers, and now it draws huge crowds, including whole families, and causes traffic jams. 

I run the Foundation with public money, so the local community is always my first thought. I want to be sensitive to the needs of people here, because they are my audience all year round; the international art world comes and goes, but its members aren’t stakeholders in the same way. The organization collaborates with other institutions; right now, we are presenting a show by Sudanese painter Kamala Ibrahim Ishag at the Serpentine in London [through January 29]. A lot of institutions in the West have robust systems of patronage and support for the arts, but we don’t really have that here, so my work is about supporting the artists. I don’t care who wants to put their name on a commission or if it gets shown in Venice before it comes here. Institutions should be working together and sharing the credit and resources. I’ve emphasized collaboration throughout my presidency of the International Biennial Association: we should commission works together, without fussing over who shows it first. 

Now we’re in full install mode for the biennial, which will take place in five cities in Sharjah. The Foundation grew out of the biennial, but I realized that our year-round commitments weren’t always obvious to biennial visitors. We host workshops and courses in seven towns in Sharjah, and I want those towns to be a visible part of what we’re doing. I’m always striving to decenter the biennial. Some people might say “oh, such and such is too far.” I find that frustrating: too far for whom? There are people who live there! We’re also renovating several buildings throughout the emirate and showing work there. I’ve banned the word “off-site” in our office; there is no such thing. 

In addition to the fair, biennial, and exhibitions, we host residencies for artists, curators, and musicians. Our newest initiative is a performance festival, Perform Sharjah. I got Air Arabia to sponsor the curatorial residency, because I wanted it to be regional, but I asked myself, what is our region? So I looked at the flight map of Air Arabia, which is a budget airline, and I decided, well, that’s a region! We have an annual photography show that’s in its 10th edition now, as well as an architecture triennial. We decided to build the Africa Institute on the basis of recommendations made by the African-Arab Symposium in 1976. I’m lucky to have had support from my father and from the government of Sharjah to do all this. I don’t really experience pushback or censorship. For me, my community is most important. If I was just acting for myself, I could go open a gallery in New York or London, or whatever. I’ve been working for the Foundation and its predecessor for 20 years now, and my dad asked me what I’m going to do to celebrate. I said: the biennial!

Banner images, left to right: Kamala Ibrahim Ishag: Blues for the Martyrs (detail), 2022, oil on canvas, 623 by 934 feet; Tahila Mintz: Ancestral Gratitude Bridge, 2022, video; Al Qasimi [illustration by Denise Nestor]; Carolina Caycedo, Aluminum Intensive (detail), 2022; Nusra Latif Qureshi, The Ideal Floral Background (detail), 2013.

But to that last point, the remainder of the exhibition, titled “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C.,” makes a crucial intervention, reframing narratives concerning the persistence of patriarchy. In addition to works by Enheduanna, the show includes objects—primarily small stone sculptures and cylinder seals, most not attributed to individual makers—depicting the lives of Mesopotamian women: Working with their long hair tied back, they milk cows or make pottery and textiles. Some are shown seated and wearing long robes, suggesting they are of high status, often, priestesses. This is the society in which agriculture was invented, freeing people from the need to hunt and gather, or to farm for subsistence, allowing them to take on other kinds of jobs. Here, where the society-wide division of labor likely began, women held positions of power outside the home.

Yet catalogue essays argue that these records of ancient women have long been interpreted through the lens of scholars’ misogyny, or else their understandable inability to fathom that more equal (though still imperfect) worlds had already existed. As Columbia PhD student Kutay Şen points out in his contribution, scholarly articles and museum presentations about a group of four small but significant stone sculptures of seated women in the exhibition have repeatedly overlooked or downplayed the significance of the tablets the women hold in their lap. Instead, scholars have focused debates concerning these objects on whether their seated positions and long robes denote “goddess” or “high priestess,” emphasizing their role in the heavens over their impact here on Earth. These tablets testify to their vital roles as poets, administrators, and scribes.

Nowhere is ancient feminine power more evident than in depictions of Ishtar herself, on view in nine cylinder seals, large rounded stones carved with figurative narratives and meant to be rolled onto wet clay to produce a relief. Small and sturdy, they are often the most reliably preserved records of Mesopotamian civilization. The Queen of Heaven, as she came to be called, who is also the subject of Mesopotamia’s best-known work—the Ishtar Gate, leading into Babylon—is typically shown with a frontal gaze, slaying lions and lovers. Here, as in other depictions, worshippers bow at her feet; she bears maces and sickle axes. Rehabilitations of Ishtar and other early goddesses often emphasize her powers in the realm of fertility, but this can be misleading: Ishtar was the goddess of love and of war. Showing Enheduanna’s hymns alongside such cylinder seals, the curators suggest that the author’s descriptions of Ishtar as powerful and threatening helped establish the goddess’s preeminence and laid the groundwork for these divine visual depictions, which flourished centuries after Enheduanna penned her hymn.

We are often taught to believe that we cerebral moderns are still working to overcome various animalistic impulses and gendered roles determined by our bodies. But “She Who Wrote” emphasizes that our path has been far from linear. The exhibition also resonates with histories being written today: The curators could not have predicted that these treasures would be mounted amid a feminist revolution taking place in the same fertile crescent where Enheduanna wrote. The boldness and bravery of the Iranian women leading that rebellion feels as galvanizing as Enheduanna’s first use of “I.” Women’s resistance persists.