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A couple of weeks ago, on my midwife’s recommendation, I was to spend most of my time upright in hope of yoking my deadline averse offspring to finally grace us with his earthly presence. At nine and a half months pregnant, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do what I admittedly do very rarely; go see some exhibitions. Plotting my tour de force of Central London’s prime cultural real estate, I somewhat ambitiously aimed to cover three venues in one day, the ICA, Tate Britain and the Serpentine Gallery, a neatly triangulated crawl through snowed in parks and institutional models that bear the imprints of their respective legacies, which all three institutions have been in the recent years attempting to shake up or upgrade. As tends to be the case with many great projects, mine had to be curtailed by 66.67 percent. Instead of casting a wide panoramic net over four different exhibitions (Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the ICA, All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life at Tate Britain, and Sondra Perry: Typhoon coming on and Ian Cheng: BOB at the Serpentine Gallery) I ended up submerging into the ingenuously self-fashioned world of Forensic Architecture, the most un-contemporary art show that one could expect to encounter at an institute for contemporary art, and arguably, so much better for it.

Over the last couple of years, reference (at point of salivation) to Forensic Architecture would crop up immediately whenever speculations would be made as to what kind of practices could emerge if the art world would embrace a greater diversity of artistic, curatorial and institutional outputs, particularly, finding new ways of accommodating those that are geared towards effects that pierce through the insularity of the art object-exhibition-discourse norm. What is particularly refreshing about Forensic Architecture is its rational and functionalist approach to the space of contemporary art as one of the many fora that can be called upon in the research agency’s mission to deploy transdisciplinarity, architectural analysis and digital media as tools for investigating and challenging ‘public truths’ that either enact or shield human rights and humanitarian violations. Since its inception in 2007, heralded by Goldsmiths, University of London based academic and architect, Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture has forged a uniquely hybrid practice that recasts forensic investigation from a niche specialization of the human rights field into a practice of the ‘general intellect’ that knows how to leverage its various points of access (to great minds, technologies, influential institutional and media outlets). 

In many ways, Forensic Architecture’s inclusion of contemporary art in its portfolio of resources is the perfect compliment to a field that is at once so self-defensively pompous about the dubious social value of what it produces and perpetually seeking self-legitimization as a force of ‘good’. Without attempting to critique or change anything about contemporary art, Forensic Architecture strategically draws on contemporary art’s affordances: its in-built appetite for complex visual semantics, theoretical novelty and ethically driven revelation. Of course, what distinguishes Forensic Architecture’s work is that the value of revelation is pegged to the capacity of the agency’s practice to traverse institutional boundaries and to have traction in fora that are more directly implicated in governance (such as courts of law, government bodies, but also mass media). Similarly, aestheticization as a forensic device gets Forensic Architecture out of the tricky territory where the project could be accused of aestheticizing violence à la artists as Teresa Margolles or Santiago Sierra. 

In fact, as far as exhibitions go, Counter Investigations may be qualified as aesthetically underwhelming, or, in the very least, fittingly austere. It is also unapologetically rich in didactics with extensive wall texts, video material and visualizations that provide details on Forensic Architecture’s methodologies and cases. To do justice to this exhibition, one does need to engage with the material in a focused and methodical manner. To this extent, the exhibition does not strive to produce ‘affect’ through symbolic engagement with the viewer’s sensorium, but leads the viewer — should they choose to be led — on a journey that makes evident how the sensorium can be deployed as an instrument of truth-seeking, always mediated by institutional structures, technologies and the peculiarities of the human mind as a bio-chemical machine. 

One could say that there is somewhat of a disconnect between the multi-layered nature of Forensic Architecture’s practice precisely on the subject of sensorial manipulation and the flatness of the demand that is placed on the viewer (for example to be a diligent and engaged observer). On the other hand, one could argue that to demand anything additional to this of the viewer within an exhibition setting would be to buy into contemporary art’s wishful thinking that bears little empirical evidence: that the exhibition space is a placeholder for all sorts of interaction-driven transformative projections, from the possibility of various personal epiphanies to the possibility of societal seismic shifts. In contrast to the dominance of the latter approach that settles for conservative pragmatism does strike a chord.

By the same token, while a show like Counter Investigations and Forensic Architecture’s use of the contemporary art field more generally do indeed offer fresh perspectives on the art field’s horizons, the question is whether this can also pave new institutional pathways beyond existing strategies and formats (such as exhibition making and public programming). This might not be as much of a demand to be placed on Forensic Architecture — indeed, they seem to have enough on their plate as it is — but one to be borne by art institutions. With that in mind, the final paragraph in the introductory wall text at the ICA does make one want to watch this space: ‘Counter Investigations marks the beginning of a long term collaboration between the Institute of Contemporary Art and Forensic Architecture. The exhibition and this ongoing partnership exemplifies the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ intent to foster and explore new modes of civil practice operating across the fields of art, architecture and activism.’

Victoria Ivanova

is curator en schrijver, Londen