At the beginning of 2020, the Röhsska Museum opened an exhibition with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture. The exhibition presented three criminal cases where the group has contributed evidence material by utilising architecture and design strategies.
Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research agency consisting of architects, software developers, filmmakers, journalists, artists, scientists, and lawyers. Using CCTV footage, floor plans, mobile videos/images, and testimonies they create architectural models, films and 3D renderings which are then used as forensic evidence in legal cases.
The exhibition, which is Forensic Architecture’s first large scale solo exhibition in Sweden, presented three installations: 77sqm_9:26min, Outsourcing Risk and Drone Strikes: Miranshah.The first installation highlights the assassination of Halit Yozgat where a police officer’s testimony came to be questioned, the second deals with the fire at Ali Enterprises textile factory where workers claim that images published from a previous inspection did not show the actual factory, and the third is about a drone strike in Pakistan.
With the exhibition, the Röhsska Museum showed how digital tools and material knowledge can contribute new information, thus challenging both democratic and authoritarian states’ forensic monopoly.
Forensic Architecture was founded in 2010 as a research project at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their work has previously been shown at Documenta Kassel, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Architecture Biennial in Venice and ICA in London.
Top image, illustration: Forensic Architecture