The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center cordially invites you to the opening of the exhibition "Violence, Fast and Slow" by the Forensic Architecture Agency on Sunday July 21, 2019, at 17:00 at the center. The opening will be followed by a public talk and discussion at 18:00, with a group of experts from four human rights organizations in Palestine: Adalah; Gisha Legal Center for Freedom of Movement; Al-Haq; Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. The talk will focus on the use of law in confronting the Israeli violations in Palestine today, and how, looking from a legal perspective, forensic work can influence public opinion.

In this exhibition, Forensic Architecture’s Centre for Contemporary Nature presents two large scale investigations in Palestine where the ongoing Nakba is exemplified by both the displacement of people and the transformation of the environment.

The two investigations are concerned with contiguous places: one in the Naqab and the other in Gaza. In both these locations, environmental destruction has become a means for border production — in Gaza the environmental destruction is mobilised as part of the production and fortification of the border and in the Naqab as a mode of weaponsing the fleeting threshold of the desert. In both environmental destruction erupts with lethal physical force.

These investigations thus describe forms of destruction that are both slow and fast, expanding the way of thinking about violence in the context of colonial domination.

The exhibition continues until October 23, 2019. The reasons for hosting the exhibition come from a critical context and with the aim to highlight the logic behind human rights practices and the language employed. We consider presenting the Forensic Architecture’s work for the first time in Palestine, primarily, as an attempt to understand its practices as an international agency that addresses Palestine in its research and work, targeting international and westren audiences. These audiences tend to perceive the Palestinian cause in the context of human rights and international law, and disregard it as the continutation of a settlercolonial project that started over 100 years ago.

With these concerns in mind we invite you to attend the exhibition as active and critical viewers of the logic behind the work and the ideas presented in these investigations, and offer a Palestinain perspective to the agency. We’d also like to invite you to attend the discussions and workshops that will take place during the period of the exhibition, which will help us in rethinking this work and other projects and initiatives emanating from the notion of accountability of human rights principles and international law.
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Forensic Architecture
Centre for Contemporary Nature
Forensic Architecture presented its work in many exhibitions and museums around the world, won a number of awards, and was nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize. Its investigations were used in numerous international forums and tribunals to offer evidence in cases of human rights violations, in countries such as Argentina, Columbia, Syria, and the Mediterranean region. Palestine was a significant subject in the investigations and projects done by Forensic Architecture, one such project being the investigation of the murder of Nadim Nuwara (note: this particular case will not be part of the exhibition).

As a research agency Forensic Architecture undertakes advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations.

One of our research divisions in Forensic Architecture is dedicated to examining environmental violence. We call this unit the Center for Contemporary Nature (CCN).

The premise of CCN is that while historically, nature has been understood as a static, eternal backdrop against which human activity unfolds, today we must understand it as a situated historical project. In the era of massive environmental damage and rapid, anthropogenic climate change, “contemporary nature” is being updated alongside human history, interacting and becoming entangled with it.

A large part of anthropogenic changes to our environment is conflict. Violence against the environment may be slow, indirect, and diffused but it is enmeshed in colonial and military forms of domination.


*This exhibition is supported by the A. M. Qattan Foundation through the ‘Visual Arts: A Flourishing Field’ Project.