Hosted by Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center
Investigations by Forensic Architecture/Center for
Contemporary Nature

Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center is hosting the exhibition Violence, Fast and Slow, which presents some of the findings of Forensic Architecture research agency. The agency undertakes spatial and multimedia investigations of human rights violations across the globe. The research is exhibited as multimedia artwork using video, images, text, and sound. The final work, which is built on both aesthetic and critical architectural theories, and international human rights laws, is then shown in comprehensive and complex research exhibitions. 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 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 Western audiences.

In this exhibition, Centre for Contemporary Nature (CCN) 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. CCN is one of Forensic Architecture research divisions that is dedicated to examining environmental violence. 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.

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 mobilized as part of the production and fortification of the border and in the Naqab as a mode of weaponizing 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. What is repeated in these investigative inquiries is the symmetry of ground and figure – a continuum of violence that links the slow killing of the land to the fast killing of the body.
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 in order to offer a Palestinian perspective to the agency. The exhibition continues until October 23, 2019. 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 to rethink this work and other projects and initiatives that emanate from the notion of accountability of human rights principles and international law.

This exhibition is supported by the A. M. Qattan Foundation through the Visual Arts: A Flourishing Field project.