In this new review in Review 31, Bernard Hay discusses Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture:Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Click here to learn more about the book. Click here to read the full article. An excerpt appears below:

“The case studies in this book provide further tools in the studio’s armoury, providing legal and historical precedents for their future work. Aesthetics has often been connected to justice, and at times truth too. In the work of Forensic Architecture the forms of visual practice – be they films, digital renderings, graphs or installations – become legal evidence. Discussing the origins of forensic photography in the 19th century, Weizman notes that for him ‘aesthetics’ refers to the ‘modes and means by which reality is sensed and presented publicly’, not beauty or disinterested pleasure. While many modernist practices purported to separate the spheres of art and politics, in the hands of Forensic Architecture the aesthetic becomes the mode in which justice is sought out and argued for.”