Investigative Aesthetics — Investigative Poetics: Forensic Procedures in the Contemporary Arts
March 13, 2024
Guest lecture by Lisa Stuckey
Department Art and Time | Media, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Oscillating between scientific and rhetorical evidence, the inquiries by Forensic Architecture have been putting notions of arts and aesthetics, law and justice to the test for more than a decade. Emerging research branches into diverse transdisciplinary currents, one of which explores media-historic and theory-political genealogies of “Investigative Aesthetics”: Drawing from her book Forensische Verfahren in den zeitgenössischen Künsten (De Gruyter 2022), Lisa Stuckey’s guest lecture will elucidate Forensic Architecture’s para-juridical exhibition practice, discussing display strategies and evolving attention economies. Building on this analysis, the research agency’s investigative methodologies will be juxtaposed to those employed by artists such as M. NourbeSe Philip, Constanze Ruhm, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan — revealing a tension between “Investigative Aesthetics” (Forensic Architecture 2017) and “Investigative Poetics” (Stuckey 2022) within forensic procedures in the contemporary arts.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Earwitness Inventory, 2020, Revolver Publishing.
Constanze Ruhm: GLI APPUNTI DI ANNA AZZORI: Uno specchio che viaggia nel tempo, 2019, © Constanze Ruhm.
M. NourbeSe Philip: Zong!, 2008. Page 94 © M. NourbeSe Philip / Wesleyan University Press.
Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, MACBA 2017, © kunst-dokumentation.com.