Exhibition as a Forensic Space
The word "Exhibition", when first used in the fifteenth century, refers to the public display of evidence in the courtroom. An exhibit is a document or material object produced and identified in court or before an examiner for use as evidence. This may reveal a hint of interplay between the exhibition space and the courtroom, regarding the collection of evidence in the field, and then the art of display in the forum.
To constantly prove your knowledge to an entity, requires a “way of knowing” that seeks order by dissection in order to specify “the composition of the known”. [2] Courtroom is the most intense deduction of the fact, a strictly sealed logic reasoning, either for defense or invasion. With in the scientific analysis framework behind the courtroom, evidence is typically organized and visualized in an objective, unbiased manner to present a factual analysis. However, within this constructed power dynamic, the most striking aspect is how one is deliberately positioned to constantly state, prove, and be contested. This rigid rationalization leaves no room for instability or ambiguity, striving instead for a more precise argument of the facts—one that seeks to eliminate alternative possibilities. In doing so, it reinforces a discursive power relationship, prioritizing singular truths over pluralistic perspectives. It paved way for the idea that the world is a "forensic object" that can be logically deduced and objectively known, which guarantees and refreshes the power of the knower.
The exhibition, as an alternative forensic space, allows another way of knowing. It acknowledges that accounts of a "real" world do not, then, depend on a logic of "discovery" but on a power-charged social relation of "conversation". [3] Both the courtroom and the exhibition are the looking-back, inspection, and spectation to the history, weaving together objects and discourse to reconstruct the past. Rather holding to the belief that the truth will always stay in the past, which leaves almost no spatial agency for the present to know the past, the past always seeps into the present, entangling with the future.
The courtroom asks for the exact historical point in the memory, as the proof of witness, to be accurate and clearly-stated. It asks for proof, rigidly. While the exhibition, as another forensic space, critically engages with the reality that documentation is often a privileged choice, and what is absent in the evidence can be a powerful witness. The alternative forensic space also keeps pushing the boundary of evidence, an indicator to the situation. Its records do not mark singular unrepeatable momentsin history, but rather, are in relationship with what call corollary records documenting reoccurring momentsin which the same or similar oppressions get in time. A corollary moment is a point in time with repeated. [4]
Exhibition allows the practicce of “plotting”, that straddles both the past, the present and the future. He uses the example of a detective and the practice of forensically trying to figure out a sequence of events behind a crime committed in the past in order to prevent further crimes from happening in the future. [5] History therefore does not enter the realm of empirical knowledge in ‘a probable form of succession’, but rather as their ‘fundamental mode of being.’ [6]
-- Objects -- Mediator -- Forum
Play it, Emin::Walking along the Russian Monument at Ayastefanos
In 1914, a soldier filmed “Demolition of the Monument at San Stefano”, a documentary capturing the event of dismantling the Russian Monument to Fallen Soldiers in Istanbul following the outbreak of war between the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. This film is considered the first Turkish-produced movie, marking the beginning of Turkish national cinema. Unfortunately, the original footage has been lost.
Using three photographs documenting the demolition, as well as two different textual accounts—namely, the memoirs of the lieutenant who oversaw the demolition and a newspaper announcement—artist Kamma commissioned Karagöz master Emin Şenyer to create an animation reconstructing the event. Kamma juxtaposes two screens in her work: on the left, a silent film tracks the ruins of the monument’s site (in Florya, a suburb of Istanbul) a century after its destruction. Both the film and the narrated space remain silent, reflecting the absence of the original footage.
On the right screen, the artist documents Emin Şenyer's process of creating and rehearsing a shadow play reenactment of the monument’s destruction. Karagöz, a traditional Turkish shadow puppet theater popular in Greece, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Adjara, is used as a medium. As Şenyer carves and recounts the details of the event, the subtle trembling of his hands—strained from the intensity of the knife—seems to root the present moment in the past.
By employing shadow play, a marginalized participatory performance form from the East, Kamma ironically encourages the creation of cross-cultural connections while addressing the geopolitical history between Russia, Turkey, and Greece in the context of the Russo-Turkish War. Each retelling of the past attempts to uncover fixed and mutable elements within the narrative, suggesting that through the repetitive speculation of past, the perception of reality itself can gradually transform.
Earwitness Inventory, 2018 - now
I would like to take the exhibition of "Earwitness Inventory" by Lawrence Abu Hamdan as another example. According to Walter Benjamin, forensic photograph(object) has a "political significance" precisely because they provide evidence of public "historical occurrences”. The photograph(object) of the scene, of people in a conflict pulling a photo in the middle, inherently produce a political response because they invite interpretation and analysis rather than aesthetic contemplation. [7]
The project explores how the witnesses to any events often rely on everyday objects to describe the sounds they heard during an event. For example, they might describe the sound of a building collapsing as resembling popcorn popping. These memories and descriptions of sounds are frequently used as crucial evidence in human rights cases. On the screen, words appear in rhythm with the sounds, documenting his conversations with prisoners and sound effects specialists. These dialogues attempt to reconstruct specific sounds, such as the metallic slam of prison doors, appearing as the prisoners’ sudden recall of the traumatic memory triggered by a particular sound heard somewhere else.
The daily objects scattered on the ground serve to be the forensic objects inviting interpretation. In her book Material Witness, Susan mentions that for objects to serve as witnesses, it is not enough to simply place them on display. [8] Their entanglement with relevant memories, histories, and events must be transformed into readable, understandable forms that can spark public discussion. At the exhibition, the stacking of these everyday objects carried a sense of childlike humor, yet continually reminded viewers of their importance as sonic evidence or reference points.
The forensic practice is connecting the peripheral clues that do not seem to collide with each other, rendering justice not as a ultimate conclusion or sentence dividing the side of rightiousness and the side of evil, but rather an ongoing negotiation of the reality. The exhibition space thus allows for the never-tiring revisiting of the reality, acknowledging the motion of truth-making.
Bibliography
[1] Ravensbergen, Sanne. People, Paper, Cloth: Mixed Courtrooms and Materiality in Colonial Indonesia.
[2] Alford, Robert R. 2002. "Review of The History of Scientific Knowledge, by John V. Pickstone." The Quarterly Review of Biology 77 (4): 435–37. https://doi.org/10.1086/344415.
[3] Haraway, Donna. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99.
[4] Caswell, Michelle. 2021. Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work. New York: Routledge.
[5] Singleton, Benedict. “The Long Con”. In When Site Lost the Plot. Edited by Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic. 2015. pp. 105-120.
[6] Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge.
[7] Rugoff, Ralph, et al. Scene of the Crime. MIT Press (MA), 1997.[8] Schuppli, Susan. 2020. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.