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Forensic Aesthetics:
A conversation between Kodwo Eshun and Eyal Weizman

The Showroom is pleased to announce a conversation between Kodwo Eshun and Eyal Weizman to celebrate the recent publication of three books, authored and co-authored by Eyal Weizman: The Least of All Possible Evils (Verso, 2012), Mengele's Skull (with Thomas Keenan, Sternberg and Portikus 2012), and Forensic Architecture (Hatje Cantz, dOCUMENTA13 Notebook, 2012).

From the analysis of the skull of Mengele – discovered in a provincial cemetery near Sau Paulo – to that of the mass graves of the Guatemalan highlands, the killing fields of Yugoslavia and the villages of Darfur, to modes of investigating the urban destruction of the refugee camps of Gaza, a new paradigm for the representation and documentation of calamities and catastrophes has emerged. A recent shift of emphasis from human testimony to material forensics, from trauma and memory to scientific analysis, has started to challenge our aesthetic conception of history and politics.

New ways of using forensic science have blurred a previously held distinction: between evidence, when the law speaks of objects, and that of the witness, referring to subjects. Such a shift has aesthetic, political and ethical implications, dangers and potentials, which are unpacked in these three books using different historical probes.

In conversation with Eshun, Weizman will talk about how this shift has become apparent in the world of human rights and humanitarianism – and its compromises of lesser evil – but has expanded to structure our perception of the world at large.

‘Originality, ingenuity, and brilliance do not even begin to do justice to this amazing study, this architectural forensics of battle and human rights as pieced together from the study of the ruin and the terrifying logic of “the lesser evil”. How astonishing to see our new world this new way.’
– Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

For more information on the books, please visit:
Verso Books

Sternberg Press


Hatje Cantz

No bookings taken; places allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

The Showroom
63 Penfold Street
London
NW8 8PQ
t +44 (0)20 7724 4300
www.theshowroom.org

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