War on the Senses / War of the Senses

Installation view, ‘War on the Senses / War of the Senses’, Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje. Photo: Denis Saraginovski

Forensic Architecture presents three projects—‘No Traces of Life’: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza 2023-2024, Humanitarian Violence in Gaza, and Destruction of Medical Infrastructure in Gaza—as part of the group exhibition ‘War on the Senses / War of the Senses’ at Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje.

The exhibition registers how aesthetics is fundamental to war. The senses become a key site through which war is pursued and also become its targets. Machine sensing, as much as human perception, is involved. We see this in the amount of data circulating online as well as its speed and distribution. This sheer mass transforms sensation and experience; something further intensified through information warfare and campaigns of mis- and dis- information, as well as the automation of warfare itself. These developments redistribute articulations of crises fueled by military conflicts and form part of the theatre of war whilst also being part of the everyday news agenda.

This exhibition focuses on relationships between contemporary digital technologies and the production, distribution, interpretation, and use of images and evidence of war in order to explore the nexus of aesthetics and violence. The exhibition highlights six exemplary projects working on the investigation and analysis of such conditions. Each work may suggest ways of understanding this condition and even reworking it by calls for justice and the forming of evidence.