Since 2020, the Ramallah-based human rights organisation Al-Haq has worked closely with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture to build the Forensic Architecture Investigation (FAI) Unit. Housed within Al-Haq’s Monitoring and Documentation Department in Ramallah, and the first of its kind in the Middle East, the FAI Unit employs Forensic Architecture’s established methodologies and techniques for monitoring and documenting violations against Palestinians in pursuit of legal accountability and public advocacy. Since its inception, the FAI Unit has worked to cultivate a new understanding of how human rights documentation can function in Palestine—in a context where rights defenders are themselves living under occupation and apartheid, regularly facing both Israeli digital and physical violence. In so doing, as Palestinian forensic investigators, the FAI Unit is also pushing forward the limits of Forensic Architecture’s techniques by interlacing Al-Haq’s established frameworks for community-centred ground truths with visual and spatial analysis.

This marks the launch of the Al-Haq FAI Unit’s first solo exhibition of their work, They Are Shooting at Our Shadows, featuring a series of visual investigations into state violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory—a political, intellectual and counter-forensic contribution to the Palestinian liberation movement. The work will be on show at the UC Santa Cruz Institute of Arts and Sciences from 12 January – 2 March 2024, and will be accompanied by a comprehensive public programme led by members of the Unit and FA collaborators.

With support from UCSC Institute of Arts and Sciences, the Unit made the decision to delay the opening of the exhibition in the context of the unfolding events in Gaza. An excerpt from the statement they released is below:

Since October 7, 2023, the current military aggression means that Al-Haq’s field researchers in Gaza have been forcibly displaced from their homes multiple times, and for the first time in Al-Haq’s 44-year history, our teams on the ground are unable to document violations in the traditional ways we used in the past. Under the present conditions, we not only find ourselves in a particularly precarious and imperilled state but also have felt compelled to rethink the scope of the exhibition to respond to the devastation to which we are bearing witness. . . .We have had to divert additional resources to support our staff, document and analyse incidents and patterns of destruction within the ongoing Israeli offensive, and prepare reports for legal fora. The ongoing military campaign makes our intervention with this exhibition all the more urgent, and as a result, we feel it is particularly important to be able to present additional work addressing the systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure since the 7^th of October and its devastating effects on the lives of the Palestinian People.

Read the full statement from the Al-Haq FAI Unit here.

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