Photo by Maeve Fitzhoward.
Photo by Maeve Fitzhoward.
Photo by Maeve Fitzhoward.
Photo by Maeve Fitzhoward.
1 / 4 Photo by Maeve Fitzhoward.

Beyond the Frame: Exhibition and Lecture

October 27th 2022

On October 27, partner Brad Samuels and researcher Gauri Bahuguna presented a lecture at The Cooper Union School of Architecture on SITU Research's methodologies for event reconstruction. The lecture coincided with the opening of Beyond the Frame, an exhibition organized by SITU Research's approach to human rights and environmental justice through spatial studies and analysis across multiple scales.


Never have the facts been more elusive. It is not necessarily that they are harder to determine, but rather, harder to agree upon. What do we consider to be a reliable source? How can we think about justice in the context of a fractured landscape of information? Fact-finding is often described as searching for the signal within the noise. What does the sheer amount of noise portend for the future of democracy and dissent, and how does the education of an architect prepare us to take on this question?

Beyond the Frame addresses these questions through a series of real-world case studies documenting human rights and environmental violations through the nascent field of Visual Investigations. The videos and wall graphics presented here highlight emerging forms of forensic documentation coupled with an examination of the changing nature of evidence—from the deluge of citizen-generated video to the multi-perspectival capture of contested events. Organized by study in ascending order of relative size, each panel presents an investigation that leverages scale-specific evidentiary, analytical, and representational processes to reconstruct a personal, environmental, or political harm.

Investigations on view include Choking Dissent: How Tear Gas is Used to Crush Protestors (2020); The Crimes of ISIL against the Yazidi Community in Sinjar (ongoing); After the Strike (2021); The Trap, Mott Haven, Bronx (2020); and Cerro de Pasco, Peru (2020). In addition to these projects, the final panel, Breaking into parts, includes texts selected by the team about the development and politics of imaging technologies and their role in making human rights claims.

Currently, SITU Research is leading multiple investigations covering war crimes in Ukraine, the NYPD’s use of excessive force during the 2020 Black Lives Matter justice movement, and the suppression of dissent by Sudanese police and military, among other projects.

More information here.