INVESTIGATIVE ARTS

Kampnagel’s 2025/2026 season Legends of the Avantgarde will be shaped by a look back at its rich history of progressive art and performance, celebrating the deep interconnections of political activism and artistic investigation. In times when the provocative character of art has been hijacked by political actors, turning pranks and memes into tools of racist, anti-feminist, and ultra-nationalist mobilisation, we must ask whether art should once again sharpen its critical edge. Could the utilisation of Investigative Arts not only mark a break with mere attention-seeking strategies, but also provide the tools to adequately respond to a world flooded with realities made deliberately unverifiable?

Digital art has long been at the forefront of reinterpreting history, memory, and the narratives ingrained in our political consciousness. Investigative and intervening practices now form the backbone of artistic endeavours that recalibrate our understanding of the world. Looking back at the subversive power of diverse art forms, we turn towards those artists who use technology to demonstrate that art can indeed be a means of societal transformation – and that specifically investigative multimedia practices can serve as interventions and charged commentaries on social and technological challenges.

Our thematic focus is situated within a longer genealogy: it was the neo-avantgarde of the post-war period – with figures such as Hans Haacke – that first brought activism and art together. Haacke’s research-based works, so incisive that they were censored, demonstrated how sober investigation could make systemic injustice visible. In 1971, his Shapolsky et al. exposed corrupt housing practices in New York, relying on official registers and unadorned presentation that forced viewers to confront uncomfortable truths.

Today, Investigative Arts resonate in a world where crisis has become a permanent condition – what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic crisis,” paving the way for continuous struggles over hegemony. Since its emergence in dialogue with human rights discourses of the late 1980s, and especially since the founding of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths College in 2010, investigative art has established itself as a vital sub-genre. At the intersection of art, journalism, and activism, artists have adopted methods of research, documentation, and evidence gathering to expose hidden structures of power, exploitation, and violence. Archives are combed through, data collected, trials followed, networks analysed and aesthetic form merges into journalistic rigour. The result are works that do not only raise questions, but also uncover facts, reveal abuses, and situate art as a discursive force in its own right.

Heba Y. Amin: Future Ways of Seeing

Keynote, 25 September 2025, 7 – 8 pm, Kampnagel, P1

Heba Y. Amin deals with political themes and archival history in her artistic work. She works with various media such as film, photography, archival material, and installations. In her research-based art projects, she takes a speculative, often satirical approach to address power in relation to technology and its role in visual representation. Through her critical practice, Amin uses tactics of subversion and other techniques that both question dominant historical narratives and attempt to define future histories.

In her lecture for the thematic focus Investigative Arts, Amin explored how digital-colonialism shapes memory regimes that enable the retroactive construction of evidence. In light of the fragility and manipulability of historical materials—especially in digital form—she questioned whose narratives are created and preserved when networked systems of visibility reinforce dominant power hierarchies.

Heba Y. Amin is Professor of Digital and Time-Based art at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, co-founder of Black Athena Collective, curator of visual art for MIZNA journal, and currently sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital War. She was awarded the 2025 Hans-Molfenter Preis/City of Stuttgart Prize (Germany).

Art as Counter-Archive: Documenting Violence in the Era of Post-Truth Politics

Exhibition, 25 – 27 September, Kampnagel, K4

Contemporary artists have used, critiqued and re-interpreted existing archives. They become archivists themselves – creating new archives as counter-archives. The exhibition gave space to artists seeing their works as a contribution to documenting, investigating and collecting memories and material witnesses of violence and trauma. The works situated memories within the framework of time-based knowledge shaped by power relations and illustrate how cultural techniques such as sound, architecture, photography and sculpture turn into storage and voices of past injustice.

With:

Forensic Architecture (FA) and Forensis use techniques in spatial analysis and digital modelling to investigate state and corporate violence, environmental destruction, and colonial legacies. In collaboration with indigenous Ovaherero and Nama groups, the two agencies have undertaken a multi-year investigation into the genocide perpetrated by German colonial forces in Namibia during the first years of the 20th century. Connecting this violent history to contemporary instances of state violence in Germany and Palestine, their ongoing research was presented across a series of films, an installation, and a panel discussion.

Qusay Awad is a Berlin-based architect and multimedia artist working at the intersection of spatial and archival research and audiovisual practice. Through site-responsive installations, Awad’s practice explores themes of violence and remembrance. While constructing counter-memories, he examines how re-narrating spaces can bear witness to history. His artistic methods include 3D and sound design, video, field recording, performance and sculpture. His works have been presented at institutions and festivals including SAVVY Contemporary, Maxim Gorki Theater, CTM Festival, B7L9 Art Centre and many more.

Pierre Larauza, co-founder of the Belgian-based contemporary dance company t.r.a.n.s.i.t.s.c.a.p.e, is a multidisciplinary artist working on individual and collective projects performed or exhibited worldwide in the areas of performing arts, visual arts and architecture. His installation and sculpture work is deeply rooted in reality, which he describes as ‘documentary sculpture’.

The media art and research collective Total View was founded in 2024 by the artist trio Ferdinand Doblhammer, Ulrich Formann and the Futile Corporation to develop new digital methods for investigating state repression and forced cultural assimilation. The collective functions as an interdisciplinary hub for exchange between artists, journalists and researchers. Total View collaborates with institutions such as the University of Vienna and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Lighthouse Reports is an independent, non-profit, European-based investigative media collective. The organisation works across borders, collaborating with leading international media outlets to expose hidden stories. Its thematic priorities include migration, climate change, corruption, disinformation, financial flows, and surveillance technologies. Lighthouse Reports combines traditional journalistic research methods with data journalism, open-source intelligence, forensic analysis and visual evidence to work in an interdisciplinary manner.

German Colonial Genocide in Namibia

Restituting Evidence & Swakopmund; Shark Island; The Hornkranz Massacre & The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia

Film Screenings, 25 – 27 September, Kampnagel, P1

Between 1904 and 1908, Germany committed genocide against the Herero, Mbanderu and Nama peoples in its colony of ‘South West Africa’ (now Namibia). Over three days of our focus Investigative Arts, we showed individual film screenings from the series German Colonial Genocide in Namibia by the research collectives Forensic Architecture/Forensis, who collaborated with genocide activists from descendant communities to combine archival photos and oral testimonies in 3D models of the sites where these atrocities were committed. Their findings are the beginning of a collection of digital evidence that can be used to support claims for land restitution and reparations.

With introductions by Agata Nguyen Chuong (FA) and Mark Mushiba (Forensis).

Investigative Arts: Methods, Research, Approaches

Paneldiskussion, 26. September, 20:15 – 21:45 Uhr, Kampnagel, P1

Can art contribute to the investigation of political violence? Agata Nguyen Chuong (Advanced Researcher, Forensic Architecture), Jean Peters (investigative journalist at Correctiv and co-founder of the Peng! Collective) and Dr. Lisa Stuckey (Art and Cultural Theorist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna) talked to journalist Mohamed Amjahid. How can (digital) images, spatial data, open source research and visual strategies be used to investigate complex acts of violence, state cover-ups or human rights violations and make them publicly accessible? And how can the arts intervene rather than illustrate?

With:

Agata Nguyen Chuong leads FA’s research on the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in present-day Namibia. Her research focuses on environmental and colonial violence and evidencing their enduring legacies. Agata is interested in developing spatial and visual methodologies for the reconstruction of historical environments in support of Indigenous land claims and advocacy. She joined FA in 2021 after completing an MA in Architecture at the Royal College of Art.

Jean Peters is a German journalist, author and performance artist. He is best known as a founding member of the Peng collective and for his work at Correctiv, particularly his investigation into the meeting of right-wing extremists in Potsdam in 2023. Peters has won awards for his political activism, theatre work and journalism, including the Aachen Peace Prize, the Carlo Schmidt Prize, the Dramatist Prize and the Leuchtturm Prize for investigative journalism.

Dr. Lisa Stuckey is an Art and Cultural Studies researcher. Her interests revolve around contemporary visual cultures, forensic and investigative art practices, the moving image and the curatorial, media aesthetics, and critical/cultural legal studies. Her current research deals with tribunalization phenomena. Stuckey works as Senior Scientist at the Institute of Arts and Society, University of Applied Arts Vienna

Mohamed Amjahid was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1988 as the son of so-called Gastarbeiter:innen. He attended school in Morocco until graduating from high school. He studied political science in Berlin and Cairo and conducted research on various anthropological projects in North Africa. He researches and writes as a freelance investigative journalist for publications including Der Spiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, taz, RBB, SWR and WDR. In his non-fiction debut Unter Weißen (Among Whites, 2017) and the bestseller Der weiße Fleck (The White Spot, 2021), he addresses the issue of racism. His investigative non-fiction book Alles nur Einzelfälle? (2024) deals with the system behind police violence.

Ästhetik der Enthüllung

Lecture Performance, 27. September 2025, 19:00 – 20:00 Uhr, Kampnagel, P1

What is considered art is not a neutral definition, but an instrument of power – a boundary that determines what may be seen and how it should be seen. With the IBIZA video, we shift this boundary: between reality and staging, revelation and manipulation, art and political intervention. The lecture performance was staged like a live TV show: 3–5 candidates from the audience competed against each other, evaluated controversial scenarios, re-enacted them and tested together how boundaries can be shifted.

Who determines whether an act of disclosure is interpreted as artistic practice or criminal assault? Who decides whether an intervention serves the common good or personal interests? And who controls the discursive infrastructure on the basis of which such presumptions of guilt are made and judgements passed? The institutionalised concept of art operates here as a border regime – seemingly objective, but in fact contaminated by ideological interests, economic dependencies and narrative control.

Death is a master from Germany.

Politics is an artist from Austria.

Art is a scandal from Ibiza.

Ubermorgen sees this work as a radical universalist intervention that does not remain confined to symbolic space, but infiltrates, destabilises and exposes real power structures. For them, this classification is not a minor detail, but a strategic approach.

In 1995, two rebels formed the community UBERMORGEN.COM: lizvlx (Liz Katlein) and Luzius Bernhard (formerly known as Hans Bernhard), a duo that turns network nodes and the analogue world into a stage for revolutionary art. Their roots lie in the avant-garde Net.Art movement, characterised by media hacking that breaks down the boundaries of everyday life and attracts attention – subversive, provocative, never predictable.