BETWEEN RESISTANCE AND COMPLICITY: A STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE & THE ART WORLD

Abstract

This study seeks to consider what the contemporary institutional acceptance of Forensic Architecture in an art world context engenders for both the work that the agency produces and the state of the contemporary art world by charting and critically analysing the curatorial and critical discourse concerning four pertinent case studies over the past two years - a time in which the agency have found their work featured in increasingly more mainstream arts institutions. Taking an institutional theory of art as the guiding theoretical framework alongside critical discourse analysis, I will look at the unfolding interactions of events, relationships and other factors between both Forensic Architecture and a number of art world actors, including curators and critics. Exploring the process of conferring that status of art upon an object, though situating and framing it within a wider art world ideology and specialised discourse, the case studies are then used as point of departure to assess what are the implications of this conceptualisation of art on both Forensic Architecture and the art world. Through the consideration of the criteria for judging the legitimacy, value and ethics of either party within their own social field throughout the course of these case studies, I argue that the tension between Forensic Architecture’s unwavering conviction of their status as an art world outsider and their nominal status of art from the perspective of the art world has a liminal potentiality in multiple contexts which currently balances precariously between resistance and complicity.