Forensic Architecture at the ICA: What Happens After the Evidence?
In 2021, the ICA exhibited a reconstruction of the police killing of Mark Duggan. The request to reopen the case had already been refused. What remained for the exhibition to do?
On 26 May 2021, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) refused to reopen its investigation into the police killing of Mark Duggan. Less than two months later, Forensic Architecture’s reconstruction of the shooting was on view at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. I keep returning to that order of events. The evidence arrived in the gallery after the authority to which it had been submitted had declined to act on it.
Duggan was shot by police in Tottenham in 2011. His family’s lawyers asked Forensic Architecture to reconstruct the scene and examine the officers’ accounts. The agency built a digital model that could be navigated from different positions. It tested, among other things, the official explanation for a gun found several metres from Duggan’s body. Its findings challenged the account accepted by the original investigation. The IOPC considered the submission and refused to reopen the case; the family and Forensic Architecture disputed its response. The investigation · The response to the IOPC
The reconstruction appeared in War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights. The exhibition was curated by Tottenham Rights, an organisation involved in campaigns against racism and police violence, together with Kamara Scott and Rianna Jade Parker. It covered decades of Black resistance in Britain through photographs, archives, films and tributes from families. The Duggan case was part of that history, rather than an isolated technological display.
The ICA also hosted discussions, screenings and educational events, some held in Tottenham. At the closing event, called The People’s Verdict, Tottenham Rights and Forensic Architecture presented the reconstruction and opened it to discussion. Visitors could see how the digital model was used. This was an exhibition shaped by people with a direct stake in the story. Calling it an exercise in fashionable outrage would be careless.
And yet the family had sought something quite specific from the IOPC. The exhibition could keep their challenge in public view, give it a space and bring other people into the argument. It could not reopen the investigation. I think the difficulty begins when these different results are folded into a single word such as impact. It becomes easy to praise the number of people reached while saying less about the answer the family received.
A question addressed
In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls counted the women artists and female nudes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern art sections. Fewer than 5% of the artists were women; 85% of the nudes were female. The poster was directed at the Met and its decisions. The figures gave a name and an address to a disparity the institution could otherwise treat as a general problem in society. The original poster
Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings (1971) used property records and photographs to trace an ownership network in New York. It belongs to an earlier history of information used as artistic material. The Guggenheim cancelled the exhibition in which the work was to appear and dismissed its curator. Haacke had brought information into a museum that the museum refused to accommodate. Today such work is comfortably part of art history. That later acceptance does not erase what the cancellation exposed.
Forensic Architecture’s own Triple-Chaser was aimed closer to home. Made with Praxis Films for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, it investigated tear-gas canisters made by a company in the Safariland Group. Warren B. Kanders, then vice-chair of the Whitney’s board, owned Safariland. Decolonize This Place had already been protesting his position. Forensic Architecture joined artists demanding withdrawal from the Biennial, and Kanders resigned amid the wider campaign. The investigation was one part of that pressure; the museum itself had a decision to make. Forensic Architecture’s account
The ICA faced a different situation. It had given Tottenham Rights a curatorial role and supported a case brought to it by the people affected. The contested decision lay with the IOPC. Asking why the museum did not change that decision would assign it a power it never had. Asking what the museum’s presentation did for the campaign is fair.
There was an answer beyond the weeks the show was open. Tottenham Rights describes a subsequent teaching collaboration with Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths. In 2025, Goldsmiths announced funding for further research into deaths linked to policing and plans for another exhibition, building on War Inna Babylon. That continuing work deserves space in the account. It did not amount to the reopening requested in Duggan’s case.
Forensic Architecture sometimes establishes evidence that was missing; at other times it brings greater precision to events already reported by witnesses and journalists. A gallery can help that material reach people who would never read a technical report. It can also make the reconstruction itself the memorable outcome. The danger lies in leaving the visitor with the feeling that understanding the evidence has settled the matter.
In the Duggan case, the facts are less tidy. A family challenged an official account. The authority refused to reconsider it. A community-led exhibition kept the challenge public, and the collaboration continued afterward. I would want all three facts beside the work wherever it is shown. That way the achievement of the exhibition remains visible, and so does the decision it could not change.
Further reading
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. The book sets out the research practice behind the agency’s investigations, including the problem of how evidence becomes publicly legible.
