What does accountability look like? In recent years, the answer has been overwhelmingly forensic.  

From the news to true crime podcasts, and from art exhibitions to film festivals, forensic modes of investigation have emerged as a dominant form of artist and activist media practice. Forensic methods, which leverage media technologies to produce empirical evidence of wrongdoing, can provide mechanisms of harm reduction; their legibility affords marginal communities a provisional form of protection that challenges the systems producing their vulnerability. And yet, forensic practices often coalesce around a set of ideas — innocence, objectivity, crime, perpetrator — that perpetuate the oppressive forms of social, legal, and factual authority that artists and activists are often struggling against.   

How can activists navigate these double binds? Can forensic practices be reconciled to abolitionist and decolonial aims? This programme, organised in conjunction with the publication of World Records, Volume 9: Just Evidence, features screenings, live performances, and workshops highlighting the work of artists, filmmakers, and investigators who are interrogating, subverting, and rerouting forensic methods.  

Published with the Center for Media, Culture, and History at New York University, World Records brings together the voices of scholars, critics, makers, and curators who offer new and complex perspectives on nonfiction media. Volume 9: Just Evidence is guest-edited by Sasha Crawford-Holland, Patrick Smith and LaCharles Ward. The programme Just Evidence has been devised with World Records and is supported by the Institute for Future Studies (IFFS), with funding provided by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for the Advancement of the Humanities and Social Sciences.