Amer Matar
Founder and Director, Prisons Museum
Amer Matar is an investigative journalist, documentary filmmaker and founder of the Prisons Museum. Based in Berlin, he works on the history of prisons, repression and disappearance in Syria and Iraq through documents, testimony and spatial documentation. His work takes the form of investigations, films and exhibitions.
Move through the archive
Visitors using virtual-reality headsets during a public tour of the Sednaya exhibition in Berlin
The Berlin exhibition brings together architectural reconstruction, survivor testimony, documents, personal material and virtual reality to examine Sednaya as a system of detention. This record includes installation work in March and public tours during the exhibition run.
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On 5 September 2026, Amer Matar presented a live documentary performance at Pavillon Hannover, reading from his personal security dossier, which he photographed at the site where it was found.
Hannover
A radio interview on the development of the Prisons Museum, from documenting ISIS detention sites to investigating the Assad regime’s prison system, and on the role of testimony, documents and 3D reconstruction.
Monte Carlo Doualiya
Reporting on the reuse of former detention sites after the fall of Assad, the persistence of arbitrary detention, and his own detention at the Syrian–Lebanese border.
The Dial
A report from inside the Sednaya exhibition in Berlin: the digital reconstruction, survivor testimony, and the attempt to turn a place sealed for decades into a space of knowledge and accountability.
The New Arab
How the Military Intelligence Directorate handled the Tadamon massacre once it became public, read through internal security records.
Al-Jumhuriya / Syria Prisons Museum
la-croix.com
An exhibition treating Sednaya as a crime scene to be documented.
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial · 26 Mar — 27 Sep 2026
nzz.ch
Long-term projects through which questions of evidence, place, disappearance, images and public memory have developed over time.
An investigative museum documenting detention systems through places, records and survivor testimony. Its work includes the ISIS Prisons Museum, Syria Prisons Museum and Jawab.
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A virtual museum investigating ISIS detention sites in Syria and Iraq. Field documentation, testimony and internal records are connected through investigations and digital tours.
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A research project documenting the Assad regime’s prison and security-branch system. Its public investigations began with Sednaya and Branch 215.
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A protected information pathway for families searching for missing relatives, developed with careful access rules rather than indiscriminate publication of personal records.
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A festival and training platform for films made with mobile phones, linking production support and public screenings inside Syria with international audiences.
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Founded in Syria in 2010, AlShare works across documentary film, journalism, cultural projects, training and collaborative media production.
Read more →Investigating a prison or massacre can take years and may require interviewing dozens or hundreds of people and analysing large collections of documents. For that reason, Matar does not reduce an investigation to a final article. With the Prisons Museum, he works to build an integrated dossier that brings together the site, the 3D tour, documents, testimony, a timeline and the written investigation.
Records are tested against testimony, photographs, open sources and field documentation. A document is not treated as true because it is official, nor a testimony as complete because it is direct; each source is read for what it reveals, what it omits, and where it agrees or conflicts with other evidence. The Prisons Museum has published seven major investigation dossiers in Syria and Iraq, with others still in progress.
Matar works on episodes of contemporary Syrian and Iraqi history whose records remain incomplete or fragmented. He begins with the traces an event leaves behind — documents, testimony, photographs, buildings and media records — then arranges them in time and connects people, institutions and places.
Historical reconstruction is not meant to produce a closed final narrative, but to show what is known, how it is known and where uncertainty remains. When a document conflicts with testimony or with what the physical site makes possible, the conflict is examined rather than hidden or resolved arbitrarily. Matar and the Prisons Museum team have recorded and catalogued hundreds of filmed testimonies related to prisons, massacres and disappearance.
For Matar, an archive is not a place where material is deposited after an investigation; it is part of the investigation itself.
Documents, photographs, testimony and audiovisual materials are documented and catalogued with their context: source, date, producing institution, and the people and places they mention. These elements are then linked so they can be searched and revisited with new questions. In the work on ISIS alone, the research archive includes digital documentation of more than 70,000 records alongside hundreds of testimonies and field materials. After the fall of the Assad regime, the team photographed and digitised records inside former detention and security facilities without removing documents from those sites. Materials selected for public presentation are reviewed under the museum’s legal and ethical publication policies, with particular attention to privacy, personal data and the protection of individuals.
Matar treats place as part of the evidence. Since 2017, Prisons Museum teams have documented detention sites and crime scenes using high-resolution and 360° photography, drones, plans and aerial imagery before sites change or disappear.
After a site is recorded, its structure is compared with testimony and related documents. This helps identify the uses of rooms and corridors, test spatial claims and understand changes to a building over time. 3D reconstruction is not used as illustration or to simulate a detainee’s experience, but to create a navigable spatial record that can be linked to testimony, documents and timelines and used in investigations, research, exhibitions and legal work.
Documentary film was one of Matar’s earliest tools for recording events, people and places beyond the limits of the news cycle. Image, sound, interview and sustained observation preserve details and experiences that cannot be reduced to written information.
As the work developed toward investigation and archives, film ceased to be a separate track. A filmed interview can become part of the archive, field video part of spatial documentation, and visual testimony a source linked to a document, an investigation or a 3D tour. Film is therefore not only a way to present research, but one of the tools through which research is produced.
One question remains after an investigation and archive are built: how does this knowledge move into public space?
Exhibitions can place documents, testimony, reconstructed sites and timelines in a single space that the public can enter and read. They are treated not as the end or promotion of an investigation, but as another form of interpreting and publishing the material. Since 2024, Prisons Museum work has appeared in public spaces in London, Paris, Damascus, Berlin and elsewhere. In each exhibition, archival materials are reorganised around the site and the question so visitors can encounter not only what happened, but the evidence on which that knowledge rests.
Investigating a prison or massacre can take years and may require interviewing dozens or hundreds of people and analysing large collections of documents. For that reason, Matar does not reduce an investigation to a final article. With the Prisons Museum, he works to build an integrated dossier that brings together the site, the 3D tour, documents, testimony, a timeline and the written investigation.
Records are tested against testimony, photographs, open sources and field documentation. A document is not treated as true because it is official, nor a testimony as complete because it is direct; each source is read for what it reveals, what it omits, and where it agrees or conflicts with other evidence. The Prisons Museum has published seven major investigation dossiers in Syria and Iraq, with others still in progress.
Investigation file · Personal archive
From a newspaper article to 52 days in Unit 215
Open the file →Conversations that explain the background to particular investigations, places and methodological questions, and record how the work has changed over time.
Amer Matar — Branch 215
When investigations and archives enter public space.
The Berlin exhibition brings together architectural reconstruction, survivor testimony, documents, personal material and virtual reality to examine Sednaya as a system of detention.
The Prisons Museum presented architectural reconstruction, VR, survivor testimony, documents, filmed investigations and personal objects as part of SARAB 2026.
On 5 September 2026, Amer Matar presented a live documentary performance at Pavillon Hannover, reading from his personal security dossier, which he photographed at the site where it was found.
Co-curated with the Migrant Future Institute at Goldsmiths College, London, the exhibition presented the Prisons Museum's work within the “Syria in Transition” series through two…
A public presentation built around documents from Matar’s personal security file.
The Syria Prisons Museum organized a joint event with Amnesty International, “The Struggle for Truth and Justice,” at the National Museum in Damascus, coinciding with…
The Syria Prisons Museum launched publicly at the National Museum in Damascus, beginning with the Sednaya Military Prison file and expanding the project’s documentation of…
An early physical exhibition by the project at UNESCO headquarters in Paris presented reconstructions, testimony and spatial research from Mosul.
The ISIS Prisons Museum was publicly launched at the National Theatre in London after years of field documentation, witness interviews, document digitisation and cataloguing, and digital reconstruction.
Two investigations that make the method visible. Here a document is not treated as a quotation or illustration, but as an institutional trace that can be connected to people, orders, places and a chronology.
The investigation connects architectural reconstruction, survivor testimony, official records and spatial analysis to examine how Sednaya functioned across decades — from the building itself to surveillance, punishment and execution.
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The investigation reconstructs the branch’s administrative hierarchy, arrest and torture mechanisms, communications surveillance, and the handling of the dead — and documents more than 1,500 deaths inside the branch.
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