Projects

These titles do not describe separate practices. Some are institutions, some are long-term research frameworks, and some are earlier experiments through which recurring questions about evidence, place, disappearance, images and public memory took shape.

Prisons Museum

2017 — Ongoing

The institution in which a methodology developed for connecting sites, records, testimony and archives, treating prisons as crime scenes and as sources for writing recent history.

ISIS Prisons Museum

2017 — Ongoing

A long-term investigation into the detention system through which ISIS governed, punished and disappeared people in Syria and Iraq.

Syria Prisons Museum

2024 — Ongoing

A continuing investigation of Syria’s prison and security apparatus, moving from buildings and records to bureaucratic structures, procedures and chains of responsibility.

Jawab / The Missing

In preparation

An attempt to answer an ethical and practical question: how can what an archive knows return to families without turning the records of missing people into an exposed public database?

Syria Mobile Film Festival

2013 — 2018

An experiment in who has the right to produce an image during war, and what changes when the camera is already in the hands of the person living the event.

AlShare Media Foundation

2010 — Ongoing

The first laboratory in which Matar’s journalism, documentary image and public cultural work met — and from which the later prison documentation developed.

Video interviews

Conversations that explain the background to particular investigations, places and methodological questions, and record how the work has changed over time.