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.

01 2017 — Ongoing Prisons Museum 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. Read more → 02 2017 — Ongoing ISIS Prisons Museum A long-term investigation into the detention system through which ISIS governed, punished and disappeared people in Syria and Iraq. Read more → 03 2024 — Ongoing Syria Prisons Museum A continuing investigation of Syria’s prison and security apparatus, moving from buildings and records to bureaucratic structures, procedures and chains of responsibility. Read more → 05 In preparation Jawab / The Missing 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? Read more → 06 2013 — 2018 Syria Mobile Film Festival 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. Read more → 07 2010 — Ongoing AlShare | الشارع The first laboratory in which Matar’s journalism, documentary image and public cultural work met — and from which the later prison documentation developed. Read more →