ISIS Prisons Museum

The work began in 2017 while we were searching for colleagues abducted by ISIS in 2013. Many detention sites had no official prison architecture: they were houses, public buildings and other ordinary structures whose previous use could disappear quickly from view. Former detainees and local memory were therefore essential to locating sites and understanding how rooms, routes and functions had changed.

The archive grew by bringing different traces together: more than 70,000 ISIS records, hundreds of filmed survivor interviews, objects, drone documentation of mass graves, more than 1,000 photographs of writing on prison walls and extensive 3D documentation. No single layer is treated as sufficient on its own.

The digital museum is a way of keeping those relationships visible. A visitor can move through a reconstructed site while reading the records, testimony and chronology connected to it. The aim is not to recreate the experience of imprisonment, but to preserve a spatial and evidentiary record that can continue to be questioned.

Matar initiated this work and leads its investigative and editorial direction. Field documentation, interviews, archival processing, research and digital reconstruction are carried out collectively by specialised teams and in dialogue with survivors and local knowledge.