Syria Prisons Museum
2024 — Ongoing · Public launch: September 2025After 8 December 2024, the problem changed from lack of access to the urgency of preservation: how to document sites and records quickly enough to keep them available for later investigation, while placing each fragment back inside the larger system that produced it.
Question and approach
Work expanded immediately after the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024. Cells, offices, corridors, walls, objects and records were suddenly accessible, but that access was unstable. The first task was therefore to preserve context: to document spaces before they were altered, and to record documents and physical traces before they were moved, dispersed or lost.
The methodology had to expand for a state-run detention system whose scale, bureaucracy and long chronology were different from the ISIS sites. A prison or branch is read not only as a building but as part of a network: court files, registries, interrogation records, chains of command, medical systems, transfers, deaths and changing uses across political periods.
Spatial reconstruction, testimony and records are used to test one another and to trace institutional patterns rather than to produce a single image of repression. The public work began with Sednaya Military Prison; more than 70 additional detention sites were documented during the first half of 2025, and the archive continues to grow as those sites are investigated in greater depth.
Role in the work
Matar leads the investigative and editorial direction and helps define the questions that connect sites, records and institutional structures. Field documentation, archiving, interviews, spatial reconstruction and specialist analysis are collective work across the Prisons Museum teams.
Visual archive
Sednaya Military Prison
Branch 215
Preparing the Syria Prisons Museum
Reading a state detention system
Materials and outputs
Sednaya Military Prison
Architectural and investigative documentation based on survivor testimony, records, photography and 3D reconstruction.
Branch 215 — The Bureaucracy of Murder in State Prisons
The structure, functions and procedures of a Military Intelligence raid branch.
The Internal Dossier of the Tadamon Massacre
Internal records showing how Military Intelligence dealt with the massacre after it became public.
Documentation of detention sites
A continuing architectural and digital record of prisons and security branches across Syria.
Current exhibition
SEDNAYA: Syria’s Architecture of Repression and Death
The exhibition treats Sednaya as a crime scene, combining reconstructed spaces, survivor testimony, documents, letters and objects.
- Open daily, 10:00–18:00.
- VR and guided tours every Tuesday and Thursday, 12:00–16:00.
- Admission free.
Recent related material
Under Surveillance: My File at Branch 215
Amer Matar opens his personal security file, recovered from the archives of Branch 215 of Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate. The documents show that surveillance of him began in 2009 and include security reports, intercepted phone-call summaries, an arrest order and records connected to his interrogation.
Hannover
The Internal Dossier of the Tadamon Massacre
How the Military Intelligence Directorate handled the Tadamon massacre once it became public, read through internal security records.
Al-Jumhuriya / Syria Prisons Museum
SEDNAYA: Syria’s Architecture of Repression and Death
An exhibition treating Sednaya as a crime scene to be documented. Visitors enter digitally reconstructed sections of the prison, hear survivor testimony, and encounter documents, letters and objects from life in detention.
Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial · 26 Mar — 27 Sep 2026
One Year After Assad’s Fall: Transitional Justice, Memory and Accountability in Syria
A documentary reading from Amer Matar’s Branch 215 security file followed by a public discussion.
HAU Hebbel am Ufer · Berlin