Kader Attia is a contemporary artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Born in 1970 in France, the French-Algerian artist began his artistic practice with photography before taking on sculpture, installation, collage and film.

His socio-cultural research has led Kader Attia to the notion of Repair, a concept he has been developing philosophically in his writings and symbolically in his oeuvre as a visual artist. With the principle of Repair being a constant in nature — thus also in humanity —, any system, social institution or cultural tradition can be considered as an infinite process of Repair, which is closely linked to loss and wounds, to recuperation and re-appropriation. Repair reaches far beyond the subject and connects the individual to gender, philosophy, science, and architecture, and also involves it in evolutionary processes in nature, culture, myth and history.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, art curator, filmmaker, and theorist of photography and visual culture. She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University and an independent curator of Archives and Exhibitions. Her books include: Potential History – Unlearning Imperialism; Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography; The Civil Contract of Photography; Aïm Deüelle Lüski and Horizontal Photography; From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950; co-author with Adi Ophir; The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River. Her potential histories, archives and curatorial work were shown in Germany, the US, Spain and Israel.

Newroz Duman is an activist for self-organization, migration, empowerment and anti-racism. She fights in the “Initiative 19. Februar Hanau” for memory, justice, education and consequences of the racist attacks in Hanau. She is also a trauma educator, speaker in political education work, movement worker/movement foundation, board member of “PRO ASYL” as well as an organizer with “Jugendliche ohne Grenzen”.

Başak Ertür is a Reader at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. She is the author of Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (Fordham University Press, 2022) which won the 2024 SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize. Her work is engaged with questions of legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law’s epistemologies and aesthetics. Başak’s edited collections include the forthcoming Routledge Handbook on the Lived Experience of Ideology (with James Martel, Naveed Mansouri and Connal Parsley, 2024), Manual for Conspiracy (2011), and Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward Said (with Müge Gürsoy Sökmen, 2008). She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2023-24), was a CAPES/PRINT Visiting Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 2022, and received the Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities Julien Mezey Dissertation Award in 2016. Prior to joining Goldsmiths, she taught at Birkbeck Law School for a decade. She serves on the advisory board of Forensis, and the editorial committee of Law & Critique.

Kodwo Eshun is a writer, journalist, theorist, and filmmaker as well as teaching Contemporary Art Theory in Goldsmiths’ Department of Visual Cultures. Formerly affiliated with the University of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, Eshun co-founded the Turner Prize-nominated artists collective the Otolith Group. Eshun writes on Afrofuturism, music culture, and transnationality.

In 2007, attorney Wolfgang Kaleck founded the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin together with internationally active attorneys, and has been its Secretary General ever since.

Before founding the ECCHR, the specialist lawyer for criminal law had been working as a criminal defense lawyer in the law firm Hummel.Kaleck.Rechtsanwälte. Since 1998, he has also worked in the Coalition Against Impunity to ensure that those responsible for the murder and so-called disappearances of Germans during the Argentine military dictatorship are held accountable. Together with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Kaleck pursued criminal cases against U.S. military officials, including former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, from 2004 to 2008.

Wolfgang Kaleck is a member of the advisory boards of the Forum for International and Criminal and Humanitarian Law (FICHL), the Coalition for International Criminal Justice (CICJ), the Colombian lawyers’ collective CCAJAR, the Mexican human rights organization ProDESC, FIAN Germany, and the board of the Paul Grüninger Foundation. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Kaleck is active as a publicist ( e.g. Law versus Power, 2018).

He has received several awards for his work as a lawyer and founder of ECCHR. In 2020 and 2022 he was appointed as Scholar in Residence at the Sorensen Center at the City University New York/ CUNY.

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Now a Swedish citizen, he lives in Berlin.

Sarah is a graduate of the University of Toronto (BSc) and the University of Cambridge (MPhil), where her research focused on the destruction of heritage sites in conflict.

Sarah joined the team in 2017, having previously worked at B+H Architects, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Aga Khan Museum.

Contact her via info@forensic-architecture.org.

Bernd M. Scherer is Director of Haus der Kulturen der Welt since 2006. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. Philosopher and author of several publications focusing on aesthetics and international cultural exchange, Scherer came to the HKW from the Goethe-Institut. From 1989-1994, he was Director of the Goethe-Institute Karachi and Lahore, and from 1999-2000 he directed the Goethe-Institut Mexico City, subsequently acting as Director of the Arts Department at the Goethe-Institut main office in Munich from 2004-2005. Since January 2011, he teaches as Honorary Professor at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He curated and directed major art and cultural projects such as “Das weiße Meer”, “Rethinking Europe”, and “Über-Lebenkunst”.

Nathan is a speculative designer, technologist, and researcher with a background in architecture. He is co-founder of Inferstudio, a digital design practice that works through worldbuilding, editing, videography, VFX and data visualization to both speculate on possible futures and reveal contemporary realities. He has worked as an advanced researcher for Forensic Architecture, where his research focused on developing new tools and workflows for dynamic image and video analysis. He has also taught in architecture schools internationally, including at UCLA AUD, the Architectural Association (AA), Strelka Institute and the University of Melbourne. He studied architecture at the University of Melbourne and at the AA, where he received Diploma Honours.

Prof. Dr. Margarita Tsomou is a Greek cultural theory scholar and works from Berlin as an author, dramaturg, moderator, curator and professor. She co-founded the pop-feminist Missy Magazine in 2008, is curator for theory and discourse at HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin and professor for contemporary theater practice at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. Her recent curatorial works include the series “Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence” at HAU-Hebbel am Ufer, the series “On Violence” with HAU Hebbel am Ufer and the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne and the “Apatride Society” event series in Paul B. Preciado’s discursive program at Documenta 14.

She publishes and researches on queer decolonial feminism and sexuality, performance theory, new media and theater in education. Currently she is working on an ecological thinking that brings together dimensions of biodiversity and naturecultures with the social, the body, gender and racial capitalism.

Her work has appeared in Die Zeit, taz, Spex, Frankfurter Rundschau, WDR and SWR.