Investigative Aesthetics between Latin America and the Middle East

This thesis proposes a definition for a category of contemporary art, titled “investigative aesthetics,” that questions the authority of historical narratives and remediates archival resources, from photographs, documentation, maps, and other forms of data visualization, to do so. Following the example of the collective research agency Forensic Architecture and their leveraging of investigative aesthetics as an exhibiting strategy to examine instances of human rights violations between Latin America and the Middle East, I expand their definition to analyze work by contemporary artists from both of these regions who utilize investigative strategies, including the consultation of archives and the mounting or remounting of archival sources, to achieve forms of cognitive justice for victims of identity-based trauma to which they can relate or intimately know through their own geographic or ideological identities. Specifically in work by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Oscar Muñoz, Milena Bonilla, Fazal Sheikh, and Jananne al-Ani, investigative aesthetics provides a framework upon which historical narratives that pertain to their national histories and continue to permeate social relationships of power today may be annotated with their individual contributions.