Eyal Weizman—as the keynote speaker in the 2015 Proseminar series Fieldwork—will speak of the work of Forensic Architecture at the intersection of architecture, war and law. Forensic Architecture, an agency composed of artists, filmmakers and architectural researchers, uses architecture as sensor and an agent that can analyse and respond to political conflicts... in Israel/Palestine, environmental violence in Guatemala and their research for the UN on drone warfare in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Weizman will show how architectural methods and new sensing technologies could be used to expose the logic of violent conflict while raising a host of conceptual problems to do with the thresholds of vision and law.

The 2015 proseminar in the Masters of Visual Studies is a public series of lectures revolving around the methodology of fieldwork, bringing together artists, architects, curators, researchers and historians that critically think through spatial concepts of conflict where the public and private overlap as fields under tension and compression. The series includes talks and workshops with Eyal Weizman, Trevor Paglen, Laura Kurgan, Anna-Sophie Springer and Hillel Schwartz.  The series is moderated by Charles Stankievech.

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture - on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett (UCL) in London at the Stadel School in Frankfurt and is a Professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele's Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press 2012), ForensicArchitecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Inflexions and Cabinetwhere he has edited a special issue on forensics (issue 43, 2011).

He has worked with a variety of NGOs world wide and was member of B'Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institue of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard in NY, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and was invited to deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst, Nelson Mandela, Mansour Armaly and the Edward Said Memorial Lectures amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.  He is currently a Princeton Global Scholar at the School of Architecture at Princeton University.