The realization that evidence can have a greater political impact when it is aestheticized, monumentalized, and memorialized, has redefined the potential impact of art as a political operative. Not coincidentally, the development of evidence-based artistic practices substantially benefited from the codification of Holocaust studies in universities and museums.
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The architectural details, including a ladder and door for delivering gas pellets and a metal tube with wire mesh that defused the gas, foreground the idea of intentionality: Someone designed, planned and made these things for a specific purpose.
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The ghostly, all-white installation also utilizes materials such as steel and wood and features three, full-scale building elements, dubbed “monuments,” that were part of the original killing rooms at Auschwitz. There’s a gas chamber door, which notably hinges outward and proves that architects revised the entryways of the on-site morgues to become gas chambers. There’s also a wall hatch and ladder, which guards climbed to throw the cyanide gas down into the chambers. Lastly, on view is a floor-to-ceiling gas column through which the deadly pesticide Zyklon B was routed down into the two underground chambers.
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In these shifting venues the piece has taken on a range of textures and meanings moving between architecture, history, art, memory and commemoration.
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At first glance, The Evidence Room appears to be a modest space with a few unassuming objects all painted white, but a closer look reveals something much darker. The textured white walls are composed of memos between Nazis and architects, technical details of gas chambers, and floor plans for Auschwitz—the most lethal concentration camp Nazis built during the Holocaust.
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