What must not be, cannot be

The case has been all over the German media. Because the idea that Oury Jalloh set himself on fire sixteen years ago in a detention cell at the police headquarters in Dessau-Roßlau and died within minutes is not only believed by virtually no one—it has also been conclusively rejected by a number of scientific experts and refuted by attempts to reconstruct the events. Jalloh’s death is simply impossible to explain without the involvement of a third party. Yet the investigation did not even consider the possibility that the very policemen who had arrested the man from Sierra Leone might have started the fire that killed him. The Federal Prosecutor’s Office and other authorities did not see sufficient reason to suspect a murder motivated by xenophobic hatred. That is why a cloud of doubts has continued to hang over the case. The German and international press have widely remarked that the proceedings have been hampered by almost farcical legal and administrative bumbling and foot-dragging. A constitutional appeal related to the case is pending in the Federal Constitutional Court.

Established in 2005, Initiative in Gedenken an Oury Jalloh e.V. has been pushing for a thorough investigation in order to uncover the full truth. For his project, Mario Pfeifer has worked with the initiative to produce a new expert study of the fire that will revisit the findings of earlier trials and experiments and elaborate on their conclusions.

The core scene of the action in the project is cell no. 5 itself, where Jalloh died. Experts have reconstructed it four times, trying to recreate the fire and corroborate the official version of the events. To no avail. The condition of the room and the body after the fire proved altogether inexplicable without the use of a fire accelerant. However, the authorities had ruled out the possibility of third-party involvement from the start and insisted on the suicide hypothesis, and so no accelerant was ever part of the experiments. Only the Initiative in memory of Oury Jalloh e.V. carried out fire tests with fire accelerants in Ireland in 2013. Result: a burn patter similar to the case of Oury Jalloh can be traced back to fire accelerants. In short: the fact that someone could have poured gasoline over the migrant and lit him up was never considered and therefore never examined under real world conditions by authorities and the public prosecutor's office. In short, the theory that someone might have poured gasoline over the migrant and set him on fire was never taken into consideration and never tested under real-world conditions.

Pfeifer’s project will reflect on the previous experiments and build a fifth and faithful duplicate of the cell. This will enable a new fire investigator—this time, an internationally renowned forensic scientist with specialized expertise—to simulate a sequence of events, possibly involving a fire accelerant, in order to replicate the appearance of the scene of the fire and the condition of the victim as closely as possible.

In a first step, Pfeifer’s new cell will be demonstrated at KOW. After the conclusion of the fire simulation, which the artist will record with his camera, the extensive project will be featured in its entirety at the gallery.

In addition to the replica of cell no. 5, the first presentation, held on occasion of the 2021 Gallery Weekend, will showcase a new video by Pfeifer that is effectively a small case study. It is dedicated to the lighter with which Oury Jalloh supposedly set himself on fire and that was allegedly discovered in the debris from the fire during a later search. However, no trace of Jalloh’s DNA was ever found on the lighter, which casts doubt on its probative value. Pfeifer’s video offers a glimpse of the many contradictions that have marred Oury Jalloh’s case, which his exhibition at KOW will unfold and perhaps help to resolve.