Mina Estock - Multi-screen Media Installation by Mina Estock

minaestock — 2025-05-19 07:48:24 UTC

The multi-screen media installation The Lightning Testimonies by Kanwar (2007) extends Felman and Laub’s (1991) discussion of testimonies through creatively presenting spoken, heard and read sexual assault accounts. Through a simultaneous display of eight videos on a thirty-two-minute loop (Fig. 2.1), Kanwar (2007) assembles testimonies from women and girls that expose the obscured history of sexual assault from the Indian subcontinent since the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Each screen explores a different era of regional conflict, yet a focus on testimonies from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and 2002 Gujarat massacres shown on the fifth and sixth screens of The Lightning Testimonies will centre the analysis. The Lightning Testimonies builds on Felman and Laub (1991) by firstly questioning the role of the witness through spoken accounts, then to listening to testimonies as a transformational encounter, and lastly to how reading accounts of sexual assault grounds the installation experience in the body- but not without the risk of losing transient audiences. Collectively, Kanwar (2007) uses the affordances and limitations of installation to fuel the viewer with political enquiry, immersively depicting the historical and geographical systems of meaning which allow trauma from violent social conditions to permeate everyday experience.

minaestock — 2025-05-19 08:23:48 UTC

Oral testimonies complexify representations of sexual assault due to confronting the translation of experience to spoken language. As Felman and Laub (1991) claim, a tension lies between “speech and survival” (11), where shifting an embodied experience into a linguistically legible narrative is a challenging task with high stakes. The Lightning Testimonies begins to reflect on Felman and Laub (1991) by questioning the epistemological boundaries of spoken testimonies, particularly the challenge posed by putting sexual assault experiences into words. Kanwar (2007) opens The Lightning Testimonies in a brief voice-over that says:

“Which image can represent the ever-changing words of a testimony?” (Punjabistan 2018, 0:29)

In turn, the installation invites the viewer to critique and question the affordances and limitations of the artistic techniques that will complement the upcoming testimonies. For example, to emphasise the spoken affordances of the testimonies, the installation uses contemplative and subtle “visual vocabularies” (Kanwar n.d., para. 2). Consequently, the viewer focuses on absorbing each sentence, thereby contributing to the deconstruction of “unspeakable” (Felman and Laub 1991, 16) testimonies and socially illegible accounts of sexual assault which violent histories rely on to maintain silence (Subotić 2019). Accepting the imperfection of spoken and visual languages to depict sexual assault creates a nuanced foundation for the oral testimonies to emerge.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 03:54:46 UTC

Next, Kanwar (2007) rejects the viewer as passive by forming an implicit dialogue between the audience and the oral testimonies, reinforcing that systems of violence inscribe all bodies. To demonstrate that “traumatic consequences… are actively evolving” (Felman and Laub 1991, 12) through oral testimony, Kanwar (2007) transitions to the first testimony of a gang rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War. A nameless witness is filmed retelling her experience while examining pictures of victims’ bodies (Fig. 2.2), creating an implicit “discursive practice” (Felman and Laub 1991, 22) between archival evidence and lived realities through testimony. Thus, The Lightning Testimonies highlights how individual testimonies can succumb to the “incommensurability of large-scale events” (Cvetkovich 2003, 20), or as Assman (2009) interprets, face a disjunctured “emplotment” (213) into collective memories. Recovering the testimonies disguised or unmentioned by existing collections of evidence, or “cultural memory” (Assman 2009, 210), not only forms a “return of the voice” (Felman and Laub 1991, 18) but also a return to the body. Refusing passivity allows The Lightning Testimonies to reopen histories and centre disenfranchised discourses of sexual assault around a renewed voice from individual lived realities.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 05:39:25 UTC

The immersive affordances of installation strengthen the activation of the viewer during oral testimonies. For Felman and Laub (1991), consuming testimonies “desacralise[s] the witness” (18) from strictly performing a purposeful and symbolic role in history, instead highlighting uncomfortable, often marginalised, accounts of suffering that enrich, complicate or reframe historical narratives. In Fig. 2.3, the aforementioned witness testimony is spoken and subtitled alongside videos of peaceful locations, contrasting the Pakistani militants’ traumatic appropriation of women as territory (Sarkar 2009). Juxtaposing the previously hidden testimony of gang rape with everyday scenery and noise, such bird chirping, breaks the perception of a “separate, singular body” (28) that is disconnected from seemingly mundane social conditions and systems of meaning (Blackman 2021). By doing so, Kanwar (2007) exemplifies desacralising the witness through implying that sexual assault is an ongoing material reality, grounded in locations and bodies that subvert symbolic, historical narratives through survival. Consequently, The Lightning Testimonies uses the visual affordances of installation to depict oral testimonies as nuanced, evolving and embodied acts of challenging historical narratives.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 05:43:04 UTC

When listening to testimonies, traumatic accounts pass through from the speaker to the viewer, often in transformational ways. Testimonies encapsulate “incommensurate” (58) experiences that can create a feeling of suspension or temporary disconnection between the knowledge and recipient (Felman and Laub 1991), creating a gap for new frames of understanding. Felman and Laub (1991) demonstrate that reflecting and sitting with traumatic accounts is integral to regaining disembodied knowledge, due to forming a “transference of pain” (63) which Kanwar (2007) facilitates through long pauses and minutes of silence. For example, Kanwar (2007) includes a witness testimony from a father whose daughter was missing and raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War (Fig. 2.5), yet each sentence is spaced by a ten-second gap of silence. As a result, the audience is forced to listen in painfully “affective terms” (Cvetkovich 2003, 48), extending the father’s traumatic account from beyond the letter to the Bangladesh government that the testimony originated from (Fig. 2.4). Through purposeful sound choices, The Lightning Testimonies crafts a listening experience that enhances the affective power of each testimony.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 05:47:13 UTC

Furthermore, listening to testimonies opens the opportunity for viewers to notice patterns among systems of violence. Liven (2012) argues that listening to each screen together develops a “simultaneity between narratives” (51), thereby keeping a national-historical scope without losing regional nuances during the process. As a result, Kanwar (2007) exposes what Sarkar (2009) labels as “collective amnesia” (28) since the Partition, which has caused a “tragic repetition” (28) of sexual trauma across the Indian subcontinent. The Lightning Testimonies draws attention to the repetitive inscribing of women’s bodies as sites for violent politics through presenting stories that faded from national memory as interconnected, consequently “capturing the disjunctions” (44) between lived realities and history (Cvetkovich 2003). To conclude the father’s testimony, the audience is plunged into silence before Kanwar (2007) explains that the Bangladesh Liberation War triggered a redefinition of the ‘raped woman’ as a ‘Veerangana’ (Fig. 2.5) or “brave heroine” (Punjabistan 2018, 5:43). Here, the simultaneous, multi-screen format enables the viewer to draw large-scale insights from hearing individual testimonies. The Lightning Testimonies creates a comparison between testimonies and national histories through weaving together interconnected soundscapes, representative of fractured narratives, to highlight the obscured prevalence of sexual assault during conflict.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 05:57:29 UTC

Purposeful silences during the installation embed different modes of understanding sexual assault accounts. Where listening to testimonies is to transform and reorient one’s knowledge (Felman and Laub 1991), using frequent pauses in The Lightning Testimonies enhances a reflexive audience presence while also reminding viewers of the political context of each sexual assault (Maithani 2016). Heavy statements are not only said, but seeped into the viewer, such as the quote on Veerangana women:

“The definition lived [pause], but she disappeared [pause], while the state was absolved of responsibility [pause].” (Punjabistan 2018, 5:50)

To Maithani (2016), “the silences are pertinent” (81) because the audience is led to question their relationship to each testimony, like the Veerangana women whose survival has not been systemically addressed beyond “haunting” (Freccero 2007, 195) a word. The gaps in the listening experience tease out reflection from the audience, making The Lightning Testimonies an artwork of “creative overcoming” (Gill-Peterson 2013, 290) rather than dwelling. Emphasising interconnectedness through the sound affordances of media installation facilitates an affective and nuanced listening to the testimonies.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 06:07:05 UTC

Compared to speaking and listening, displaying written testimonies offers a direct relationship between the testimony and the audience. While reading, the viewer “encounter[s] strangeness” (24) with the testimony due to an inner voice subjectively consuming and interpreting the text (Felman and Laub, 1991). Thus, when Kanwar (n.d.) displays a legal testimony excerpt without aesthetic “visual vocabularies” (para. 2) for the first time during the installation (Fig. 2.7), the audience is implicitly signalled to “read as if for life” (63), suspended in a lack of familiarity with the “newness of… information” (Felman and Laub 1991, 61). Particularly without the assistance of visual or sound cues, The Lightning Testimonies shows how language can be “lost and regained” (58) when interpreting a testimony (Felman and Laub 1991). Yet, the “space-in-between” (153) the audience and artwork which guides viewer interpretation is fragile (Morse 1990), demonstrating the cruel paradox of art communicating political intentions while attempting to be a successful commodity (Maithani 2016). Switching to a text-based communication format during The Lightning Testimonies reveals the limitations of depending on engagement from transient audiences, potentially diminishing the immersive potency of the medium.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 06:17:31 UTC

Despite the political enquiry The Lightning Testimonies attempts to foster within the audience, Kanwar’s (2007) entangled approach to depicting sexual assault through media installation may contest with contemporary gallery patterns. Reading testimonies “for life” (63) is a deep emotional investment (Felman and Laub 1991), which The Lightning Testimonies builds by embedding the audience as the subject of the testimony. Framing the viewer as “you” (Fig. 2.7; Punjabistan 2018, 19:50) shares the victim’s embodiment, demystifying the incommensurability of sexual assault (Liven 2012). Nonetheless, Kanwar’s (2007) effort to locate sexual assault as politically and historically situated may diminish under the increasing pattern of transient gallery viewership, which has intensified since the late twentieth-century (Morse 1990; Serrell 2010). The “intricacies and paradoxes of… grief” (Freccero 2007, 205), which can become ambiguous in the “retrievable shape” (Assman 2009, 213) of collective narratives, may not be acknowledged by audiences who do not make the emotional investment. Assuming that the viewer will read testimonies against collective memory may be an assumption that collapses under a generalised exhibition audience.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 07:30:21 UTC

The combination of spoken, heard and read testimonies in The Lightning Testimonies underlines the compelling affordances of using multi-screen media installation to trace interconnected histories of sexual assault. By grounding the “liberation of the testimony” (18) noted by Felman and Laub (1991) within the sensorial capacities of the audience, Kanwar (2007) centres the body in the artwork’s intention, artistic techniques, and viewing experience. However, relying on the engagement and subjectivities of the viewer during The Lightning Testimonies creates an unstable dependence, particularly considering the tension between art as a commodified political enquiry into sexual assault. Remembering that the testimonies were transposed from histories and experience into the artwork, as a globally-exhibited commodity, disrupts the assumption that installation is a neutral medium. When experienced in entirety, The Lightning Testimonies epitomises the affordances of installation to display spoken, heard and written dimensions of testimony within the context of sexual assault during conflict. In the face of changing gallery audiences, The Lightning Testimonies persists to expose the insidious gaps in Indian subcontinental national histories and reveal the repetitive use of womens’ bodies as a site of political violence.

minaestock — 2025-05-20 09:41:06 UTC

minaestock — 2025-05-20 09:44:25 UTC

minaestock — 2025-05-23 04:31:15 UTC

Figures

Fig. 2.1. Kanwar, Amar. 2007. The Lightning Testimonies. Multi-screen media installation, 8 projection digital video, synchronized, colour, black and white, sound, loop, 32:31 min. https://www.amarkanwar.com/tlt-2007.

Fig. 2.2. Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 1:52.

https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Fig. 2.3. Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 2:49.

https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Fig. 2.4. Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 3:34.

https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Fig. 2.5. Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 4:50.

https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Fig. 2.6. Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 19:50.

https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Bibliography

minaestock — 2025-05-23 04:32:25 UTC

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https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270439.003.0011.

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https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2074512.

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Kanwar, Amar. 2007. The Lightning Testimonies. Multi-screen media installation, 8 projection digital video, synchronized, colour, black and white, sound, loop, 32:31 min. https://www.amarkanwar.com/tlt-2007.

Kanwar, Amar. n.d. “The Lightning Testimonies (2007).” Amar Kanwar. Accessed May 20, 2025.

https://www.amarkanwar.com/tlt-2007.

Punjabistan. “The Lightning Testimonies Part-2,” Youtube. November 25, 2018. Reproduced video of original artwork, 0:29-19:50. https://youtu.be/hiZyKT64sF8?si=K6Oiev5WTFi5JFBF.

Sarkar, Bhaskar. 2009. Mourning the nation: Indian cinema in the wake of Partition. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11sms6r.

Serrell, Beverly. 2010. “Paying attention: The duration and allocation of visitors’ time in museum exhibitions.” Curator: The Museum Journal, 40, no. 2: 108-125.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1997.tb01292.x.

Subotić, Jelena. 2019. Yellow star, red star: Holocaust remembrance after communism. Cornell University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501742415-005.