Is the Voyeur a Witness?
Fig. 1. Exhibition view of Testimony Exhibition, Studio Cache, Montreal. Photo by Luc Joo Baya
The Testimony collective, composed of eighteen Concordia University artists, presented their work at Studio Cache, each responding to our time's emotional and material urgencies. In this exhibition, Testimony transcends explanation. It lingers in texture, rhythm and silence. It resides in the labour, the weight of softness, in fragments of the mundane. These works do not offer a resolution; rather, they ask us to consider: is the voyeur a witness, or are they simply watching the aftermath of something they cannot understand? This text reflects on a selection of works within the collective, each offering a distinct approach to witnessing.
Fig. 2. Jericho Sanderson-Knight, For in my Hands, I mend, cyanotype; cotton, linen, plaster, raku clay, porcelain, mulberry paper, 2 × 2 × 9 ft. Photo by Luc Joo Baya
In Isabelle Galipeau's soft, fabric-laced installation, Testimony arrives as an embrace. Suspended in midair, made from stuffed lace, accompanied by audio, we are invited into a somatic experience through proximity, not to decode, but to feel. This sculptural monument is grounded in instinct, which asks the viewer not for interpretation but for presence. A moment of sisterly tenderness, a soft maternal embrace that, while uniform in its presence, can never be perfectly replicated twice. The work resists permanence; it changes with the room, light, and the body approaching it. In this space, Testimony becomes touch, where the politics of softness and feminist rhetoric emerge. It makes a case for vulnerability and shared presence, declaring a holistic acceptance of tenderness and emotionality.
The gesture of care carries onto Jericho Sanderson-Knight's handmade assemblages— delicate, collaged constellations ranging from floor to ceiling. Cyanotypes, stitched textiles, photographs, and cast ceramics cohere into a landscape of witnessing. Caring hands reappear repeatedly— stitched, cast, photographed, held. Each one is an echo of labour, reminding us that to testify is to carry, to piece together, and to bear witness in the face of rupture. Care becomes a skilled endurance, therapeutic in process, and deeply material in its manifestation, making the viewer feel the weight of making and process. The question lingers: Are we witnessing the labour?
Nedjma Ziarati’s Testimony takes on the form of contemplative stillness, ornate, symbolic, and gently withheld. One composition creates a dreamlike plane, with suspended hovering faces that are both watching and being watched. In the other, a figure is leaning to the edge of a ruptured landscape, caught between concealment and visuality. The environment around her is a threshold, between interior and exterior, myth and reality. Here, the viewer witnesses a sanctuary of memory, myth and archetype. They evoke ancestors, forgotten selves, or unseen witnesses. In this world, a narrative of connection, secrecy and transformation unfolds, though spoken in soft whispers instead of loud declarations. It insists on inheritance and embodiment. Stillness is not silence, but a testimony in another tongue.
Fig. 3. Nedjma Ziarati, Beneath the Willow (20 × 24 in) and Untitled (9 × 12 in), gouache and watercolour on paper. Photo by Luc Joo Baya
But not all testimony is wrapped in lace, labour, ritualized testimony or the serenity of witnessing. In JC's poetic minimalism, Testimony is stripped of grandeur and instead embedded in the everyday residue. Here, the unnoticed is not brought to the forefront. The daily commute is sanctified, ritualized, refusing spectacle. The kitchen floor is exalted. The mundane is framed, presented and made sacred through context, becoming the ultimate refusal of narrative closure or linear storytelling. The viewer is offered no narrative closure. Everything is implicated, and the Testimony is through the mundane, not coherence.
Fig. 4. Arthur Chenier, 16 janvier, 18 h, acrylic and oil on canvas, 36 × 30 in. Photo by Luc Joo Baya
Like many works in the exhibition, testimony is addressed from different personal and ideological perspectives. Arthur Chénier’s practice approaches this through rupture—through the uncomfortable, the distorted, the unspoken. Arthur Chénier's tableau turns on the viewer. The horror, whether in the distorted face of the woman, the isolation of sitting alone at the dinner table, or the surreal horror of mimicry and masks, persists. His work implicates the viewer, demanding we confront our own voyeurism. The gaze here is not gentle. Instead, it inculpates, and the viewer is not spared. The figures return our gaze, waiting to be witnessed, in the solitude of abandonment, and the unbearable tension of what the monsters might do next.
These works suggest that Testimony does not require linearity, explanation, or coherence. It can arrive in softness or fracture, care or residue. In Testimony, we are left with both a declaration, and a lingering: of hands, gazes, threads; fragments refusing to fade.