The Lightning Testimonies

The Lightning Testimonies is a multi-channel video installation that reflects upon a history of conflict in the Indian subcontinent through the often repressed, always sensitive, and newly urgent subject of sexual violence against women. As a complex montage of simultaneous accounts, it includes stories ranging from wide-scale abduction and rape during the partition of India in 1947 to the powerful anti-rape protests in Manipur in 2004. Each projection features a different woman recounting a multilayered memory of trauma and resilience, revealing multiple submerged narratives, at times through people, images and memories, at other times though objects from nature and everyday life that stand as silent but surviving witnesses. In all the narratives, the body is central – as a site for honor, hatred and humiliation and also for dignity and protest. Kanwar thereby explores the many ways in which narratives of sexual violence are enmeshed within Indian social and political conflicts. The endeavor was created, in part, to break through the zones of self-imposed and communally enforced silence surrounding the issue in India, in both public and private realms. The objectivity of Kanwar’s documentary approach is modified by his own presence in the films. Through voice-over and first-person commentary, the artist insists on his own place within the larger discourse, introducing an empathic and passionate presence into a discussion that is epic in scale and national in consequence.

Biographies and personal accounts collected by Amar Kanwar on his travels through India and Bangladesh inform his filmic work in a variety of ways: in the form of facts, poetry, song, theatrical performances, and poetic images. Using a range of visual languages, The Lightning Testimonies transports us beyond the realm of suffering into a space of quiet contemplation where resilience creates the potential for transformation.