The Object as Witness

Captain RedTape (2011)

Nigerian artist and architect Peju Alatise's exhibition Material Witness in (2012) frames the notion of the object as witness, or 

Material witness (pun intended) is the idea that the ‘material’ is the witness. The idea that an inanimate object can be made to speak in a visual composition of its experiences as though it indeed had life and memory.

The exhibition was intended to raise questions around the nature of 'material' as tangible evidence and its associations with testimony. Her work addresses the intersections between material and composition to speak its truth.