Witness
- Farrah Rahaman and Tshay Williams
- Annenberg School for Communication, School of Arts & Sciences
- 2020 Black Artists Support Grant
At 56th and Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia, PA
WITNESS is a joint undertaking of curator Tshay Williams (SAS’17) and producer Farrah Rahaman (Annenberg, PhD) which proposes a public art portrait series bearing witness to the glory and grace of Philadelphians.
Inspired by the joviality of the annual Odunde Festival, the featured images are uplifting portraits of children, adults, and elders from Philadelphia’s Black communities. They stem from Philadelphia based or rooted photographers including Rashid Zakat, Naomieh Jovin, angel edwards, Lendl Tellington and Ociele Hawkins. Each photo is composed with the motif “Our victory is inevitable. Our glory is undeniable.”
The project moves beyond the sheer politics of visibility and riffs on Deb Thomas’ notion of witnessing 2.0 as a form of appreciating and bearing witness to life outside of racial capitalism. WITNESS enacts a kind of repair, providing a visual balm and healing in form of small pleasure and encounter for the neighborhoods in which the portraits are placed.