(1999-2000)
Created by artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, Witness is a response to the instances of police brutality in New York City in the late 1990s.
Most street corners at the time had red emergency “call boxes” so that observers of crime could alert the appropriate emergency service. McCallum and Tarry recreated these classic call boxes in cast iron from the perspective of witnesses and survivors of such incidents, reversing the intended function and animating these with the stories and testimonies of individuals who had themselves experienced violence at the hands of authorities meant to protect.
Audio of the oral histories of witnesses, family members, activists, and survivors of police violence were accompanied by legal documents including court transcripts, autopsy reports and criminal records, as well as video projections, photographic images and text. This created conditions in which the social trauma of these incidents could be processed through acts of witnessing, sharing, and accountability, and in certain cases led to guilty
McCallum and Tarry placed these callboxes at different sites of police violence and persecution throughout New York City with accompanying installations and exhibitions at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Institute on Arts and Civic Dialogue in Boston, MA.
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