Personal testimony lies at the very heart of almost all documentation of human rights abuses and injustice. Such testimony tends to prioritise spectacular violence and events, and in assessing the ‘value’ of testimony, investigators usually prize qualities like coherence, consistency, and even complementarity with institutional aims and objectives.

As a result, testimony can be rather narrowly defined in much human rights work. We asked artists and activists to think about how the arts can challenge and provoke us to expand our ideas of testimony and offer us bold new languages for expression, persuasion, and protest in the fields of human rights and social justice. Artists offered collaborative proposals dealing with the following themes: Slow and structural  violence; unspoken testimony; testimonies of joy and hope; other ‘voices’ in the human and non-human world; and alternative sites of testimony. At the end of Conversations with TESTIMONY, we will bring artists and activists together to share their process and work.