Witnessing, Memory and Trauma: Re-thinking the Exhibit Space

The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) has embarked on a five-year initiative examining the AGGV gallery building itself as it relates to intergenerational trauma and diverse communities impacted by processes of colonialization, and the WWII internment of Japanese Canadians.

Cathy Caruth considers the exhibition space through the lens of bearing witness to history and memory. Architectural historian Alberto Pérez-Gómez sees the gallery, as in fact “a theatre of memory” capable of uncovering truths while philosopher Giorgio Agamben also speaks to this in a radical of seeing built cultural spaces akin to the position of witnessing.

The pandemic highlighted the essentiality of cultural spaces – large open spaces that provide safe environments for dialogue and even mass protests for social justice. Although acts of reckoning with loss is not new, communities are increasingly using the possibilities of built space to engage with historical and personal narratives, as well as representations of witnessing, memory and trauma.

Matheson will draw a connection between galleries serving as spaces of reconciliation, alongside decolonization approaches to exhibit spaces and programming taken by the AGGV that will inform future research.

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Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: MIT Press, 2007.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience, Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. ‘The Architecture of Richard Henriquez: A Praxis of Personal Memory’, in Richard Henriquez: Memory Theatre, ed. Howard Shubert (Montreal/Vancouver: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Vancouver Art Gallery, 1993), pp.9-29.