‘It's art, all it can do is bear witness’

This chapter examines histories of enslavement as portrayed in Selina Thompson’s salt. (2017) and Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights (2020) compared with objects, artefacts, and exhibits at the International Slavery Museum (ISM) in Liverpool. I assess how narratives, staging, and curating decisions respond to the ethical issues of bearing witness to the past and drawing out contemporary legacies. While ISM’s displays are sedate, sterile, and disembodied narrations of histories of enslavement, Thompson and Pinnock’s use of embodied performance strategies creates space for Black women to speak back to histories of racial injustice and the ongoing legacies of slavery.