Art behind bars: ‘Tea, Torture & Reparations’
DePaul exhibit makes connections between police violence in Chicago and torture in Guantanamo
Mamdouh poses alone in a refuse-filled square of his Egyptian hometown; Murat in a cluster of mint-green containers that serve as a refugee housing complex in Germany; Rustam in the central hall of a jail-turnedmuseum in Ireland. Unusual for portrait subjects, their backs are to the camera. But portraits, at least profound ones, are never just about likeness, and these men, released from Guantanamo after having been held for years without charge, appear still marked by the U.S. military’s rule against photographing the faces of imprisoned people.
These pictures belong to “Beyond Gitmo,” a haunting series by Debi Cornwall that’s part of “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture & Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo,” an ambitious group exhibition at the DePaul Art Museum that is at once enraging, heartbreaking and replete with humanity. It’s no coincidence that the show opened this year: 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the opening of the extralegal military prison established by the U.S. government at its naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as part of the global war on terror. Meanwhile, Chicago’s police department is the other institution being examined for repeated abuse of human rights. In both places, it has been mostly Black and minority bodies at stake and white bodies in charge.
“Remaking the Exceptional” shifts continually between Chicago and Guantanamo. Included is the work of some two dozen individuals and collectives: artist Trevor Paglen, who shot the only known photograph of Salt Pit, a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan; activist Sarah-Ji Rhee, who’s been documenting local freedom struggles since 2010; the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials group; Gitmo detainees past and present; and inmates of Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, where the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/ Education Project has been leading classes for over a decade. The art here is documentary, conceptual, legalistic, therapeutic, representational, memorializing and visionary. It is whatever it needs to be and much of it — like the struggle for justice — is ongoing.
The show opens with a navigational chart of sorts: a print of undulating water overlaid with a constellation of eight interlinked names. Four survived torture at the hands of Chicago police; four in Guantanamo. What might they have to say to one another, across the oceans that separate them and that also have long symbolized freedom? A podcast created for the exhibition collages together their individual interviews into an imagined conversation about the carceral state and the possibilities of reparation, much as the show itself facilitates such rapport between artworks.
Those portraits by Cornwall are joined by others, ceiling-hung effigies quilted by Dorothy Burge of CPD torture victims who remain incarcerated, that status visible in the vertically striped fabric that lines the men’s faces like so many prison bars. An 8-foot-long black banner itemizes a speculative reparations ordinance for survivors of police abuse, made real when it was approved by the Chicago City Council in 2015; a second banner imagines the same for Guantanamo detainees, whose jumpsuits beget its bright orange.
Shelves display rough sketches by Darrell Cannon and Abu Zubaydah of brutal acts they were forced to undergo while in the custody of CPD officers and Guantanamo guards, respectively. “Coordinates of Terror,” an interactive map by the Invisible Institute, concretely links torture techniques used in war to those employed by notorious CPD officers like former commander and
Vietnam vet Jon Burge and detective Richard Zuley, a senior interrogator at Gitmo for two years. The implications are clear and horrendous.
The heart of “Remaking the Exceptional” is the Tea Project, an endeavor of Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes, who also co-curated the exhibition. Their “Ode to the Sea,” a sprawling wooden dock in the main gallery, includes an array of items to help a visitor find moorings in treacherous waters: charts for navigating the way between violence and injustice, a “torture tree” in the form of driftwood studded with nails, a lighthouse containing parts of a torture device, a phonograph horn broadcasting the voices of survivors. The longest-running of their collaborations has been a series of cast porcelain teacups, one for each of the 780 men imprisoned in Guantanamo (37 remain today, only 2 of whom have been convicted). Every cup bears the name and nationality of a detainee and is decorated with that country’s flower. Inspired by stories of how inmates would etch their Styrofoam cups with designs and poems, the vessels sit quietly, endlessly, on wooden shelves that line the walls of the main gallery.
Above the rows and rows of teacups hangs a grouping of art made inside Guantanamo: 48 paintings and drawings of flowers, one for each of the countries whose citizens have been imprisoned. The effect is of condolence cards or hospital art, offered with the sincere hope of comforting those in pain. It’s one of a few collections of detainee art on view here — there are also ships at sea, empty tea settings, dead or wintering trees — whose themes speak movingly and metaphorically to the inner life of a person indefinitely confined.
All of these pictures — plus a rare sculpture by Khalid Qasim, a representation of the tools of knowledge ingeniously constructed from restricted supplies: wood, coffee, creamer, paint and cardboard — predate a 2017 decision by the Department of Defense to no longer allow art to leave the island. Doing so doesn’t pose a traditional security risk: it threatens to humanize those who remain locked up. What else is art but evidence that a being continues to think and feel and imagine and resist, despite having endured the cruelest of treatment?
“Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture & Reparations | Chicago to Guantanamo” runs through Aug. 7 at the DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton, 773-325-7506, resources.depaul.edu