Images of Torture by US Military Featured at California Art Gallery
At the Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco, California, an exhibition of photographs taken by guards at the Abu Ghraib prison will soon be opening
On January 4 at the Toomey Tourell Gallery in San Francisco, California, the most recent exhibition by controversial South Africa-born artist Clinton Fein will open. It is already predicted that it “will open the wounds of Abu Ghraib.” This allows us to ask if the halls in that dark prison are closed. Are they closed for the relatives of those victims and for all of humanity that demands justice?
The exhibit is a collection of photographs – the same ones taken by the guards who tortured prisoners as part of their twisted conduct. The images are now digitally manipulated, transforming them into works of artistic creation. Above all, these serve as vehicles of accusation, the point that an article in the press noted as “an impressive and defiant exploration of America’s approach to torture under the Bush administration.”
The alternative website www.RawStory.com commented that the diffuse transformations and low resolution of the images achieve “vivid, strong and terrifying” effects.
The works will be exhibited under the name “Torture;” it could not be otherwise. It is not acceptable to use the euphemism “abuse,” as is done in official government statements and by the press, when the reality is that United States carried out the most horrific crimes at Abu Ghraib.
Those scenes of physical and psychic torture occur equally, or in a similar way, at the concentration camp at the illegally occupied Guantanamo US naval base here in Cuba, in other prisons of Iraq, at the prison in Bagram (Afghanistan) and in the secret jails of the CIA located in who knows how many truly dark corners of the planet.
This is not the first time that Clinton Fein has sparked controversy, or that the issue of Abu Ghraib has been dealt with; pictorial works by Colombian Fernando Botero have also spotlighted the misdeed. Fein however focuses on the choreography and “sexualization” of the torture, working with the images of naked prisoners, men forced into contorted positions, inmates made to simulate degrading and humiliating sexual acts. The artist pokes away and it exposes the dark side of a war that the American people were tricked into by their own government, and one in which hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been slaughtered.
The jolt of Abu Ghraib impacted the consciousness of many when the pictures were published in April 2004, and will have a continued impact through “Torture” by Clinton Fein.
It is a necessary reproduction because it is indispensable that the wave of indignation grow more powerful and systematic in order to do away with those who conceived, organized and ordered the execution of the war against Iraq.
