Berlin Biennale Responds as Artists Pull Work over Images of Abu Ghraib Torture
After a number of Iraqi artists eliminated their work from the twelfth Berlin Biennale in protest of the exhibition’s show of works that includes pictures of torture happening at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, the Biennale’s curator, Kader Attia, and his workforce right now issued a press release on the matter. “We consider in dialogue and worth the relationships we have now with all artists collaborating within the Berlin Biennale very a lot,” wrote the group. “We’re nonetheless concerned about working by means of the controversy and can stay open to a dialogue. We predict the problems at stake are extremely necessary and would due to this fact like to ask the events concerned to talk about them in a public dialogue.”
Sajjad Abbas, Layth Kareem, and Rayad Mutar on August 16 requested that their work be faraway from the Biennale following the July 29 publication in Artforum on-line of a letter written by curator and artist Rijin Sahakian and cosigned by greater than 4 hundred artists, amongst them the three Biennale members who in the end pulled their work. Abbas, Kareem, Mutar, and Sahakian, supported by their friends, took subject with the location of their work in proximity with Jean-Jacques Lebel’s 2013 Poison soluble. Scènes de l’occupation américaine à Bagdad (Soluble Poison. Scenes from the American Occupation in Baghdad), which includes life-size pictures of Iraqi prisoners who had been tortured and murdered by American troops at Abu Ghraib within the wake of the US-led occupation of Iraq.
“This version of the Biennale is alleged to be centered on decolonial engagement, to supply ‘restore… as a type of company’ and ‘a place to begin . . for important dialog, in an effort to discover methods collectively to look after the now,’” Sahakian wrote, referring to the Biennale’s curatorial assertion. “But the Biennale made the choice to commodify images of unlawfully imprisoned and brutalized Iraqi our bodies below occupation, displaying them with out the consent of the victims and with none enter from the Biennale’s collaborating Iraqi artists, whose work was adjacently put in with out their information. Who’s given company on this type of ‘restore’?”
Attia and his workforce supplied a response in Artforum which could be seen in full instantly beneath Sahakian’s letter, during which he asserted that the Biennale’s curatorial workforce “deemed it necessary to not indulge the impulse to show a blind eye to a really latest imperialist crime—a criminal offense carried out below navy occupation that was rapidly brushed below the rug with the intention of prompting a swift forgetting,” noting that “that is how imperialism fabricates its impunity.”
The Biennale’s organizers that very same day apologized for the location of the Iraqi artists’ work and admitted that they’d dragged their ft on transferring the works elsewhere within the exhibition, as they in the end did the contributions of Abbas and Mutar. Sahakian and the artists known as the apology “paternalistic” and insincere, noting, “We have now not been moved to simply accept the instrumentalization of our work and identities as Iraqi.” Abbas, Kareem, and Mutar then demanded the elimination of their work from the Biennale altogether.
One member of the Biennale’s curatorial workforce, Ana Teixeira Pinto, resigned in protest of the show of Poison soluble on June 12, the opening day of the exhibition. “I’m not satisfied by the assertion that exhibiting violence prompts political engagement,” she wrote in a press release shared with Artforum. “I may also not carry myself to agree with the premise that turning trauma into spectacle is equivalent to denouncing torture. Or that, vice versa, selecting to not exhibit brutalized our bodies is equivalent to erasing imperial crimes.”
“We respect the artists’ choice, though we remorse it very a lot,” wrote the Biennale’s organizers on August 18, promising, “Extra info on this can comply with quickly.”
Correction: An earlier model of this text misstated that viewers had been required to navigate Poison soluble to see work by Abbas, Kareem, and Mutar; all works had been accessible from a hall.
This text has been up to date to incorporate a remark from Ana Teixeira Pinto.
