The art is striking – a miniature three-masted ship in cardboard, with bits of T-shirt for the sails and threads from a prayer cap for ropes. A picture of a huge mosque at water’s edge. A shadowy and faceless Statue of Liberty.
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice is offering art lovers a chance to examine the works of eight presumed militants now or once held at the detention center, which has become a symbol of America’s “war on terror” – and of the excesses committed in its name.
The prison was opened in 2002 at the US naval base on Cuba’s southern coast. Some 800 suspected militants, swept up by American forces in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, have passed through its cells.
Former US president Barack Obama promised to close the prison amid reports of torture or arbitrary treatment. But 41 detainees remain, and President Donald Trump, vowing a relentless war on extremists, wants to keep them there.
The exhibit of paintings and other objets d’art made by detainees is called “Ode to the Sea” and the water is indeed an omnipresent theme – even though prisoners were able to see it only once.
A 2014 hurricane briefly forced the US military to remove the tarps blocking the detainees’ view, said Erin Thompson, a co-curator of the exhibit and an assistant art professor at John Jay.
While the sea apparently fed the dreams – and the nightmares – of detainees, it is also a theme that passes the rigorous standards of Guantanamo censors, who have rejected some artworks as “overly political or angry,” Thompson said.
Censors did, however, approve a drawing entitled “Vertigo at Guantanamo” – a dizzying spiral of blue, green and red dots.
Pakistani detainee Ammar al-Baluchi, the exhibit’s only artist to have been charged formally over the 9/11 attacks, wanted to convey to his lawyers the precarious feeling he says he has suffered since being “tortured by the CIA,” Thompson explained. “This art is not here to glorify him as an artist – it’s here so we can learn about his experience, his life,” she said.
During their first meeting, Ansi spoke to her at length about the art courses that Guantanamo first offered in 2009, and he asked if his work could eventually be displayed in the outside world.