Abu Ghraib. Abuse of power

The exhibition “Abu Gharib. Abuse of Power, Works on card by Susan Crile” has a clear and courageous message. It consists of 29 works by the US artist Susan Crile, exhibited at the Museum of Rome in Trastevere from the 27th June until the 30th September, as part of the International Anti-Torture Day. The harsh, delicate images were inspired by photographs taken inside the prison of Abu Gharib, in which the white gesso is used to show the fragility of the victims, similar to the figures covered in ash fleeing from the World Trade Centre, or the corpses from the eruption of Pompei.

The photos of Abu Ghraib, which are the origin of Susan Crile’s notable works on paper, show one distinctive trait: they have made torture tangible, palpable, and visible, raising the subject from simple reporting to take it to the centre of the collective consciousness. And the artist, at two years’ distance from the events that happened in an Iraqi prison, with her works brings our eyes to the images and to the humanity they represent: an encounter between human beings. Indeed these images go beyond what happened at that moment, reducing torture to its timeless essence: humiliation, degradation, suffering.
The portrayal of suffering is one of the main themes of Western art and part of this theme is the artist’s attempt to find a visual form through which the viewer can identify with, or feel empathy for, the suffering itself. The photos of Abu Gharib were not taken with the intention of creating this connection, but Susan Crile, cleverly reshuffling signs of power that have already become familiar in these images, and denouncing them as expressions of brutality and perversion, has transformed these objects of abuse, degradation and scorn into human beings.

They are images which, in the hands of a US artist awaken the forgotten empathy, stirring up the urgency to see beyond the fog of euphemisms such as “environmental adjustment”, “forced nakedness”, and “use of dogs to create stress”. It is a terrible degradation, within which the artist’s hand insists on recovering, and restoring, the essential and inextinguishable beauty of the human form. If redemption is possible, this is where it should be sought: in the pulsing lines, which are still vital in the middle of oppressing images of contorted bodies. Images thanks to which, for the first time in five years of the war on terror, torture has raised its head in the collective consciousness, shocking, embarrassing, but undeniable.

(In November 2003, six months after the beginning of the war in Iraq, the specialist soldier Joseph Darby, returning from leave, asked a colleague at the prison of Abu Ghraib to tell him what had happened during his absence. As a reply, the specialist soldier Charles Graner handed over two CDs which contained, as Darby shortly discovered, hundreds of digital photographs, many of which showed officers of the US army and secret service agents in the act of committing abuses against the prisoners: photographs which subsequently became the most famous images of the war).