The Berlin Biennale has issued an apology to Iraqi artists who protested an installation showing heartbreaking images of detainees at Abu Ghraib.
Work, the 2013 piece called The poison is soluble For French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, there has been a polarization since the show opened in June. However, the controversy reached new proportions in late July, when Iraqi curator Regin Sahakian published an open letter about the piece signed by more than a dozen artists, including three Iraqi-born Berlin Biennale participants.
the message that featured in Artforum, revealed that a member of the Berlin Biennale’s artistic team, Ana Teixeira Pinto, had resigned in protest of Lebel’s work. (In an email, Pinto confirmed that she had resigned on June 12, the day of the exhibition’s opening, but declined to comment further.) Additionally, Sahakian’s letter stated that artist Sajjad Abbas had successfully pressured the Berlin Biennial to remove his piece from near the Label facility and that The other participant, Raed Matar, has made a similar request.
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Sahakian was the founder of Sada, an Iraqi art initiative that no longer exists and is participating in another German art gallery, Documenta in Kassel. There Echo displays the works of Abbas, Matar and others who signed the letter. Sahakian was the creditor of Motar’s painting at the Berlin Biennale and also contributed an article to the catalog.
in statement Published about two and a half weeks after Sahakian’s letter was published, the Berlin Biennale said he had read Artforum Pieces with “big dreads”.
“We apologize that placing the works of the affected Iraqi artists so close to that of Jean-Jacques Lebel has caused them great pain,” the Berlin Biennale wrote in its statement. We have reduced the sensitivity of the situation. We also apologize for not having previously discussed placement with them in this particular case. Likewise, we regret that the business replacement process has taken so long.”
The statement did not say that Lebel’s work would be deleted, although the biennial noted that with Sahakian, Abbas, Matar, and artist Laith Karim, he was “trying to find ways to work together through the situation and understand the injuries that occurred.” And I promised a response from the artist Kader Attia, the coordinator for this year’s edition, which will appear in Artforum.
A Berlin Biennale representative confirmed that Abbas’ piece had been moved away from Hamburger Bahnhof, where Label’s piece is on display, and that Mutter’s piece had been removed with plans to move it.
The controversy at the Biennale follows repeated allegations of anti-Semitism at Documenta, another exhibition that this year has also focused on decolonization and the Global South. Documenta has been largely debated over a mural that was removed by an Indonesian group containing stereotypical images of Jews.
Attia previously showed his works side by side The poison is soluble and other Lebel pieces at the 2018 Palais de Tokyo exhibition in Paris. This offer is from The poison is solubleas well as MAMCO, the Geneva Museum that owns the museum, did not raise controversy.
The poison is soluble It is a maze-like structure whose hanging walls consist of images of Abu Ghraib detainees being tortured and sexually abused, and in other ways violated by American soldiers. Amid these images are footage of Iraqi villages left under the rubble after being destroyed by the US Air Force. in Statement on the website of the Berlin Biennale“The aim of this project is to provoke the viewer to reflect on the consequences of colonialism,” Lebel said.
Sahakian read the work differently, writing, “There is nothing in the work to suggest a loss of information, to anything we haven’t seen yet. The images that flooded the global media two decades ago only demonstrated the ability of the United States to mobilize the world to hate and abuse the Iraqi body.” .
Karim, one of the Berlin Biennial artists who signed the letter, joined Sahakian for a talk in June organized by the show. In this event, is Publicly criticized Label’s work, saying: “I, as a simple human being, am someone who grew up in Baghdad, and lived there for 24 years–I cannot allow myself, nor can I imagine, to see such images, and use them and pain, and turn them into a work of art.” Karim went on to say that he was considering using images from Abu Ghraib in his work, but “out of respect” for the people who were held there, some of whom were his distant relatives, “couldn’t do that.”
Critics agreed with Sahakian’s interpretation. in The New York Times reconsideringSiddhartha Mitter described this piece, along with others Lebel wrote for the Biennale, as “a substantive lesson in how a certain European and patriarchal style of anti-racist and anti-colonial art, though shaped in real political battles, has lost its way and fallen into exploitation”. in i wanted to reconsideringBen Davis accused the piece of “reinforcing the signal of the decadence it deplores.” Emily Watlington said in art in america Review that Lebel’s work was “the most universally hated – and justly – at the Biennale”.
Upon its opening, the Berlin Biennale put the work behind a curtain and placed a warning outside the work urging viewers who had experienced racial trauma or abuse not to enter it. But even this gesture was seen as a rather easy attempt to mitigate any potential harm. Mitter described the trigger warning as “fatherly and exclusionary.”
While the Biennale has not yet taken a strong stance on the work itself, it has previously refused to send images of Label’s piece to the press, ARTnews Learn. The representative of the Biennale said that photos The poison is soluble They are not provided “to counter digital publishing and remove context for sensitive content.”
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