Guantánamo Art Exhibition Opens at Rich Mix in London on December 5, with Mansoor Adayfi and Andy Worthington

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

I’m delighted to announce that, on Thursday December 5, an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the 2021 memoir of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, will be launching at Rich Mix, a cultural and community space in Shoreditch, at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA.

The exhibition will be running until January 5, with an opening event, starting at 6pm on December 5, featuring Mansoor and myself as speakers. It was organized by the UK Guantánamo Network (an umbrella group of organizations calling for Guantánamo’s closure), in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was put together by Lise Rossi and Dominique O’Neil, core team members of the UK Guantánamo Network, and Amnesty International members.

The exhibition — the first in the UK — is a version of an exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners that first opened at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City in October 2017, and that has since toured across the US, as well as in Berlin and the European Parliament.

The prison at Guantánamo Bay opened in January 2002, to hold men seized in the “war on terror”, declared by the US after the 9/11 attacks, without any rights whatsoever, and for the next seven years, until Bush left office, one persistent aspect of its multi-faceted cruelty was the refusal of the authorities to allow the prisoners any outlet for creative expression.

This finally changed when President Obama took office, and prisoners regarded as “compliant” were allowed to have educational opportunities, including art classes. For many of the men, the freedom to express themselves was liberating and inspirational, and some of them produced quite exceptional work, as was finally revealed to the world when the New York exhibition took place.

Notoriously, however, that first exhibition attracted hostility from the Pentagon, leading to a baleful situation for the next five years, whereby the existing arrangements — in which prisoners were allowed to give their art to their lawyers, and, via them, to their families — were abruptly cancelled, and the Pentagon claimed ownership of all the men’s art, the right to destroy it, if they wished, and the right to prevent any prisoner from leaving the prison with any of the work they had created. Prisoners were also — at least in some cases — prevented or restricted from making any new artwork.

These various threats and bans stayed in place until February 2023, when, finally, in response to a submission by two UN Special Mandates holders — the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism — they were lifted.

The exhibition at Rich Mix features artwork by five former prisoners, and one, Moath Al-Alwi, who is still held. The five released prisoners are Sabri Al-Qurashi, Muhammad Ansi, Ahmed Rabbani, Abdualmalik Abud (aka Abd Almalik) and Mansoor Adayfi, while Moath — the maker of fabulous sailing ships out of recycled materials — is one of 16 men (out of the 30 still held at Guantánamo) who have long been approved for release, but are still awaiting their freedom. Moath, who I profiled earlier this year, was approved for release almost three years ago, on December 27, 2021, and has, shamefully, been held at Guantánamo in total for nearly 23 years, having arrived at the prison shortly after it first opened.

For the men released from Guantánamo, life has not necessarily improved. While Mansoor, released in Serbia in 2016, has, in recent years, finally been allowed to travel freely, and Abd Almalik lives in Montenegro, and has a website making his artwork available to interested parties, Sabri Al-Qurashi, released in Kazakhstan in 2014, lives fundamentally without any basic rights, and Muhammad Ansi, resettled in Oman in 2017, was, recently, forcibly repatriated to his home country of Yemen, where his status in unknown. Ahmed Rabbani, meanwhile, who was returned to his home country of Pakistan in February 2023, has found no support on his return, and recently suffered the loss of his brother, Abdul Rahim, also held with him in Guantánamo, and, previously, in CIA “black sites”, because of this lack of care.

As the organizers state, the purpose of the exhibition is to “shed light on the injustice of indefinite detention without trial or charge”, and to “illustrate that the prisoners have stories, emotions, dignity and humanity.”

They add that their works of art “offer a rare and personal insight into the lives of those who suffered, and are a call to remember their experiences and the ongoing fight for justice”, with the exhibition functioning not only as “a space for art but also a platform for raising awareness about the human rights violations that have occurred in Guantánamo Bay and the continuing struggles for justice and accountability.”

Note: On Saturday December 7, Mansoor Adayfi and Andy Worthington will also be speaking about Guantánamo at Amnesty International’s Amplify Festival at Woolwich Works in Woolwich, London, SE18 6HD, described as Amnesty International UK’s first ever Human Rights Festival. Tickets are available via the page linked to above.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.