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 be flagging up an important exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork that is currently on display at the Atrium-Gallery of the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University of Berlin (Georgenstr. 47, 10117 Berlin).

The exhibition — of original artwork by one current prisoner, Moath al-Alwi, and three former prisoners, Sabri al-Qurashi, Mohammed al-Ansi and Ghalib al-Bihani, all Yemenis — is the first to take place outside the US, where several exhibitions have taken place since the ground-breaking “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” was presented at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York from October 2017 to January 2018. See here for my report about that exhibition, and see here and here for my reports from a subsequent exhibition held at CUNY School of Law in New York in 2020. Please also check out my articles here and here (and follow the internal links) for the full story of how, from November 2017 to February 2023, the US government imposed a ban on prisoners leaving with their artwork (and threatened to destroy it) in a fit of pique triggered by the John Jay College exhibition.

Moath al-Alwi, best known for his impressive sailing ships made out of recycled materials, was approved for release from Guantánamo over two years ago, on December 27, 2021, but, shamefully, is still held. Sabri al-Qurashi, meanwhile, was resettled in Kazakhstan in 2014, but promises that he would helped to rebuild his life have turned to ashes, as he explained to Elise Swain for an article for the Intercept a year ago.

Read the rest of this entry »