Amber
Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes, TEA PROJECT
One
thing I miss is the cups. The detainees were only allowed to have Styrofoam
cups, and they would write and draw all over them. I’m not totally familiar
with Muslim culture, but I did learn that they don’t draw the human form, and
I’m not positive if they draw any creatures, but they draw a lot of flowers.
They would cover the things with flowers. Then we would have to take them. It
was a ridiculous process. We would take the cups — as if they were writing some
kind of secret message that they were somehow going to throw into the ocean,
that would get back to somebody — and send them to our military intelligence.
They would just look at these things and then throw them away. I used to love those
little cups.–
Former Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp guard, Chris Arendt (Perce, Lily. “What It
Feels Like...to Be a Prison Guard at Guantánamo Bay.” Esquire Magazine, July
30, 2008.)
Amber
Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes work collaboratively to uncover moments of beauty,
poetics and shared humanity within little known military histories. Their Tea
Project is an ongoing series of exhibitions, performances and discussions that
offer counter-narratives to disrupt the numbing effects of war and detention
and invite audiences a role in telling the story of our current involvement in
war and torture.
Hughes, an
artist and Iraq War veteran deployed to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003, developed Tea
after a return trip to Iraq, as a civilian, in 2009. It was during this trip he had tea prepared in the Iraqi
tradition for the first time. In 2013, Hughes began collaborating with artist
Amber Ginsburg.
Inspired by Arendt’s
account, Ginsburg and Hughes created 779 porcelain cast Styrofoam cups, one for
each individual detained. Each cup is scrawled with a design based on the
national or a native flowers from one of the forty-nine countries that has or
had a citizen detainee in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. In each design, the
number of flowers represents the number of citizens detained from the
respective country. Each cup is detailed with the name of one of the 779
individuals along with their citizenship. These vessels are used in exhibitions
and performances of the Tea Project.
The stories
within the performance traverse a variety of landscapes in which tea is served
-- in the Iraqi countryside, a cage in Guantanamo Bay, a family gathering here
in United States. Tea is not only
a favored drink but a shared moment that transcends cultural divides and
systems of oppression.
Tea Library
Throughout
the course of this project Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes have researched tea,
detention, terror, torture, pain, war, flowers, Islamic design, and the
Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. The
Tea Library is a selection of their research books for your perusal.
Jackie Kazarian, Studies
for Project 1915
To mark the
centennial of the first major genocide of the 20th century, Jackie Kazarian created
a monumental painting, Hayasdan, that honors the strength and resilience of the Armenian people
and is intended to inspire others to confront hatred, prevent genocide and promote
human dignity. She
made numerous studies for that painting, dating from 2014 and based on illuminated
manuscripts, ancient maps and architecture from the Near and Middle East, and
her own family artifacts.
As Post
9/11 conflict escalates, spreads and mutates, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan,
Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and beyond, the lessons from the last century’s first
genocide remain powerful and resonant.
Jackie
Kazarian’s paintings, drawings and wallpaper installations have been exhibited
in Chicago, New York, Miami, Spain, Armenia, Vietnam and Japan. She has
produced videos and installations in collaboration with Chicago dance companies
The Seldoms and 58 Group. Public
art commissions include the U.S. Embassy, Armenia and the City of Chicago.
Kazarian is a 2008 fellow of the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of
Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago. In 2010,
she exhibited and conducted workshops in Syria for the U.S. State Department.
Kazarian is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) and
Duke University (BS) and lives and works in Chicago.
Michael Rakowitz, Spoils
Michael
Rakowitz launched Spoils in September 2011, a “culinary intervention” presented
by Creative Time, in collaboration with Chef Kevin Lasko at Park Avenue Autumn
in New York City. It was a meal of venison atop Iraqi date syrup and tahini
(debes wa’rashi), and served on plates looted from Saddam Hussein’s
palaces. The event was covered in
several media outlets.
The
dishware had been looted after Saddam’s palaces were destroyed by Coalition
Forces. Personal household items
such as plates and silverware were taken by Iraqi citizens, many of whom used
them in their own homes—a dispersal of power. The plates were purchased on eBay from two different
sources: an active American soldier serving in the same unit that captured
Saddam Hussein—and an Iraqi refugee now living in Michigan.
Rakowitz
received a Cease and Desist letter demanding the “surrender of the Iraqi plates
to the U.S. Attorney's office, Southern District of New York.”
On December
11, 2011, at the request of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and at the
behest of US President Barack Obama, Saddam Hussein's dishes were repatriated
to the Republic of Iraq during the meeting in Washington, D.C. to finalize
plans for American withdrawal from Iraq and transfer of sovereignty. The plates
traveled back to Baghdad on the same flight as the Iraqi Prime Minister.
Reports on
the project's conclusion accompanied reports on the end of the Iraq War by
various news outlets, including The New York Times, The Rachel Maddow Show.
Michael
Rakowitz’s work often deals with Iraq, the country his grandparents fled in
1946. Over the years, he has re-opened his grandfather’s import/export
business, remade artifacts stolen from the Iraqi National Museum, opened the
first Iraqi-Jewish restaurant in the Arab world, staged an homage to the
Beatles’ farewell concert on a roof in Jerusalem, and drawn parallels between
genocide and gentrification in Chicago and Iraq. His current project is A Desert Home Companion, a
participatory performance and radio project involving American veterans from
the Iraq War and the Iraqi refugee community, commissioned by the Philadelphia
Mural Arts Program. Rakowitz is on
faculty at Northwestern University and represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
Alison
Ruttan, Green and White (end collapse) (Beirut) 2014 from “A Bad Idea Seems
Good Again”
This
sculpture is part of “A Bad Idea Seems Good Again,” Alison Ruttan’s ongoing investigation
into the visual evidence of war and the damage inflicted on communities, begun
in 2010. It was part of a
recent exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Each hand
built clay slab construction depicts a specific building bombed in recent conflicts,
such as in – in Homs, Aleppo, Baghdad, and here, Beirut. Based on photographic
documentation and new sources, the series archives evidence that will soon be
buried, bulldozed and carted away as new cities are built a top them.
Ruttan
notes that while they may look similar to the effects of natural disasters it
is important to remember that these are not accidents of nature but entirely
man made acts of destruction. She
also points out that while the subject of this work focuses on the destruction
caused by war, specifically the damage that civilians endure, it is equally
impossible to ignore how strange and interesting these images of destroyed
cities are. Modernity's presence can be seen in the gridded structures revealed
in the destruction as well as the directional movements within the collapses
themselves. It is possible to see this work as a reflection on a failure in
modernism, a failure to transform the Middle East into an image of ourselves.
Ruttan is a
project-based artist who blends documentary and research practices with
subjective interpretation across a wide range of media. Questions relating to human nature
circle all of her projects. "How far can you pare down visual stimulus and
still have a sexual response?", "How much of our behavior is rooted
in the core of our biological identity and how captive are we to these
impulses?", "Why are we attracted to looking at violence?",
" Can we evolve out of endless cycles of war and conflict?"
Ruttan
offers a space in which to examine conflicting responses that may or may not be
resolvable by the viewer, ultimately asserting we live in a "paradoxical
nature of being" in which negotiating that condition is the true state of
human nature.
Barbara Koenen, The War Rug Project
In 2001, when
the US invaded Afghanistan, Barbara Koenen began making art installations
inspired by the war rugs woven by Afghani women and the sand mandalas made by
Tibetan Buddhist monks.
Afghan war
rugs first appeared in the late 1970s, when the Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan. Carpets traditionally
woven by women and children began to incorporate pictures of the weapons that
became part of their lives. Subtle at first, the military iconography
eventually dominated the textiles, erasing all but the most incidental remnants
of centuries of previous motifs. AK-47s form a framework for tanks, armored
personnel carriers, mines, jets, grenades, handguns and bullets. Replacing traditional motifs of
flowers and stylized animals, the war rugs are a prime example of the
corruption that war has on a civilization. And since carpets are traditionally woven by women,
who lack even the most basic freedoms in much of this region, their imagery is
even more provocative and its origins more shrouded in mystery. Most rug dealers
place little value in these cultural artifacts, and their origins are not well
documented.
Adopting the practice of the Tibetan Buddhist monks who
make elaborate sand mandalas as meditations or prayers that, like life, are
swept away, Koenen began to reconstruct Afghan war rugs like mandalas, using
spices instead of sand. A
meditation, they may take up to a week to complete. With fringe and popper
firecrackers attached, they are touched, inhaled, sometimes even tread
upon. But they exist only temporarily.
At the
conclusion of each installation, Koenen makes a series of monoprints in which
the spices, and any footprints or distress, are adhered to cloth. Up to three impressions are made as the
imagery is dematerialized.
Koenen
found most of the war rugs listed for sale on Ebay, and uses those listing
titles, such as "Twin Towers- Tribute Rug Carpet-9/11 2001- USA
History" for the installation
and prints. She has made 11
installations.