Artist's Work Keeps Human Realities of Torture Alive
Last autumn, Rajkamal Kahlon, a Berlin-based American artist, joined the ACLU as an artist-in-residence. Working out of our New York headquarters, Kahlon furthered an on-going project of hers called Did You Kiss the Dead Body? Visualizing Absence in the Archive of War. This week, she launched a new website compiling her stunning original images as well as texts and interviews with ACLU staff: DidYouKissTheDeadBody.com.
In response to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the years following 9/11, the ACLU obtained more than 130,000 pages of official government records, now searchable in a recently updated website known as the Torture Database. Kahlon's work focuses on a subset of these records consisting of U.S. military death certificates and autopsy reports for Iraqi and Afghan men who died while in American detention centers.
Check out the slideshow Did You Kiss the Dead Body? by Rajkamal Kahlon
"These documents created a strong emotional and physical response in me, prompting both nausea and grief," Kahlon says. The texts, she explains, "highlight relations of abuse and power through descriptions of anonymous Iraqi and Afghan male prisoners, young and old, that have died in U.S. custody." In 2009, Kahlon began incorporating some of these documents into riveting works of art in an effort to augment "the secular archive with alternate forms of remembrance and mourning in order to make the fact of these incarcerations and deaths gain greater significance in our cultural memory."
Her images consist of a series of ink anatomical drawings on marbled autopsy texts; both techniques used carry deep symbolic meaning for Kahlon. "Marbling, with its origins in Iran and Turkey, is employed in the context of this project as a visual referent to the internal body," Kahlon explains. "The European anatomical illustrations provide a second and simultaneous view of the inner and outer body and create another circuit of meaning that is endlessly looped between the text and image."
In Spring 2011, Kahlon met National Security Project Staff Attorney Alexander Abdo at a Lambent Foundation seminar titled Aesthetic Justice, and the two began a conversation that eventually led to Kahlon's residency. While at the ACLU, Kahlon interviewed attorneys and human rights researchers who have been engaged in torture accountability work over the past decade. The 40 interview segments published on the new website address a wide variety of issues, including: Guantánamo; race and torture; a brief history of the FOIA law; targeted killings; and the limits and possibilities of human rights litigation as a tool for accountability.
For Kahlon, a key question raised by these documents was, "How do the lives of the men in these documents come to be remembered and brought into our shared history?"
"As an artist," Kahlon notes, "part of my logic is that the documents perform a second stage of violence to the body that has already experienced incarceration and death, further subjected to dismemberment and scrutiny. The documents are contained within an archive, which serves a secular memorial function, erasing rather than helping us to remember these excesses of power." Yet, Kahlon notes, "from a legal standpoint, the documents serve as proof of the excesses of power, providing the possibility to hold those in power accountable for their acts."
The significance of Kahlon's work, and the work of other artists committed to addressing egregious human rights violations like torture and extraordinary rendition, cannot be overstated. The creation of an official record comprised of government documents is necessary but by no means sufficient for achieving accountability for such abuses.
Artists like Kahlon, by converting sterile records into works that represent the lived horrors of torture, shape cultural memory and can help shift public debate. Their images evoke visceral reactions and provide new spaces for meaningful conversations about memory, accountability, humanity, and loss.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
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Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.