KARACHI: ‘Justice delayed is justice denied’ is one of the commonly used maxims in the English language. It doesn’t need elaboration, simply because the delay in any matter that requires fairness can have a negative, indelible mark on the life of the person who seeks it. Guantanamo Bay prison, it turns out, has quite a few such stories. One of them is that of a Rohingya Muslim by the name of Ahmed Rabbani.

A group exhibition, which mainly highlights Rabbani’s works, titled The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantanamo Bay began on Tuesday evening at the Indus Valley School (IVS) of Art and Architecture Gallery. On the whole, it showcases paintings which interpret ‘textual description of censored imagery’.

Textual interpretation is a tall claim. The truth of the matter is that the show, curated by Natasha Malik which will conclude on May 15, lives up to the claim.

The eleven participating artists — Abdullah Qureshi, Amna Rahman, Amra Khan, Faraz Aamer Khan, Natasha Malik, Nisha Hasan, Sahyr Sayed, Shehzil Malik, Shehzad Noor, Zainab Zulfiqar and Ahmed Rabbani — have done a noteworthy job. But it is imperative, in order to provide context to the readers, to narrate Rabbani’s story as told by organisers of the event.

In Guantanamo, Ahmed Rabbani painted the torture he had suffered in captivity, but the US military confiscated his artworks

“The focus of this project is Ahmed Rabbani, a Rohingya Muslim, born in Makkah in 1969. Ahmed was working as a taxi driver in Karachi, newly married, with a baby on the way, when on Sept 10, 2002 Pakistani authorities arrived at his home in the middle of the night and abducted him and his brother Abdul. The Rabbanis, misidentified as terrorists, were sold to the Americans for $5,000. The Americans were told that he was a known terrorist by the name of Hassan Ghul.

“After spending 540 days in the CIA-run Dark Prison in Kabul, Ahmed was taken to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and remained there without charge for 20 years. During his incarceration, he experienced unrelenting torture, humiliation, and dehumanising conditions. In Guantanamo, he painted the torture he had experienced in the Dark Prison and Guantanamo itself. These paintings were deemed a ‘threat to national security’ and confiscated by the US military.

“Ahmed’s human rights lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, had seen each piece in legal meetings and documented the imagery in text, which he shared with the 10 artists participating in this exhibition. The artists were to interpret this text and produce artworks in response. In doing so, the artists can become the means to disrupt this attempt by the US government to silence prisoners like Ahmed, under the guise of national security.”

This is a harrowing a tale, to say the least. But let’s leave the politics of it aside and focus on art.

On Tuesday, a decent number of media persons had gathered at the IVS gallery, hovering around Ahmed Rabbani, expecting him to explain his artworks.

A humble man that he appears to be, he did his best to give the background of each piece done by him. There’s a considerable variety of untitled works done in acrylics, oils and watercolours which contains symbols ranging from the non-inert nature of time to spiritual growth in relation to nature.

But two of the most striking side-by-side exhibits, arguably, were to do with the harsh conditions that the artist found himself while in prison. One of them was of a man on a wheelchair with his face covered in the seemingly same piece of cloth of which the dress that he’s wearing is made. The marked feature of the exhibit is that the man is in colour red which imparts a horrifying vibe to the image. Explaining the picture Rabbani said, “I used this [wheelchair] many times [in detention].”

Alongside that picture was a painting done in oils which showed an incommodious space. Rabbani said, “This is a very bad place, all [made of] iron. They kept me here for two years. The bathroom was [gestures down to his ankles] here, you couldn’t sit down. They gave me no blanket, no shoes, nothing.”

It is believed that difficulty induces growth. It is also believed that art made in difficult times creates a sense of empathy in the viewer. But the pain and agony that Ahmed Rabbani has experienced and expressed in his art surpasses all of that. It is a stage where art morphs into a big, sensitive heart and life turns into a constantly thinking mind.

Published in Dawn, May 3rd, 2023