Exhibition Review: Andres Serrano, Torture, Stills Gallery

Torture has arrived at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. Supported by arts organisation a/political Andres Serrano has produced an extensive body of work picturing borrowed torture devices and staged acts of torture. As part of his creative process he visited concentration camps and interrogation centres. He also took advice from torturers and victims of torture alike. Many of the photographs were made at The Foundry, a disused factory in the industrial town of Maubourguet. Since 2015 the work has toured galleries in France, Italy, the USA and Northern Ireland and now reaches Scotland in the form of eight very-large-scale photographs. 

What we see in the exhibition are four, obviously simulated, photographs of people being tortured, three still lives of historic instruments of torture and a portrait of CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. The photographs reach almost from floor to ceiling, mounted behind plexiglass, supported by thick black wooden frames. The vast size and scale of the photographs is intended to elevate them to the status of “Renaissance altar pieces”. Serrano has worked on a large scale since the 1980s. At that time fine art photographers took advantage of improved technology to compete with painting for space and presence on gallery walls by printing very large. Over time the effectiveness of this strategy has become diluted. The photographs are impressive but surprisingly, given their content and Serrano’s proclivity for deliberate provocation, they are not particularly shocking or moving. They do however demand questions of the viewer. Where is this happening in the world today? Who is responsible? What does this have to do with me?

A man with a bloodstained cloth covering the top of his head slumps over the edge of a concrete ‘bath’ reminiscent of Jaques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. Another man looks anxiously to one side as he poses on the factory floor in a 'dog' stress position. Opposite the dog image is a hooded man standing naked with his hands tied to metal fittings that traverse the ceiling above his head. The climactic trompe l’oeil is a triptych mimicking the infamously iconic Abu Ghraib photograph of a hooded man standing on a box in a makeshift poncho, arms outstretched with electric wires attached to his fingers. In Serrano’s version there are no wires, instead the outer images of the triptych contain metal railings within the old factory where the victim stands. They create leading lines toward the arms of the hooded figure in the central image and they connote crucifixion, a distant echo of Serrano’s signature image Piss Christ. 

There is a group of Irishmen known as The Hooded Men. Ten of the original fourteen remain alive. Though none of the images are included in the current exhibition, Serrano has photographed four of the men as part of the Torture series. The men were tortured by the British Army and RUC during their internment along with hundreds of other nationalists in 1971. The “Five Techniques” employed against them were perfected by the British during various colonial conflicts whilst extracting confessions and information from those who resisted their rule. The Hooded Men have fought a long running legal battle to have the British government acknowledge their use of torture with tacit support from leading Conservative and Unionist politicians of that time, including the then Secretary for Defence, Lord Carrington and Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Over many years the British government has vigorously denied their culpability and despite the intervention of top human rights lawyer Amal Clooney the Hooded Men's final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was rejected in September 2018. 

Not long before those events in Ireland, British forces engaged in far more severe torture tactics against Kenyans suspected of involvement in the Mau Mau uprising. During their ‘interrogation’ in detention centres many men were castrated and women raped.  Objects not so visually arresting as the Pear of Anguish, photographed by Serrano, but equally horrible in their effects, were inserted into bodily orifices. Thousands of people were executed or did not survive their torture. Some of those who did survive are still fighting their own legal battle for compensation from the British government. We live in a country where we point the finger at others for their barbaric use of torture but Britain remains in a state of denial about its own use of torture. 

A direct link in the exhibition to recent uses of torture by western powers is the portrait of John Kiriakou the CIA analyst who first made public the USA's use of waterboarding during interrogation of Al Qaeda prisoners. The USA's current president has in the past declared his approval of waterboarding, saying that "torture works" though now in office he is less vocal on the subject. For speaking out against torture, Kiriakou was imprisoned.

Whenever the torture meted out by western powers is exposed it is justified by the necessary imperative to, in Trump's words, "fight fire with fire". That is what Serrano attempts to do, but in reverse. Torture is a tool used by powerful people to control and terrorise anyone they see as a threat to that power. They endeavour to mask their morally questionable actions by keeping them hidden out of sight and by denying any accusations against them that do surface. Accusers are themselves characterised as a threat to 'national security' and sometimes suffer severe consequences, as Kiriakou learned to his cost. Through his photographs, through Torture, Serrano makes visible some unpleasant truths. He uses art as a weapon against corrupt power. When people see things they are not supposed to see, they ask questions, they talk and the mask begins to slip.

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Andres Serrano's Torture will be showing at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh until 3rd March 2019.

All images © Andres Serrano. Image credits in order of appearance:

1. Untitled XIV (Series: Torture), 2015, Andres Serrano. Courtesy of a/political and the artist.

2. Dog Position II (Series: Torture), 2015, Andres Serrano. Courtesy of a/political and the artist.

3. Pear of Anguish, The Inquisition Museum, Carcassonne (Series: Torture), 2015, Andres Serrano. Courtesy of a/political and the artist.

4. Scold’s Bridle IV, Hever Castle, Kent, UK (Series: Torture), 2015, Andres Serrano. Courtesy of a/political and the artist.