The Center for Constitutional Rights is excited to collaborate with the Depaul Art Museum (DPAM) and the Tea Project on Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo, which will run March 10 - August 7, 2022. The exhibition explores themes of torture and reparations through paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations produced by torture survivors, artists, and activists, including Center for Constitutional Rights clients, Djamel Ameziane and Ghaleb Al-Bihani, who were detained at Guantánamo.

In addition, Center for Constitutional Rights Advocacy Program Manager Aliya Hana Hussain and our client Majid Khan are contributors to the exhibition catalog, which brings together artworks, poetry, testimony by torture survivors, and scholarship at the intersection of aesthetics and politics.

To find out more information about public programming and visiting the exhibition, please visit the Depaul Art Museum’s website.

More About the Exhibition
Remaking the Exceptional marks 20 years since the opening of the United States' extralegal prison in Guantánamo by examining local and international ramifications of state violence, while also uplifting acts of creative resistance. This exhibition highlights connections between policing and incarceration in Chicago and the human rights violations of the "Global War on Terror." It celebrates the struggle for survival, justice, and reparations by imprisoned people, activists, and artists. Remaking the Exceptional brings together a diverse group of artists and activists working on the legal and moral implications of torture and incarceration. ​

This exhibition features works produced by torture survivors, artists, activists, and collectives with long-term commitments to creating visions of justice. It includes Abdualmalik Abud, Mansoor Adayfi, Djamel Ameziane, Muhammad Ansi, Ghaleb Al-Bihani, Dorothy Burge, Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Debi Cornwall, Assad “Haroon” Gul, Mashaun Hendricks, Invisible Institute, Damon Locks, Lucky Pierre, Trevor Paglen, Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, Khalid Qasim, Sabri Mohammad Ibrahim Al Qurashi, Ahmed Badr Rabbani, and Sarah-Ji Rhee​. Remaking the Exceptional is organized by DePaul Art Museum staff and is curated by contributing artists Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes. 

The Tea Project, which informs the development of this exhibition, is an ongoing series of installations and performances that create opportunities to engage with local and global histories of war, torture, and confinement. Through the project, tea serves as a contradictory metaphor for imperialism and settler colonialism on the one hand, and human connection and international solidarity on the other.