Nina Felshin, curator of the Zilkha Gallery, has had a long-standing interest in the artistic expression of the faulty politics of war. In 2005, she organized a show called “The Disasters of War: From Goya to Golub,” which featured the work of prominent artists, as well as photographs depicting the torture endured by the Iraqi detainees within Abu Ghraib between 2003 and 2004. Four years later, at the advice of a mutual friend, Felshin took a trip to Philadelphia to visit an artist named Daniel Heyman. She was deeply impressed by his work, and now, more than a year later, his work is being displayed in Zilkha Gallery in an exhibit titled “Bearing Witness.”
Heyman, who graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a degree in visual studies, has long been interested in violence as a theme in his art.
“There’s so much violence in the world, it’s hard not to think about it from time to time,” Heyman said during a phone interview.
As a college student, Heyman lived with a family in France who told him stories about life under Nazi occupation in World War II, which further inspired him to start thinking about war as what he calls “a government-sponsored activity.” After college, Heyman was awarded a grant that involved interviewing French survivors of World War II. This experience, paired with living through several wars in his own life, have helped him address the recurring motif of human suffering caused by war in his art.
“The wars are kind of endless…for a lot of different reasons,” Heyman said. “I want the viewer to come to the recognition of what war might do to a person on the other side of the world… [I would] rather have the viewer think about the results and come to their own conclusions.”
Heyman met human rights attorney Susan Burke in 2006 and has spent the last four years accompanying her to Istanbul to meet with detainees of Abu Ghraib. He never went to Iraq, but rather went to politically neutral zones such as Istanbul and Amman, until the latter enacted more stringent laws. As Burke questioned detainees, Heyman sketched them, and his paintings developed from these sketches. On his website, Heyman describes the process.
“I sit in this hotel room and draw the face of an Iraqi who is telling the most humiliating and degrading story of his life. I try to disappear. I draw, first a small sketch on a scrap of paper, and then a copper plate using a stylus. This plate will be the matrix for a print. As I listen and draw, I am also inscribing the words I hear into the copper, backwards. I have to write very quickly, so that I do not lose the thread of the story… I have done very little editing, hopefully it will retain the freshness of the interview.”
Author and poet Nick Flynn collaborated with Heyman on these confessional pieces, taking some of the words and phrases from the “most humiliating” confessions and arranging them in evocative and harrowing poetry. The phrases are incomplete, but not broken—the absence of the more graphic and disturbing details make the poetry more moving and powerful. As Felshin pointed out, the absence of the words make the presence of the psychological duress even more poignant and tangible.
Many of the paintings featured in the exhibit are portraits of the detainees against a white background, with the words of the testimony curling around their silhouette. The contrast between color and white brings the facial expressions and the words from the interviews to life. The mood of the gallery, even on a bright sunny day when I viewed it, was heavy and almost bleak. Three of the detainees that Heyman painted have since been killed in the war, but their stories are here, in vivid color and sharp description.
The point of this exhibit is not to shock the viewer or evoke a distant and passing sympathy, but rather to draw in the viewer, both in a physical and emotional sense. You have to actually get close to the paintings themselves to be able to discern the text that snakes and twists along the canvas. By making viewers get close to the canvas, Heyman has painted a metaphorical window into these people’s lives, adding a human dimension to the so often dehumanizing process of war.
“He’s not depicting torture, he’s letting these guys speak for themselves,” Felshin explained.
Heyman feels similarly about his art, and about this exhibit in particular.
“If I can use my art to give a voice to people who have been silenced then for me that would be really great accomplishment,” he said.
Heyman used a similar format to portray a group of African-American men incarcerated in Philadelphia, which, despite the differences of geography and race, squarely fits with the theme of the current exhibit, in that it allows members on the very fringes of society to speak in their own words. All of the testimonies represented in the paintings are in the first person.
One of the most moving pieces that I saw is a painting of a detainee with his head slightly cocked to the right. On the left side of the painting are the words of someone (presumably an attorney) showing the painting subject the pictures of the horrors of Abu Ghraib: “Did you ever see this? Did this ever happen to you?” His response is on the right side of the painting: “Yes I saw this. Yes this happened to me. Yes I saw this often. To me, to others.”
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