Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani's installation in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library's Central branch, Index of the Disappeared: The Guantanamo Effect, combines a curated selection of books and other material from the branch collection with a selection of primary source documents from the Index of the Disappeared archive, amassed over six years of collaborative research into post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions, and other disappearances. This particular selection examines the origins of the CIA torture program, the complicity of medical practitioners and psychologists in the program design and refinement, its application to rendered prisoners in black sites, its spread to military prisons and embodiment in the Guantanamo SOP, the export of the Guantanamo SOP to military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effects of this contravening of international conventions and laws of war on prisoners, officers and servicemen, and the subsequent challenges to these practices by legal and human rights activists. The installation also includes photographic prints (based on photos shot in Afghanistan), large-scale vinyl texts, and free postcards (also available at CEPA) that combine fragments of text abstracted from documents in the Index archive with proverbs, protest slogans, and poems.


Web:
Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh
http://www.kabul-reconstructions.net
http://www.chitraganesh.com