Soil, ground coffee and even turmeric from the canteen: During his nearly 20 years incarcerated in Guantanamo without ever having been tried, the recently released Pakistani Ahmed Rabbani used everything he could find to escape through art. “Thanks to the painting, I felt outside Guantanamo”, explains the 53-year-old man, with the large salt-and-pepper beard, on the occasion of the presentation of more than twenty of his works in the city port of Karachi, in the south of Pakistan. “Painting was everything to me there,” he adds during this exhibition called “The Unforgotten Moon: Liberating Art from Guantanamo Bay”.
In September 2002, Ahmed Rabbani was arrested by the Pakistani authorities and handed over to the CIA against a bounty of 5,000 dollars. He was ‘sold’ as a notorious activist known as Hassan Ghul, but he always claimed it was a mistaken identity. He was also accused of recruiting his older brother, Muhammed, for extremist circles. He was transferred to Guantanamo in September 2004. He and his brother were never charged or tried during their years in detention, and were not released until February 2023. “The United States had paid expensive and didn’t want to be taken in,” writes Clive Stafford Smith, Rabbani’s lawyer, in the exhibition catalogue.
“What neither he nor I knew, until the US Senate released its report on detentions in 2014, was that Hassan Ghul had been captured and taken to the same prison, before being released in Pakistan for cooperating,” he explains. “While Hassan Ghul resumed his terrorist activities and was killed in a drone attack in 2012, Ahmed was given a one-way ticket to Guantanamo Bay.”
Born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where his parents worked, Ahmed Rabbani arrived in Karachi as a teenager and was a taxi driver when he was arrested. Fluent in Arabic, he had specialized in transporting customers from the Middle East, which contributed to his misidentification.
Painting became Ahmed Rabbani’s obsession during his captivity, although years in prison and numerous hunger strikes often made him too weak to hold a paintbrush. When his condition allowed it, in case of shortage of equipment Ahmed Rabbani improvised with what was around him. “I would find a discarded or torn piece of clothing and turn it into a canvas,” he explains. “Sometimes I used coffee, sometimes turmeric” to make paint.
“He lost a big part of his life. Producing images of such quality is a miracle… It’s remarkable,” says Natasha Malik, curator and curator of the exhibition. Alongside the twenty or so paintings he was allowed to take when he left prison, are those of local artists responsible for “reimagining” the paintings that were confiscated from him. “Exhibited alongside the uncensored works of Ahmed, these artists accentuate his protest and his creative expression by recreating the work that the public was not supposed to see”, analyzes the curator.
Depicting his hopes and despair, his works are surprisingly accomplished for someone who only studied art superficially in school. Some works express his hopes for freedom: nature glimpsed through narrow openings, flying birds and endless oceans. Another painting shows a cage containing bright orange fish, the color of the suits Guantanamo prisoners are forced to wear.
“I spent many years in orange,” says the artist who says he “never accepted their laws” and prefers to look to the future. With a smile on his lips and bright eyes, he talks about his projects, including the publication of a cookbook in which he will talk about his memoirs. Ahmed Rabbani also wishes, thanks to the money raised by the sale of his works of art, to open a restaurant based on recipes learned in prison.
