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Three Iraqi Artists Pull Their Work From Major Show Over Abu Ghraib Scandal

The move was done in protest of an installation displaying images of prisoners being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

In response to the Berlin Biennale’s decision to exhibit Poison Soluble, an an installation by Jean-Jacques Lebel that surrounds visitors with images of tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib, three Iraqi artists—Raed Mutar, Layth Kareem, and Sajjad Abbas—have pulled their work from the Biennale, Artnet reports. The Berlin Biennale apologized for exhibiting the installation in an official statement on Monday, but Mutar, Kareem and Abbas were unmoved: “In an exhibition that prioritizes the display of wrongly imprisoned Iraqis photographed in the act of being sexually and physically tortured, no, we do not find sincerity or transparency in this paternalistic response,” a statement from the three artists and curator Rijin Sahakian reads.