Why Northern Ireland – and the rest of the world – needs Andres Serrano's Torture pictures Why Northern Ireland – and the rest of the world – needs Andres Serrano's Torture pictures
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Version 3 of 4. There are two reasons that Northern Ireland is a particularly pungent place for Andres Serrano to show his Torture pictures, currently on view at Void in Derry. One is the violent history of the Troubles. The other is the Christian imagery that haunts the artist. In Serrano’s notorious image Piss Christ, a crucifix is suspended in a tank of orange urine. When it was made in 1987, Northern Ireland was in the midst of something that resembled a civil war. Protestants fought Catholics and the IRA fought the British army. Altogether, 3,600 people were killed in the Troubles between 1968 and 1998, when the Good Friday agreement began today’s peace. Since 1998, political violence has become a lot rarer in Northern Ireland, but the horrors of terror and torture have scarcely vanished from the world. Serrano started staging photographs about modern torture when he was commissioned to create a cover on this theme for the New York Times Magazine in 2005. His image of a face hidden by a horrific black hood illustrated an essay about the torture of prisoners by US personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In 2015 he returned to this disturbing subject in a series of pictures made with survivors of torture. The participants in Serrano’s Torture series have been tortured in real life. Courageously, they allow him to recreate their sufferings by posing in baroque staged versions of their ordeal. Among the participants are some of Northern Ireland’s “hooded men”. In 1971, as the Irish Times and others have reported, as British panic over the crisis in Northern Ireland grew, 14 men were taken to a British army site on an old airfield at Ballykelly in County Derry. They were made to wear hoods and, the survivors claim, subjected to systematic torture. “Sometimes the hood would be lifted and there was this figure in silhouette firing questions and abuse – telling you your wife had done filthy, terrible things and your kids were in care,” Liam Shannon, one of the hooded men, told the Irish Times. “I was sure they were going to kill me anyway, so I just said, ‘Aye, dead on.’” These experiences are restaged in Serrano’s pictures, with the participation of some of the hooded men themselves. Serrano’s pictures at Derry’s Void gallery are not just echoes of a troubled past but acts of witness in a dispute that is far from over. The men interrogated by the British army in 1971 are campaigning to have their treatment recognised as torture at the European court of human rights. In April this year, their lawyers accused Theresa Villiers, then the Northern Ireland secretary, of deliberately holding back documents that could help them. Amnesty International has called for their case to be reopened. Clearly Serrano still has the nose for trouble that he did when he created Piss Christ. Yet his images of hooded torture victims transcend any one cause or crime. The hoods make these frail human bodies look anonymous and universal. Helpless and naked before the camera, they resemble saints in baroque paintings. Serrano’s depiction of a suffering that extends from Derry in 1971 to the political dungeons of today is both a call for justice and a compassionate portrayal of the human plight – our tragic embodiment, born to suffer, born to die. As for the Troubles, they are not over in the minds of people from all sides and communities who saw and suffered them. Now that Brexit has transformed every aspect of British nationhood, some fear that Northern Ireland’s peace process may even be in danger. Could those hooded ghosts come back? |