Botero’s Abu Ghraib exhibition in California, USA

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Fernando Botero with one of his Abu Ghraib paintingsFernando Botero‘s exhibition on the torture in Abu Ghraib, in Berkeley, California, is now open.

From Look, See blog in the USA:

The paintings are not being shown at the Berkeley Art Museum.

They are being shown in a large room in the library which houses computers mostly used by students for email and quick searches, through which most people walk to gain entrance to the main library.

New partitions were installed, the walls were painted- it is a very serviceable exhibition space.

As is probably well known by now, the paintings have shown in Rome and New York, but nowhere else, and Botero has offered the complete collection of works to an American museum willing to take and show them. No takers.

As far as I can tell, the Berkeley Art Museum, the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, nor the the UC Berkeley History of Art department had anything to do with the exhibition taking place at UC Berkeley.

Talking about (ex-)Abu Ghraib prisoners: here is an interview with Iranian American film maker Cyrus Kar.

From US weblog MetaFilter:

The YouTube account (“Deathlyillington”) is now defunct but the video survives and purports to show a former guard from Abu Ghraib talking about torture techniques employed at the American-run prison.

The man recounts the gang rape of a female teenage detainee, in which one guard “pimped” the girl to others for $50 each.

As he recalls, “I think at the end of the day he’d made like 500 bucks before she hung herself.”

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