New York based artists Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh discuss their ongoing collaborative project Index of the Disappeared with Yesomi Umolu, Logan Center Exhibitions Curator. 

This event is presented in partnership by Logan Center Exhibitions, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the Open Practice Committee, and the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.

Free and open to the public.

Index of the Disappeared is a collaboration between Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani, ongoing since 2004. The Index is both a physical archive of post-9/11 disappearances - detentions, deportations, renditions, redactions - and a platform for public dialogue around related issues. The Index also produces visual and poetic interventions that circulate fragments of the archive into the wider world.  More info below.

Chitra Ganesh is a Brooklyn-based artist widely recognized for her experimental use of comic and large-scale narrative forms to excavate narratives typically absent from canons of history and art. Notable international exhibitions include the Asia Society (2005) in New York, Fondazione Sandretto (2006), Kunsthalle Exnergrasse (2011) and Queens Museum (2013), with solo presentations at PS1/MOMA (2009-10), The Andy Warhol Museum (2011), Gothenberg Kunsthalle (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2014). Her work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, the Saatchi Collection, Burger Collection, & Devi Art Foundation.

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work looks at places and moments where social, political, and cultural structures take on visible forms, and has been presented internationally. Notable exhibitions and screenings include the Liverpool Biennial (2004), Brooklyn Museum (2005), Tate Modern (2007), National Gallery (2008), Sharjah Biennial (2009, 2011), dOCUMENTA 13 (2012), Rotterdam Film Festival (2013), and CCCB (2014), with solo presentations at the Museum of Modern Art (2011), Rogaland Kunsenter (2014), Saint Louis Art Museum (2015) and Queens Museum of Art (2016). Recent texts have been published in Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, the Manifesta Journal, and the readers Dissonant Archives and The Gulf: High Culture, Hard Labor. She teaches in the MFA Social Practice program at Queens College and the Film Studies program at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

As Index of the Disappeared, Chitra and Mariam have been artists in residence at NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute (2013-14), where they presented the exhibitions Secrets Told, Parasitic Archive, and Watch This Space and organized the international, interdisciplinary symposium Radical Archives (radical-archives.net). They are currently Robina Foundation Visiting Artists at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School, as part of the pilot year of Juncture: Explorations in Art and Human Rights, where they are supervising both JD and MFA students pursuing independent research related to Black Sites I: The Seen Unseen through a legal clinic model.

More project info:

The Index’s current research, supported by Creative Time Reports and the Juncture initiative at Yale Law School, is a legal, visual, and historical inquiry into the afterlives of former black site prisons. The term “black site” is currently understood to refer to a secret prison operated by the CIA as part of their extrajudicial rendition, interrogation, and torture program, active between 2001 and 2009. However, any place that has been temporarily made invisible by (tacit or explicit) agreement to not see something that clearly exists can also be understood as a black site – including “temporary holding” zones used for extrajudicial interrogation, from Homan Square in Chicago to the Forward Operating Bases deployed by the US military. 

When a site becomes a black site, a place becomes a non-place. Real buildings, people, and territories are rendered invisible through a sort of consensual hallucination. What happens when this process is reversed? When a place begins to insist on its reality, despite the contracts that mandate its existence as nothing more than a rumor, how do those buildings, people and territories emerge from the black? Is it ever possible to look at a former black site without seeing it through the veil of its previous life in the unseen?

Black Sites I: The Seen Unseen (2015-16), the first phase of the Index’s research into this phenomenon, is based on field research in Afghanistan into several types of black site. The debut presentation of The Seen Unseen at the Dhaka Art Summit in February 2016 includes four parts: a series of watercolor portraits based on some of the most well-known witnesses of the black sites; a series of photographs pairing images of sites in Afghanistan with redaction patterns from Index archive documents about events that took place in those places; a video exploring the circumlocutions through which information that is widely known remains officially denied; and a neon sign that pairs a phrase from the description of the first prisoner waterboarded by the CIA with the Bangla idiom “covering a fish with greens,” signifying an attempt to cover up something that everyone already knows. 

The project will continue in 2016-17 with research into sites in Eastern Europe and the United States, as well as the emergence and spread of the idea of the black site.