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BY ROSARIO PAZ

In print | January 24, 2008

Visiting assistant professor of art Daniel Heyman, who is currently on leave, has recently returned from Istanbul, Turkey and Amman, Jordan after completing a series of prints detailing the thoughts and experiences of former detainees who were victims of torture and abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

According to Heyman, the inspiration for his artwork came from reading articles about the alleged torture of Iraqi detainees by members of the U.S. Army Reserve.

“Ever since the photos from Abu Ghraib came out, I’ve been very concerned that Americans are…using the war on terrorism to lower safeguards against human rights … I found it very upsetting and started making some of the work that I was doing at the time reflect the torture problem by incorporating some of the images of Abu Ghraib in some of my pictures,” Heyman said.

After integrating the images of the Abu Ghraib detainees into his artwork for about a year, Heyman became dissatisfied with the “ubiquitous” nature of his sources and decided to pursue a more direct way of presenting the voices of the victims through his work.

At this point, Heyman met Susan Burke, a lawyer in Philadelphia, whose firm Burke O’Neil LLC was responsible for the prosecution of the torture victims’ cases.

The lawsuit was against two firms, Titan Corporation and CACI International, Inc., that were hired to provide translators and interrogators. The class action complaint was also filed against an interrogator and two linguists working for either of the firms for committing the “series of tortious acts”.

Burke invited Heyman to travel with the law firm to the Middle East, which provided him with the opportunity to speak to and see the torture victims face to face while the firm conducted preliminary interviews.

“For the most part, it was a very simple process. I draw the portraits of the people that were telling us what happened, and write down what they remember. I don’t edit what I write down,” Heyman said. In his artwork, Heyman not only captured the expressions and postures of the detainees being interviewed but simultaneously wrote down their words as the translator provided them, making for an interesting synthesis of first and third person perspectives as the translator would take on the detainees’ voices at times and retain his own at others.

“When I got access to the victims of torture, I wanted people to pay attention specifically to exactly what [was] being heard … It’s very rare that you can just get the unmediated voice, especially if it something as politically sensitive as torture,” he said.

For his printmaking, Heyman used a technique called dry point. This process involved scratching a copper plate with a diamond pointed stylus.

“An edition printer prints it for me in Philadelphia. It’s extremely direct. There’s nothing else you have to do to the plate,” Heyman said. “Another technique I’ve been using involves watercolors and gouache paints. I use a brush and write down what [the detainees] say in watercolor.”

In addition to his work with the Abu Ghraib prison detainees, Heyman has recently done similar portrait work with the victims and survivors of the Blackwater shootings at the Nisour Square in Baghdad, Iraq on Sep. 16.

According to Heyman, Blackwater gunmen from a four car envoy and helicopters opened fire on the square for 15 minutes, resulting in 16 deaths and many wounded.

For this particular tragedy, Heyman also sat in on preliminary interviews of the witnesses and the loved ones of the direct victims of the shootings. One interviewee was a male doctor who had lost his wife and son to the shootings.

Heyman wrote of this experience in a journal during his stay at Istanbul: “He spoke in English and was extremely articulate, at times even poetic, and listening to his descriptions of his love for his wife and son, and their love for their family, their hopes and accomplishments, was heart breaking and leaves a wound that every American should try to feel as we glibly say of such violence, ‘Well, bad things happen in a war.’”

Heyman’s artwork detailing the personal voices of the victims of war-torn Iraq has garnered the attention of his colleagues as well as various exhibition libraries.

“I have visited his studio and looked at his work with him,” said Louise Lincoln, Director of the DePaul University Museum of Art in Chicago. “First of all, it is very good. He’s a very good draftsman, which is to say he’s technically very good as a printmaker in drawing.”

“I also think he’s found a remarkably powerful way to give voice to people who have been crucially involved in important events, but whose identity and presence has not been visible for us in the U.S.,” Lincoln continued. “He understands that these people are individuals who have names [and] their own experiences and that is very important.”

Lincoln has become familiar with Heyman’s work in preparation for an upcoming exhibit at the museum. The exhibit will display the various works Heyman has done on former detainees of Iraq, among other similarly themed pieces.

“It has been about the excitement [Heyman] has felt to being able to connect his art to something that is so representative of our times,” chair of the art department Syd Carpenter said. “It’s something that is so central to the core of what we are thinking of ourselves as a nation.”

Carpenter has yet to see any of the actual prints of Heyman’s most recent work, but knows about his work on the Abu Ghraib detainees from what she has discussed with Heyman.

In addition to the DePaul University Museum of Art, exhibitions of Heyman’s artwork will be held at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz, the New York Public Library and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

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