The installation is composed of two parts, a painting “Rendition” hanging on the wall which deals with the issue of political prisoners and a conceptual piece “Infernus” composed of a monochrome orange circle 1m 20, on which there are 73 MK2 grenades in black fragmentation without the fired caps that have been returned. The orange colour is reminiscent of the prisoners’ clothing, and the black colour of the grenades is that of the black bags on the heads, a symbol of abuse and ill-treatment.
In geopolitics, the English term “rendition” can be translated as the act of transferring a prisoner from one country to another outside the judicial framework. It is when a person suspected of terrorism is abducted during a clandestine operation. An illegal procedure, as part of the anti-terrorist action, the person is subsequently placed in a secret prison. Examples are the Bagram and Kandahar prisons in Afghanistan, the Guantánamo prison in Cuba, the Kosovo prison in the former Yugoslavia, the Gulag prison in the former USSR, or the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These people have been considered “enemy combatants” not protected by the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war.
The representation in this installation is circular, through it Mohamed Thara summons the figure of the circle, dear to Dante. The figure of the circle returns several times. In the oriental imagination, the circle refers to the topology of the Beyond, charged with darkness and light, just as it evokes, for Westerners, Dante’s hell, that of the initiatory journey of The Divine Comedy. The Figure of the circle is quite complex and paradoxical, it is one of the figures of alienation: the circle enslaves, the circle imprisons, the circle encloses. It is the emblematic figure of the inferno. The installation symbolically addresses the theme of damnation and fall, it engraves in hollow the compulsive figure of its infernal circularity. In the Koran, the narrative of Isra and the Miraj, (The night journey and the ascent of Mohammed from Mecca to Jerusalem), the figure of the circle is omnipresent. According to the interpretation of Ibn Ishâq in his text dating from the 8th century: “We walked to the curtains that separated God from his angels. These curtains drew circles. Around each of these circles stood angels […] I looked at the curtains that drew circles […] The circles followed one another, each formed by seventy curtains of all colours, each more brilliant than the next.
© Courtesy La Galerie 38 Casablanca.
