Left: Khalid Qasim, Untitled, 2016. Courtesy of the Tea Project.
Right (clockwise): Aaron Hughes, Amber Ginsburg, La Tanya Jenifor-Sublett, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi.
Grab a cup of tea and join the artists of the Tea Project (Amber Ginsburg and Aaron Hughes) for this virtual conversation with guests La Tanya Jenifor-Sublett and Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Expanding on the themes of their podcast, Remaking the Exceptional, this conversation will connect policing in Chicago to human rights violations at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the shared lessons learned from their experiences.
This program is presented in conjunction with Seeing through Stone, a multi-sited exhibition that is part of Visualizing Abolition.
The Tea Project is an ongoing dialogue that creates opportunities to engage with local and global histories of war, torture, and confinement while uplifting acts of creative resistance over cups of tea.
Amber Ginsburg is an artist and teacher in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. She creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present day situations, as well as engaging present-day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects towards the continuities and ruptures in material, social, and utopic histories. For more than a decade, she has collaborated with Aaron Hughes on the Tea Project.
Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes works collaboratively to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Hughes works with a range of art and activist groups, including Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, emerging Veteran Art Movement, and Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. He collaborates with Amber Ginsburg on the Tea Project.
LaTanya Jenifor-Sublett is a social justice advocate, public speaker, community organizer, and director of community engagement and supportive services for the Chicago Torture Justice Center. She experienced abuse and torture at the hands of Chicago Police at the age of 19. Sentenced to 42 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for a crime she did not commit, she did her very best to reinvent herself.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi is an internationally acclaimed author who currently holds positions as writer-in-residence with NITE and De Balie in the Netherlands. In 2001, he was detained and renditioned from his home country Mauritania, an ordeal chronicled in his bestselling Guantánamo Diary (2015). The memoir was published in twenty-five languages and adapted for film as “The Mauritanian” (2021). He has also published a novel, The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga (2021) and co-written the theater production Yara’s Wedding (2023). He was awarded the Netherlands PAX Peace Prize in 2022 and The Marco Borradori Prize in 2023.