I’m sitting in De Santis, a small stylish coffee shop opposite the gallery. The owner (I find out later) has been kind enough to give me a coffee on the house as I was short of change and their minimum cost for card payments is ₤10. I am not, I must confess, in the habit of garnering freebies from people I hardly know, but something compels me to write this review now, almost as if the emotions and the thoughts will suddenly vanish as I board the underground and travel homewards. As if the feelings – right now so intense – will evaporate as the mundane everyday world around me corrodes them and pulls me in once more to the robotic monotony of “normality”. It is precisely that normality, that humdrum existence in which one is oblivious of the horrors that occur around us which Captivated (“The Art of the Interned”) looks to disrupt. Mounted on the walls were evocative bios of a number of “detainees” and their artwork; from a mosque built of matchsticks to poems of caged birds and the loss of justice. Walking around, reading and looking at what was on display felt odd at first. What was I doing here? What was the purpose of showing us these? Eerie though some of it was and deeply moving no doubt, what was I to learn from seeing these things? And then, from somewhere, a thought occurred to me; is this to ‘humanise’ the individuals caught in a legal maze that retained the right to make and change the rules of the ‘game’ at will. As I write the word ‘humanise’ I recall Mozzam Beg’s curt retort – “Humanise?” he said, “Are they [the detainees] animals that need humanizing?” – I believe he has a point. I suppose if the exhibition hoped to ‘humanise’ terror suspects, such an aim speaks merely of the degree to and the speed with which our media and its authorizing discourses shamefully blinker our minds. We who are uninvolved in the campaigns – sympathizers no doubt – the occasional attendees of such exhibitions and lectures; we who may look at newsreels and react with a profound ambivalence, are living proof of the need for efforts like Captivated. It is you and I who are in need of being constantly awakened and critically positioned to our ‘reality’. That would be success enough for such an exhibition, and I think for me that is what happened as I walked around the buzz of people – a good turn out – looking at and reading the material on display. What I experienced was an acute sense of cognitive dissonance. How was I to compute the voices coming forth from the works? Who were these people that had experienced in the same country in which I lived such absurd and extreme acts? Who was I? I, who am so comfortable intellectualizing the world and purporting to dissect its more intricate workings? What I do affords me a comfortable distance from the perturbations of everyday life – my ivory tower may well be a refuge, I realised. And what kind of country is this in which I, so comfortable in some ways, and others, so distressed and systematically harassed, can coexist. Such tumultuous conflicts, then, were aroused by what I saw, read, and heard (invited speakers delivered short messages/speeches towards the end of the evening). In the end I suppose I remember best that Mosque made so immaculately of matches, and I think that there could be no symbol more apt. For those ‘inside’ and those incarcerated ‘outside’, it speaks of the fragile presence of faith, and for others like myself, the powerful but fragile blinkers which events like these disrupt and ignite. My thoughts then, as I hand over my empty cup, thank the owner and walk out with the sound of the door being locked behind me: an excellent exhibition, in fact, we need more of them.

Captivated: The Art of the Interned
Monday 16th June - Friday 4th July 2008
Together Gallery, 12 Old Street, London, EC1V 9BE
Gallery opening hours 9am-5pm
Nearest Tube: Barbican