Ghaleb Al-Bihani, “Two Boats,” 2015.
Water and ocean scenes are prominent, despite the fact that many detainees had never seen an ocean before their detention.
Thompson asked a former detainee, “Why so much water?” He explained that prisoners were blocked from seeing the ocean – just yards from their cells – by tarps covering all the fences. “Only once, for four days, when a hurricane was approaching, did the tarps come down. And they spent those days just looking at the ocean,” Thompson said. “After the tarps went back up, they started to paint and sculpt ships, boats, ocean, just to recapture the feeling of peace from those days.”
