Art After Abu Ghraib: Spectacle and Medium in the Fashioning of Iraqi War Art Among the most widely circulated images of the American occupation of Iraq, photographs of American soldiers torturing their Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib have been the subject of a range of academic interventions. These interventions consider how the circulations of the now iconic images at Abu Ghraib have functioned at various levels—from their status as emblematic of the folly of the Iraq war itself, to the ways the images involved the viewer as a simultaneous witness and voyeur who, by witnessing the photographed scenes, participated in the act of humiliation. These analyses overwhelmingly focus on the impact and effects of these images on the American viewer and on the ways the images reveal the war on terror’s mechanisms of racial othering and its technologies of control and discipline. In this paper, I argue that the critical focus on the photographic representations of torture have often obscured the effects of torture on the victims. I consider the art of two Iraqi artists, Abdel Karim Khalil and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, whose work recast the iconic images of Abu Ghraib in the Iraqi context through the use of different artistic mediums, sculpture and painting. Abdel Karim Khalil’s marble sculpture “A Man from Abu Ghraib” (2004) features a hooded detainee with his arms outstretched. Arabic writing at the base of the statue states, “We are living the American Democracy.” Sadik Kwaish AlFraji’s painting “You cannot erase the traces of war” features a repetitive male torso, faceless and fragmented, scarred and burned. Superimposed on one torso is an iconic photographic image of Abu Ghraib. In this and other Iraqi art, the violence and terror of Abu Ghraib is recast to exclude the torturers, and unlike the photographic depictions, the mediums used disrupt the commodified circulation of the photographic images.