My brother’s real crime was to dare to stand against Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, during Belarus’s rigged presidential election. Now Andrei is being tortured and humiliated in jail by the psychopaths of the KGB. He is one of the few remaining political prisoners on our continent. He stands beyond 1989; he is still waiting for the final call on the Iron Curtain.

I grew up under Communism. When the Berlin Wall fell, and dissidents like  rose to become Europe’s new elite, it felt like the tide of democracy would finally sweep into Belarus. 22 years on, and the situation is arguably worse. Many of my closest friends have ‘disappeared’ or committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. My sister-in-law Irina Khalip, an investigative journalist was arrested at the same time as Andrei. The regime used this as an excuse to get to my 4 year old nephew Danil – at his grandmother’s flat the police attempted to snatch him and force him into care. Andrei is a strong man, but the thought of this perverted state taking care of his beloved son nearly broke him.

I know he has been tortured. Not just in the Belarusian KGB’s notorious “Amerikanka” detention centre, but in jail cell too. Continuity with the country’s Soviet past comes not just in the knomenklatura of the secret service which is still known as the KGB, almost as a warning, but in the bricks and mortar of the jails and interrogation rooms unchanged since their use under Communism. These bloodied rooms stain the conscience of Europe.

Much like the Cold War, only a few have spoken up. Index on Censorship founded nearly 40 years ago for writers suppressed by the Soviet Union has worked hard with my organisation Free Belarus Now and the Belarus Free Theatre to fight those willing to aid the regime. But all too many turn a blind eye. Since Andrei’s imprisonment I have spoken at meeting after meeting with politicians to persuade them that only tough economic sanctions on the regime will force it to change. This view is held by Andrei and Belarusian civil society. Yet nothing has been done. Lukashenko is still free to fly his private jet over European airspace and trade with the Netherlands and Germany is rising. Whilst Nick Clegg has taken time to meet with opposition activists, British banks have actively purchased Belarusian government bonds that help fund this police state.

One of the last acts of Václav Havel last week was to sign a manifesto in solidarity with Belarus alongside Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Prison taught them both of the evils of totalitarianism. This lesson has been ignored by Europe’s leaders who know only the language of condemnation but have forgotten that confronting evil means taking action.

Irina Bogdanova is Director of Free Belarus Now

A year ago, literally overnight, Belarus further regressed into a paranoid police state which sees a potential enemy in every citizen. This former Soviet republic of ten million people wedged between Russia and the EU is now a benighted, bankrupt dystopia where ordinary people live in fear of coming under suspicion from a vengeful tyrant.Meanwhile, outside Belarus, the official world is about to go into seasonal hibernation. The Christmas decorations are up in the marble halls of democracy and no more is expected to be heard from there until next year. The levers of political, diplomatic and economic pressure are set at rest.

This is a letter from a few artists to artists everywhere.  As a class, artists have no executive powers but time and again in countries all over the globe it is our voices that have reminded statesmen and politicians of their moral duty to act for the redress of injustice.

In the case of Belarus, 19 December 2011 is such a moment, and we call upon the power of art to disturb the sleep of conscience

Ai Weiwei, Alan Rickman, April Gornik, Bob Holman, David Lan, Eric Fischl,  Gillian Slovo, Hamish Jenkinson, Joanna Lumley, Jude Law, Kevin Spacey, Michael Sheen, Michael Attenborough, Natasha Kaliada, Nicolai Khalezin, Ron Rifkin, Sam West, Tom Stoppard, Vaclav Havel, Vladimir Shcherban

Monday 23rd May 17
Portico Rooms, Somerset House
19.00-20.30

Padraig Reidy, Index on Censorship’s News Editor, will join a panel comprising Dr Anne Alexander of Cambridge University, Dr Joss Hands, author of @ is for Activism and Sunny Hundal, Editor of Liberal Conspiracy blog, to debate the wider impact of the internet and social media in particular on the practice of 21st century politics and the nature of protest movements.

The upheavals sweeping the Arab world have been hailed by some as the Twitter revolutions. But just how influential a role has social media really played in the fall of dictatorships?

Buy tickets here.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained on 03 April 2011 by the authorities at Beijing Capital Airport preparing to board a scheduled flight to Hong Kong. He has yet to be charged and the state has not yet confirmed his whereabouts.

A major survey show of his work has opened at London’s Lisson Gallery joining his first public installation at Somerset House — “Circle of Animals”. As one of the leading cultural figures of his generation, Ai is a political artist in work and in deed. With work that juxtaposes the antiquity and craft of Chinese culture with modern techniques and multimedia platforms, his work has a voice that resonates through histories.

From a junkyard assemblage of domestic doors made from pristine slabs of marble to Han Dynasty vases covered in bold industrial paint to a marble CCTV camera pointed into the streets of London, the Lisson’s compilation of Weiwei’s work from the past six years shows the activism in his art and the artistry in his activism.

Wheatpasted on the walls outside the gallery are words from Ai himself:

“Liberty is about our rights to question everything.”

“Say what you need to say plainly and take responsibility for it.”

“Creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo and to seek new potential.”

“Words can be deleted, but the facts won’t be deleted with them.”

The Lisson’s founder and director Nicholas Logsdail argues that Weiwei’s work “has become politicised because of his position. The genius lies in politically gentle forms that are open to interpretation — only when you look into what constitutes the work can you see he’s rebaptised antiquity with a message.”

In the days of the Young British Artists, established galleries like the Lisson and larger institutions like Tate and the Guggenheim were depoliticised. Should political art be shown it was obfuscated beneath layers of visual rhetoric or in historical retrospectives where the immediacy of the message passed its dateline. Thanks to Ai Weiwei and his disappearance at the hands of his own state, an art world already politicised by funding cuts is speaking out. We’ve all become agit-prop. Tate Modern stencilled “Free Ai Weiwei” across the top of its building. Anish Kapoor dedicated his Leviathan sculpture in Paris to Ai Weiwei. Bob and Roberta Smith held a reading of names to remind people that dozens of other artists, writers, and supporters of free expression have either been detained or gone missing at the hands of the Chinese. The Guggenheim has launched an online petition for his release and the Lisson is inviting all visitors to its show to be photographed with a “Free Ai Weiwei” placard that will be broadcast on the internet. There is no scope to be subtle when freedom is at stake.

Greg Hilty, the Lisson’s curatorial director, said that after Weiwei’s disappearance there was “no question” of whether to continue with the show. “Ai Weiwei consistently places himself at great risk for his art. We are showing that his art and activism goes beyond China. He’s an example for social criticism and free expression around the world. To Weiwei, there are no sacred cows.”

Logsdail says: “If you don’t support Ai Weiwei, you’re mental. Freedom to express yourself is what it means to be an artist.”

Believing in total transparency, truth and openness in a society obsessed with micromanaging the lives of its 1.3billion inhabitants is a problem for Ai Weiwei. China’s schizophrenic relationship with maintaining repressive regime structures whilst successfully engaging with a free market economy are themes that Weiwei’s work show. A compulsive communicator, his Twitter account logged the artist’s candid thoughts and movements. His belief is that if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to spy on.

A documentary about Ai by Alison Klayman asks “Can an artist change China?”. Not just an artist, this artist. An artist that photographed himself flashing his middle finger at Tiananmen Square. An artist whose studio was trashed by Chinese authorities and beaten when he investigated the deaths of schoolchildren in post-earthquake Sichuan. An artist with a voice and a worldwide audience that China is scared of.

Ai Weiwei is not a revolutionary. He is an artist who shows us what it is to be human by example. He is the bridge between China’s past and its future.

www.freeaiweiwei.org

www.lissongallery.com

Why would Ai consider it “interesting” or “funny” to make such a piece? This animal circle, or animal house, is full of contradictions: it is neither a parody or ironic, it is not in the least cynical nor is it an iconoclastic gesture. It is a house of contradictions, just like China.

Some would say “aren’t these sculptures kind of bland?” In his book In Praise of Blandness, the French professor of Chinese philosophy, François Jullien, argues that the “plainness treasured in Chinese aesthetics is in fact superior to any particular flavour, as it is open to all potential variations.” Ai’s art demonstrates how an artistic practice can explore all those variations and can investigate even diverse cultures, in order to do what? To purge its atavisms! In this sense Ai is more Chinese than other Chinese artists. And he is walking on different, meandering — sometimes even opposing — paths at once. His multiple “walks of life” and his confrontational words and actions may seem erratic and disturbing at first, but in fact they are deeply rooted in the Chinese philosophical traditions. Ai is constantly nurturing an artificial “in-betweenness”, in between disciplines, in between the old and the new, in between the original and the reproduction, in between China and the West. In this sense he invokes old Chinese scholarly traditions. Is this why some Chinese police call him “professor” rather than “artist”? I wonder what they call him now?

Ai once said: “Art is about life. Our life is entirely political. Therefore all my art is political.” To demand the release of Ai Weiwei is a matter of life and truth, which is the matter of art.”

Chris Dercon is the Director of Tate Modern. Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads runs at Somerset House, London, from 12 May – 26 June

The 53-year-old’s disappearance comes amid heightened tensions in China with the authorities jumpy about the (albeit remote) possibility of any Middle East style protests spreading to the mainland. Several rights lawyers, activists and bloggers have either been charged or disappeared since February.

The western media is sounding a forbidding note about this latest development. While Ai has frequently wrangled with the authorities because of his efforts to push human rights — he’s been punched by provincial police, held under house arrest, and prevented from leaving the country — this is the first time he has been missing for so long. This is Time magazine’s pessimistic take on the situation.

His prominence owes itself to the fact that as a leading artist, he would be globally recognized even without his activism. And for so long that had also been a shield. By holding him, the Chinese authorities are reminding the nation that no challenger to the rule of the Communist Party should feel safe.