Art institutions accused of censoring pro-Palestine views

“Any control imposed on art, regardless of the reasons behind it, is unacceptable to an artist,” Ai Weiwei told Index today. The Chinese artist was speaking to Index following the publication of an open letter by Artists for Palestine, which has been signed by more than 1,500 artists including Oscar-winning actor Olivia Colman, and which accuses art institutions in the West of “systematically repressing, silencing and stigmatising Palestinian voices and perspectives.” This claim raises serious concerns regarding the current climate of free speech within the art world.

Since the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October, when around 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage, Israel’s retaliatory bombardment of Gaza has reportedly killed more than 21,000 Palestinians. Many artists who have spoken out against the violence have faced backlash. In their statement, Artists for Palestine condemned those aiming to silence Palestinian voices and called for a public demand for a permanent ceasefire by the arts and culture sector.

The scale of the issue is made clear in the letter, which cites no fewer than 18 separate examples of artists allegedly being censored as a result of expressing support or solidarity with Palestinians, or simply by being Palestinian themselves, in light of the ongoing conflict. One example in the letter was the cancellation of an exhibition by Ai Weiwei, which was due to open in November at the Lisson Gallery in London. The gallery called off the event due to a post made by Ai on social media in relation to the conflict, a decision that the artist described as “lacking in rationality and comprehensibility”.

The reasoning behind the exhibition’s cancellation is disputed by the Lisson Gallery. A spokesperson for the gallery told Index that the exhibition had just been postponed, and that it was the result of a social media post which “did not refer to the current tragic situation in the Middle East” and was done “in agreement with Ai Weiwei”.

However, this claim was rejected by Ai, who confirmed that no future date had been set for the exhibition to take place and suggested that he had no control over the decision. “I find the assertion that the postponement was “done in agreement” unreasonable. I have dedicated substantial effort to preparing for this exhibition, and there is no intention on my part to advocate for its postponement,” he said.

“Should the gallery express a desire to postpone, my only option is to acquiesce. In our collaboration, they represent the exhibition side, while I stand merely as the creator.”

Another example of censorship cited in the letter also occurred in the UK. Israeli-British historian Professor Avi Shlaim was scheduled to give a lecture titled Zionism and the Jews of Iraq: a personal perspective at Liverpool Hope University in October, only to be told a week prior to the event that it would not be going ahead. Shlaim argued that such a decision was contrary to the principles of academic freedom and claimed that it was the result of political pressure from those who disagreed with his views on Zionism and Israel.

Liverpool Hope defended their decision to Index, stating that the lecture was not cancelled, but postponed until later in the year. A spokesperson for the university also said: “Many of our community are acutely distressed about the current situation in the Middle East, Gaza and Israel, especially those that have family and friends living there. At the current time we are prioritising support for these groups.

“Freedom of speech is, and always will be, core to our values.”

However, Professor Shlaim was unhappy with this explanation. He told Index: “I reject the explanation of Liverpool Hope-less University. The issue was not safety but freedom of speech and they failed to uphold it in my case. Yes, they offered to postpone my lecture but I refused.”

Liverpool Hope UCU expressed their support for the lecturer in a letter to the university’s vice chancellor, calling the decision a “serious curtailing of academic freedom”. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine also offered their support, warning that “Liverpool Hope’s decision is unfortunately not an isolated one.”

The letter also refers to Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author who was due to be awarded the LiBeraturpreis award at the Frankfurt Book Fair for her novel Minor Detail, a story in part about the abduction and rape of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. To the outrage of the literary community, the organiser of the award, Litprom, disinvited the author and called off the award ceremony soon after Hamas attacked Israel. Although they originally suggested it was a joint decision with the author, Litprom retracted this comment after being challenged by Shibli’s publisher.

In an interview with the Guardian, Shibli spoke of her belief that a review of her book which complained that “all Israelis are anonymous rapists and killers, while the Palestinians are victims of poisoned or trigger-happy occupiers” was instrumental in the decision to postpone her award, but insists that the ordeal was “a distraction from the real pain, not more.”

Litprom has stressed that they did not intend to silence or censor Shibli for her work or her views, and instead claim to have made the decision to cancel the award ceremony for her own protection and wellbeing given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding the conflict.

In a statement to Index, the organisers said: “Litprom’s decision was made with the aim of protecting this event and also the prize winner from the politically heated discussion in Germany, which is not accessible to literary discourse.

“Instead, the aim was to enable a worthy celebration of what the award’s jury and many other literary critics consider to be a literary work of very high quality.

“Awarding the prize to Adania Shibli was never in question.”

This example is just one of many included in the open letter to have taken place in Germany. Also cited by Artists for Palestine was the case of Oyoun, a Jewish cultural centre in Berlin which had its funding cut by the Berlin Senate, who told Index that they “certainly feel censored”.

“Oyoun has explicitly refuted the accusations made by the Senate regarding ‘hidden antisemitism’”, the centre said in a press release. “Oyoun explicitly opposes antisemitism and rejects any form of hostility towards people.”

On the 7 December, Oyoun filed a lawsuit against the Berlin Senate. They stated that they wished to “draw attention to this intimidation, the associated grievances, the arbitrariness of the Berlin Senate, and the disastrous signal that the closure of Oyoun would have on artistic and freedom of expression in Germany.”

Candice Breitz, a Jewish filmmaker and artist who had her exhibition on sex work activists at the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery in Germany cancelled after commenting on the conflict, recently suggested that the state is weaponising false charges of antisemitism in order to repress artists.

It is clear from these incidents that censorship within the art world is a sizeable issue right now, especially but not exclusively of pro-Palestine voices. Each day brings another example from around the world – just last week a number of artists announced plans to cut ties with the Art Canada Institute after accusations that Arab and Muslim artists were being suppressed by sensitivity reviews. The week before, GQ Middle East Man of the Year winner, Palestinian musician Saint Levant, was told not to mention the conflict in his acceptance speech. This mirrors previous accusations that the BBC censored such speeches at the Scottish BAFTA Awards to avoid mentions of a ceasefire. The list goes on and Israeli artists have also been censored, such as several whose pieces were removed from the 10th annual edition of the Mediations Biennale at Art Istanbul Feshane last month. The organisers cited fears of violence as the reason.

The pattern of artists being deplatformed or silenced for showing support for either side is extremely worrying. Artists who express their views within the confines of the law should not have to risk their livelihoods to do so. Although several of the noted examples suggest that many institutions aren’t necessarily against pro-Palestine content on an individual level, they are still curtailing free speech due to fears of the potential backlash to these views. Such fears are not unfounded within the current context of the rise of Islamophobia and antisemitism, but these fears do not excuse censorship of artistic expression or opinion.

Bunker Cabaret: From the bomb shelters of Kyiv to Somerset House

You are handed a piece of paper as you enter the room. Move around, come up close, move away, sit down, do what you want; it instructs. All it asks is you be present together (and, naturally in the modern age, turn off your mobile phone).

Eventually everybody pulls up a chair, but the conformity of the audience doesn’t extend to the performance. A mixture of song, dance, poetry and performance art, Bunker Cabaret is a creative explosion.

Performed at Somerset House in Central London by the Hooligan Art Community, Bunker Cabaret is billed as an “exploration of love versus totalitarianism, and the personal conflicts of making art in time of war.” Formed in Kyiv in 2019, two of its male actors, Sam Kyslyi and Danylo Shramenko, developed scenes in a bomb shelter in the city, which would become the inspiration for the show. Leaving Ukraine, they were joined later by other members including Mirra Zhuchkova, who earlier escaped to Germany.

Photo by Steve Tanner

Bunker Cabaret opens with Kyslyi stood on a bed of fairy lights, interspersing elegant dancing with shadow boxing. The fusing of beauty with brutality, which one would imagine was how the seeds of the show were sown, is evident.

The audience is dropped into an animated conversation between Kyslyi and Shramenko. Almost childlike, it’s a game of “guess this noise”, which seems innocent enough until the correct answers compose of weaponry and warcraft. The lived experience of being trapped in a war zone is conveyed by the ability to note the difference in sound between a MiG-29 and a MiG-31.

A series of monologues are performed, including from Zhuchkova. Hers are dreamlike, almost abstract (and nightmarish), perhaps reflecting the pain of being torn away from home, and the hope of one day returning. The sound of fireworks punctuates the end of her final speech, with a strong, unifying gesture for each person in the audience. Kyslyi’s monologues are more real and descriptive of his experience, often resulting into a burst of song at the end.

Loud traffic passes outside the large windows of the room, where people could easily peek inside. This seems like a conscious decision, and like the instructions given at the start, the audience and environment play a part of the performance just as much as the actors in the room.

Ukrainian artists have been targeted since the Russian occupation and assault began. The attacks on Kyiv killed Artem Datsyshyn, the principal dancer of the National Opera of Ukraine, and the famous actress Oksana Shvet.  Musicians, painters and photographers are among those killed so far; an attempt to erase Ukraine’s cultural and artistic contributors.

Despite being under attack, closed Ukrainian cultural institutions have started to programme again. Several branches of the National Art Gallery in Lviv reopened, as well as The Theater on Podil in Kyiv. Still, the circumstances for art and artists in Ukraine remains challenging.

Bunker Cabaret is not a conventional performance, but neither are the circumstances that brought it to Somerset House. It’s a paean to the fortitude of art in the hardest of conditions.

Bunker Cabaret is currently on a UK tour. Dates and ticket details are here.

Cancel Putin, not culture

In the dark times
Will there be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.

Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems 1939

For someone who has by now lived most of my adult life in the West but grew up in Belarus – a country that borders both Ukraine and Russia – these have certainly been dark and turbulent times.

The horror of what people in Ukraine are going through is heart-breaking. It is also confusing if my own country of birth is viewed as an aggressor or a victim.

Should people who have bravely protested in hundreds of thousands in 2020 and paid a very high price for it be now equated to the regime that rules them? Does Belarus, the country and the people, mean Lukashenka? What about Russia? The support for Putin is undoubtedly bigger there. But does Russia and Russian culture mean Putin?

Having always been a passionate advocate of freedom of expression under the most trying of conditions, what to make now of the blanket censorship of Russian and Belarusian artists not in Russia and Belarus… but in the West?

When the horror of the invasion of 24 February sank in, the Western cultural scene was immediately rocked by a succession of cancellations and calls for boycotts. Some of them were easier to understand and justify than others.

Opera singer Anna Netrebko and conductor Valery Gergiev have been tied to Putin’s regime and identified as representatives of his soft power: association with them became too toxic for Western cultural institutions. Recently, the evidence of oligarchic wealth accumulated by Gergiev due to his political connections has also come to light. This made any defence of him even more difficult
Art in some ways has always been held hostage. The authoritarian Soviet regime used the prestige of the Bolshoi and the power of Russian culture as soft power.

One is reminded of a powerful 1968 performance by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich at the BBC Proms in London where he performed – intitally to the calls of protest and with tears streaming down his face – a tortured and impassionate piece of music by a Czech composer Antonin Dvorak on the day Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring.

His wife, the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, recalled the event in her autobiography:

“In the hall, six thousand people greeted the appearance of Soviet artists with long unceasing cries, stomping, whistling, preventing the concert from starting. Some shouted: ‘Soviet fascists, get out!’ Others: ‘Shut up, the artists are not to blame!’

“Slava (his nickname) stood there completely pale, absorbing the shame for his criminal government, and I, closing my eyes and not daring to raise my head, huddled in the far corner of the viewing box. But then, finally, the hall fell silent. Dvořák’s music poured over the people like a requiem, and Rostropovich, shedding tears, spoke through his cello.

“The hall froze, listening to the confession of the great artist, who at that moment, together with Dvořák merged with the very soul of the Czech people, suffering with him and with them asking his forgiveness and praying for them.

“As soon as the last note played, I rushed backstage to Slava. Pale, with trembling lips, having not yet recovered from his experience on stage, with eyes full of tears, he grabbed my arm and dragged me to the exit:

“‘Let’s go to the hotel, I can’t see anyone.’

“We went out into the street – the demonstrators were shouting there, waiting for the musicians of the orchestra to express their indignation to them.

“Seeing the two of us, they suddenly fell silent and parted in front of us. In the ensuing silence, not looking at anyone, feeling like criminals, we quickly walked to the car waiting for us and, returning to the hotel, we could finally give vent to our despair.

“But what could we do? We did the only thing that was in our power – got drunk.”

What then should the answer to this moral dilemma be? Should musicians and artists be allowed to perform only once they have stated their opposition to their government?

And is it then morally justifiable from the point of view of Western democracies to put someone living under completely different conditions in that position? To demand dissent from someone who might not be in the position to speak freely?

The German music critic Jan Brachmann gives the example of Dmitri Shostakovich, who, in 1949, appeared at a Soviet-backed peace conference in New York, having been pressured by Stalin into attending.

The émigré Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov publicly interrogated Shostakovich about Soviet denunciations of modernist music, even though he knew that his colleague could not speak his mind. Shostakovich muttered, barely audible: “I fully agree with the statements made in Pravda.”

It is unclear what exactly had been gained from that exercise. But Gurgiev aside and any moral clarity there notwithstanding, there have been other, much less clear-cut cases recently.

Sergei Loznitsa, one of Ukraine’s most prolific filmmakers, who has explored the Maidan uprising, the Donbass war, Stalin’s personality cult and the tragedy behind the Babyn Yar massacre, has recently been expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy for speaking out against blanket boycott of Russian filmmakers.

His opposition is based on the fact that people should be judged by their actions not their passports. It is hard to disagree. People can still love their country and feel deeply ashamed of their government’s actions.
Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian dissenting artist of great talent, is currently also in the line of fire.

Serebrennikov, who had his homoerotic production, Nureyev, taken off stage at Bolshoi in 2017, was placed under house arrest accused of embezzling theatre funds – a charge widely seen as being politically motivated. He was not allowed to attend a premiere of his production of Cosi Fan Tutte at Zurich Opera nor to the Cannes premiere of his hugely acclaimed ode to rock ‘n’ roll and dissent in 1980s Leningrad, Leto.

Recently Bolshoi has once again cancelled a scheduled production of Nureyev, this time as a retaliation for him speaking up against the war. Serebrennikov told France 24 in an interview last month that “it’s quite obvious that Russia started the war”, and that it was breaking his heart.

“It’s war, it’s killing people, it’s the worst thing (that) ever might happen with civilisation, with mankind… It’s a humanitarian catastrophe, it’s rivers of blood,” he said.

And yet the Ukrainian State Film Agency opposed Serebrennikov’s inclusion in Cannes Film Festival and the premiere of his new film on the grounds that he is a Russian filmmaker, and it was unacceptable in times of war. While this reaction is humanly understandable and can even be seen by some as a moral decision, we need to ask ourselves who ultimately benefits from silencing, cancelling, de-platforming and similar methods? It is never a viewer, a reader or any ordinary person.

The power of art is in our shared humanity and not in division. Art and its healing power is what gets us through the hard and dark times. We need to show solidarity with people in Ukraine and Ukrainian artists, shine a spotlight on their experiences and prioritise their voices, as well as support those who struggle under authoritarianism in their own countries. This is a task for any functioning democracy.

Having started by quoting Bertolt Brecht, another quotation, this time by the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn comes to mind: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.”

This article appears in the forthcoming summer 2022 edition of Index on Censorship. Get ahead of the game and take out a subscription with a 30% discount from Exact Editions using the promo code Battle4Ukraine.

For another view, read Marina Pesenti’s article where she argues that promoting Russian culture risks furthering Putin’s agenda.

Jodie Ginsberg: Chinese artist Badiucao is an inspiration to cartoonists and campaigners all over the world

Badiucao, one of China’s leading dissident cartoonists, has revealed his identity after years of anonymity. In November 2018 following his campaign that saw thousands of people around the world recreate the image of Tank Man, an unidentified Chinese man who stood in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, Badiucao was forced to close his debut solo exhibition in Hong Kong after Chinese authorities threatened his family.

Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index on Censorship, said “Badiucao’s courage and commitment is an inspiration to cartoonists and campaigners all over the world. The risks inherent in revealing his identity is a stark reminder of how censorship and suppression of dissent continue in China — even though it is 30 years since the Tiananmen Square massacre. Many governments fear the power of cartoonists, but cartoonists should be celebrated as invaluable contributors to democracy.”

“Badiucao has displayed exemplary courage in the face of palpable threats from the Chinese state,” Terry Anderson, deputy executive director of Cartoonists Rights Network International said. “Over the past decade his artwork has served to remind the wider world and in particular the Chinese diaspora as well as the increasing numbers of international students and tourists from the county of unpalatable truths the CCP seeks to suppress. Like so many dissidents Badiucao is forced into exile, its own form of violence against a person. On the 30th anniversary of the horror at Tiananmen Square it is incumbent on each of us to reflect upon what has changed since and more importantly what has not. Badiucao, the other free-speech advocates featured in Danny Ben-Moshe’s truly remarkable film and all those seeking reform in China deserve our support.”

CRNI is the winner of the Index Freedom of Expression Award 2019 in the campaigning category.

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