07 Jun 23 | China, News and features
As always the Chinese authorities cracked down on public commemorations of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which occurred 34 years ago last Sunday. As always more things were added to the list of what cannot be said in the lead-up. And as always people got creative in their response to getting round the censorship. Here’s a roundup of what happened recently for the anniversary Beijing would rather we all forgot.
White candles not welcome
Armoured police vehicles were deployed and hundreds of police conducted stop and search operations near Victoria Park in Hong Kong, where vigils for the victims of the massacre had previously been held for decades. The UN were “alarmed” that 23 people were arrested on Sunday for “breaching the peace”, including a veteran activist knows as “Grandma Wong”. A solitary elderly man who held a candle on a street corner was also reported to have been arrested. Commemorations of the event have become increasingly off-limits in the city state since China imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020. Still, Twitter was filled with images of people lighting candles from the relative safety of their own homes in Hong Kong.
Don’t mention Sitong Bridge
Words or symbols that reference the massacre are notoriously scrubbed from the internet by the Chinese authorities. Last week, this censorship extended to the Sitong Bridge in Beijing, when Chinese language online searches of the bridge yielded no results. It comes after a banner was unfurled on the bridge in 2022 calling for the removal of Chinese president Xi Jinping. A Weibo post by the British Embassy in Beijing showing how the Chinese state media originally reported the massacre (namely in more detail than the silence now, with state media making reference to mass casualties in hospital at the time) was removed by the authorities. The anniversary is sometimes known as “internet maintenance day” because of the number of websites taken offline.
Literary pursuits
In the weeks building up to the anniversary, it was reported that books and videos about the massacre were pulled from Hong Kong public libraries, after government auditors requested works that were “manifestly contrary” to national security be taken away. Wio News reported in mid-May that searches of library archives involving keywords on the massacre turned up no articles or references.
Tiananmen Square surveilled
No shocker here, but worth saying nonetheless – any form of rally or protest was absent at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Sunday due to additional security checks in the area. Pedestrians on Changan Avenue, running north of the square, were stopped and forced to present identification. Journalists were also told they need special permission to be in the area.
New York new museum
A new museum dedicated to the Tiananmen Square massacre opened on Friday in New York. Zhou Fengsuo, who opened the exhibit as part of the 4th June Memorial Museum, felt it was needed as a pushback to the decades-long campaign by the CCP to eradicate remembrance of the massacre around the world. Despite being in the USA, there are still security fears for the museum’s workers. Speaking about how the museum will operate a visitor booking system, Wang Dan, a former student leader during the Tiananmen protests, told the Guardian: ““We cannot open the door for anyone who wants to come in because we’re really worried they [the Chinese embassy] will send somebody.”
The world remembers
Commemorations for the massacre were held around the world, including in Sydney, where speakers included exiled former diplomat Chen Yonglin, and demonstrators chanted “Free Hong Kong”. In London, hundreds gathered outside the Chinese Embassy calling for justice for the victims of the massacre, and for the release of human rights lawyer Chow Hang-Tung. Over in Taipei in Taiwan, less than a month after the seizure of Hong Kong’s “Pillar of Shame”, a statue commemorating the victims of the massacre, people gathered around a replica on Sunday as part of the city’s commemorations. Now the only place in the Chinese-speaking world to openly hold a memorial, organisers hoped to show solidarity with both Hong Kong and Chinese dissidents.
03 Mar 23 | FEATURED: Francis Clarke, News and features, Ukraine
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.
20 Dec 22 | China, FEATURED: Francis Clarke, Germany, News and features, United Kingdom
It was the 80
th anniversary on Saturday of the first time the Holocaust was acknowledged in the British House of Commons. On 17 December 1942, Jewish Labour MP Sydney Silverman, who formed a committee to organise Jewish refugee resettlement, asked the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden to make a statement on the Nazi plan to "deport all Jews from the occupied countries to Eastern Europe and there put them to death before the end of the year.” Eighty years is a long time, but the horror of the Holocaust persists in the public’s consciousness.
The exhibition Seeing Auschwitz, which opened recently in South Kensington, London, focuses on the images which play a large part in our collective perception of the Holocaust. What makes the images in this exhibition unique is that they were predominantly taken by the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
A focus of the exhibition is to try and humanise these images. Blown up large, we are invited to study the small detail for any stories we can see. A farewell embrace, children laughing, a gaze up to the sky.
The pictures in the exhibition were taken over a three-month period in 1944. The clear, more polished photos taken by the Nazis are juxtaposed by a section of the exhibition which shows several snatched photos taken by the Sonderkommando (work units made up of death camp prisoners). One of the photos (it’s not known how they accessed a camera) shows a group of women being forced naked, a hurried snapshot of terror. Drawings made after the war by one of the Sonderkommando gives an insight into the horror of the gas chambers.
One interesting photo is taken by neither perpetrator nor victim. The image, taken by a 14-year-old boy from his bedroom window, shows inmates from Dachau on a death march through his village. It places the horrors of the concentration camp, very rarely, in a normal, suburban setting.
The exhibition reminds us that, with around two million visitors per year, Auschwitz itself isn’t the only place we can understand what happened there. It can also be ‘seen’ in the void - the absence of large Jewish populations, common in towns and cities throughout Europe before the Second World War, which signifies whole generations of people who will never be born.
Attempts to destroy evidence of the Holocaust by the Nazis failed overall. Aside from antisemitic and right-wing conspiracy theorists, the world is clear about what the Holocaust was, and who the perpetrators were.
Similar efforts to bear witness to atrocities continue today. In March 2022, at least 458 people were killed in and around the town of Bucha in Ukraine by the invading Russian Army, which Russia’s UN envoy denied and claimed was a ‘staged provocation’. Journalists and civilians alike collected evidence to prove that was a falsehood. Elsewhere it is not so easy. In a chilling echo of the Holocaust, around five years ago there were reports that China was building internment camps for its Uyghur population, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority living in the far north western region of the country. The Chinese Foreign Ministry publicly denied there was a genocide in 2021; reporters are rarely allowed into the region where the genocide is taking place and when they are, they are often followed and/or their press trips tightly controlled. Those who have left the region are subject to harassment and intimidation, as we reported in our Banned by Beijing report. Still, a growing network of brave individuals are speaking out, journalists are working hard to obtain information and a clear picture of what is taking place is emerging.
Like Sydney Silverman did in 1942, it’s important for organisations like Index on Censorship to pressure those in power to take action against human rights abuses, to support those who are on the frontlines of gathering information and to also fight back against denial in spite of evidence. In an age of misinformation and disinformation, the fear is that evidence of atrocities, like the Bucha and Uyghur genocides, become distorted from the side of the perpetrator. Seeing Auschwitz reminds us to look deeper into what we’re viewing.
23 Nov 20 | Artistic Freedom, News and features
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Maggi Hambling's Statue for Mary Wollstonecraft, photo: Grim23, CC BY-SA 4.0
What would Mary Wollstonecraft have thought? The 18th century feminist, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, has been commemorated with a new sculpture that includes the figure of a small, naked woman. The woman is not, according to artist Maggi Hambling, Wollstonecraft herself, but a timeless everywoman. Indeed, the work is A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft rather than of her.
The reaction has been swift and almost unilaterally negative. Feminist authors who stand on Wollstonecraft’s shoulders have taken to Twitter to express their views to defend the oft- labelled “mother of feminism”. Imogen Hermes Gower said a chance to break with convention has been missed and Tracy King called the piece a “shocking waste of an opportunity”. Caitlin Moran sarcastically tweeted that she expects the streets to be full of statues depicting “John Locke’s shiny testicles, Nelson Mandela’s proud penis, and Descartes' adorable arse”.
Meanwhile, Dianne Abbot MP tweeted: “Pleased to see the great feminist #MaryWollstonecraft honoured after 200 years. And it is in a lovely garden square in Stoke Newington. But what a disappointing statue. Tiny, shiny and completely inappropriate”.
Valid opinions, all. Debate around art is arguably what abstract artistic endeavour is all about. It is a form of expression as valid as the works themselves.
Where a line must be drawn is censorship.
Just a day after the sculpture appeared in North London, clothing, tape and facemasks had been used to cover up the female figure, who sits atop a large, amorphous silver mass like a star at the top of a Christmas tree. These efforts at censorship have since been removed, but they pose an interesting question: why does female nakedness, especially in conjunction with honouring feminist ideals, inspire a desire to censor?
My own thoughts on the reason the statue is controverial came quickly: female nakedness is linked with sexual objectification, and the idea that women do not exist in the world purely as sexual objects for male pleasure is a key tenet of feminism. The two are not happy bedfellows and their collision in this sculpture is at the root of the displeasure of its critics.
But this thought process seemed a little too easy. The truth is that the link between sexual objectification and nakedness, in art as in life, is not a truth universally acknowledged. It is not unbreakable; it is not unchallengeable. It is a construct of the patriarchy, and to censor the naked female form in art is to play into the hands of those who want to preserve the idea of women exclusively as sexual beings.
Caroline Banks, an artist who has written a blog about the sculpture, says that women should own their own nakedness: “There is an argument for reappropriation of that [sexual objectification]. Why should we be ashamed of our bodies because every time we have no clothes on we think we’re going to be looked at as a sexual creature, or not [if you’re not fertile]?”
She also explored how loaded the term “nudity” is. Several news outlets have referred to the sculpture as "nude".
“That woman is naked,” Banks says, “she’s not nude”.
She explains: “That’s where the male gaze comes in a lot of the time. The idea of the nude in art is different from being naked. If you’re naked you just haven’t got any clothes on. Babies are not nude. People on the mortuary slab are not nude. They’re naked, they’re not nude.”
This idea of being naked as opposed to being nude, and the censorship of nakedness when it is loaded with the implications attached to nudity, is something that has also been explored in relation to the public exposure of female nipples.
Head of content at Index, Jemimah Steinfeld, wrote about this form of censorship in 2017. This was the year a case was taken the US Supreme Court by a woman named Sonoko Tagami, who was suing the city of Chicago over a fine she received for exposing her nipples in public, arguing that it is sex-based discrimination; men are not fined for the same action.
Censorship of female nipples on social media is also the source of debate and feelings of discrimination; Instagram continues to enforce a ban on female nipples, a topic covered in depth by The New York Times. The implication seems clear that female anatomy is sexual and therefore needs to be censored. The idea of parts of a woman’s body being exposed for reasons other than to sate the male gaze seems to have escaped the censors.
And back, then, to A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft.
It is a work of art, the majority of which is a roiling silver mass from which the naked figure emerges. The figure's nakedness appears at odds with feminist values.
But the sculpture's would-be censors have it wrong. Covering its nakedness merely upholds and strengthens its sexual objectification.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title="You may also want to read" category_id="15469"][/vc_column][/vc_row]
