ALL THAT IS
BANNED
IS DESIRED
World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression
25-26 October 2012
Conference report by Robin Denselow
FREEMUSE
ALL THAT IS
BANNED
IS DESIRED
World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression
2
All that is banned is desired - Colophon
ALL THAT IS BANNED IS DESIRED
World Conference on Artistic Freedom of Expression
Organised by Fritt Ord & Freemuse
Conference Rapporteur and Report Writer: Robin Denselow
Published by Freemuse
Editor in Chief: Marie Korpe
Graphic design: Hothorse Design Bureau | www.hothorse.net
Proofreading by Julian Isherwood
Report no. 10/2013
ISBN: 978-87-988163-4-8
Copyright Freemuse 2013
The views in this report do not necessarily represent the views of Freemuse.
Freemuse
Nytorv 17, DK-1450 Copenhagen K. Denmark
www.freemuse.org | www.artsfreedom.org
This conference report was made possible through the generous support of Svenska PostkodLotteriet.
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All that is banned is desired - Content
CONTENTS
04
05
08
15
20
Preface
Introduction
The Nature of the Threat
Religious Censorship
Corporate Censorship
23
25
33
39
40
Censorship of Women
Fighting Back
Annex – Conference Programme
Annex – Violations of Artistic
Freedom of Expression in 2012
Acknowledgements
4
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All that is banned is desired - Preface
Preface
BANNEDESIRED
All that is Banned is Desired – the first world conference
on artistic freedom of expression took place on October
25-26, 2012 at the Oslo Opera House. The conference was
organised by Freemuse and Fritt Ord.
Over the two days of the conference, more than 50 artists
and individuals involved in the arts addressed vital and
complex issues concerning artists’ freedom of expression.
To honour the histories of the struggle to advance the
freedom to make and use art, we placed the artists at
the centre of this gathering. Artists shared both their
experiences of censorship and the many strategies
developed to claim, defend and advance their freedoms as
well as the freedoms of other artists.
It is our hope that the conference was the beginning of
a concerted effort to enhance the monitoring of and
defense against violations of artists’ freedom of expression
worldwide. In recent years, hundreds of artists have been
attacked, persecuted, imprisoned and even killed because
they insist on expressing themselves through their
art. Many have become symbols of resistance against
dictatorial regimes, religious extremists, corporate greed,
and oppressive cultural, gender and sexual norms.
The entire conference was filmed by VIMAGO and each
session, as well as interviews with artists, can be found on
www.artsfreedom.org and www.fritt-ord.no
We would like to thank the artists for contributing and
sharing their experiences and artistic expressions through
statements, speeches, dialogues, film screenings and live
performances.
The programme committee
Marie Korpe and Ole Reitov, Freemuse
Bente Roalsvig and Rune Eraker, Fritt Ord
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All that is banned is desired - Introduction
Introduction
05
INTRODUCTION
This was unlike any conference I have ever attended.
Taking its title from the Arab proverb ‘All That Is Banned
Is Desired’, and described as the first world conference
on artistic freedom of expression, this was an historic,
wide-ranging and often emotional gathering of musicians,
writers, painters, photographers, dancers, film-makers
or publishers who have all suffered from censorship, but
have been determined to carry on, despite imprisonment
and torture, or threats that ranged from financial ruin to
physical violence and even death.
Held over two days in one of the halls of the National
Opera in Oslo, it involved over 50 very different artists
from around the world, with very different stories to
tell, but each of them providing reminders of the varied
restrictions on freedom of artistic expression that
currently exist around the world. Many conferences are
dominated by lengthy discussions or academic papers,
but this one was bravely different. There were a series of
22 very different sessions, some of them very brief, lasting
just fifteen minutes, and others that were longer, but
each of them examining a specific theme with one or two
artists appearing either alone or with a moderator. The
result felt at times like an almost overwhelming, non-stop
barrage of crucial and personal information, as speaker
after speaker discussed their aims, work and experiences.
Each of these sessions left me asking for more, and
often feeling humbled by the bravery of those taking part.
And as soon as one session ended, another immediately
began, always on a completely different topic.
Conferences are sometimes predictable affairs, but that
was never the case here. The focus of attention constantly
changed, highlighting different issues and problems from
around the world, from the take-over by extremist Islamic
groups in northern Mali to new problems that exist in the
West, such as the growing power of major international
corporations. Then there were discussions on the
meaning of ‘tolerance’, and the dangers of self-censorship.
This was a conference that constantly raised questions,
and constantly surprised, and the powerful personal
stories were cleverly and entertainingly interspersed with
reminders of the different art forms under threat.
So while it was important to hear a discussion on
the banning of the ancient musical culture in northern
Mali, it was equally important to hear an example of the
music that has now been outlawed by the fundamentalist
Islamic groups that currently control the region, with a
stirring performance from the Terakaft band. Likewise, it
was important that the session on Tibet should include
music from the traditional singer and exponent of the
Dranyen lute, Tenzin Gönpo. And that the continuing
problems in Zimbabwe should be addressed through the
bravely original songs of a rapper and spoken word artist
best known simply as Outspoken, who believes that it is
crucial to “use art to find a solution”. It was also right
that one of the sessions dealing with the Arab Spring, and
the continued problems facing female musicians in Egypt,
should include a rousing demonstration of the work of the
rock singer Sherine Amr.
Many of the sessions challenged and questioned the
audience. So while most of those taking part argued for
artistic freedom and the right to pursue their artistic
goals without hindrance from the state or any other
bodies, there was also one voice questioning the limits
of free speech. One of the most thought-provoking, if
frustratingly brief, sessions came from Adam Fischer, the
former Music Director of the Hungarian State Opera, who
has battled against intolerance, xenophobia and the rise
of anti-Semitism in his country. Here, he argued that there
are times when censorship is necessary, as he discussed
his campaign to prevent the staging of what he regarded as
being an anti-Semitic play, The Sixth Coffin, in Budapest
early in 2012. Having argued his case, he then moved to
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All that is banned is desired - Introduction
the piano for an unexpected, exquisite performance of a
section from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, in which he
accompanied the Norwegian National Opera soloist Silvia
Moi, whose company is based in the building. It’s difficult
to think of any conferences that could deliver surprises
quite like that.
Daniel Barenboim has said that “music is much
more powerful than words” because it “attacks the brain,
and the heart and the stomach, the temperament”. The
participants at this conference provided proof of the
way that music – and the other arts – have the power
to change the world, either by attacking or ridiculing
those in authority by bringing overlooked issues to public
attention in an unusual and memorable way, or by helping
to uplift and support those who are struggling for a
particular cause.
It is this strength that makes artists so dangerous –
and why there are so many attempts to suppress the arts
by those desperate to hold on to power, using political
ideology or religion as a means to maintain control
and impose their views of the world. As the conference
so successfully showed, censorship today exists in
many different forms, from state controls to religious
intolerance and the censorship by large multi-national
corporations desperate to fight off any perceived threats
to their brand image.
Governmental attempts to suppress artistic freedom
were powerfully demonstrated in the stories we heard
from Russia, where the jailing of the highly political and
thoughtful feminist punk group Pussy Riot has caused
international outrage, but in many ways has backfired
on the authorities by highlighting the strength of the
opposition to Putin.
There were other reports of state repression and
protest from elsewhere across the globe, from Burma to
Zimbabwe and Cameroon, Turkey, Cuba and Korea. But
the stories of repression were always matched against
reminders of the work of artists involved in fighting back.
One of the most dramatic presentations of the conference
came from the Korean artist Sun Mu, who appeared with
his face hidden by a mask – for his own safety and that
of his family. He has used the political art in which he
specialised in North Korea to portray the problems of the
country from which he has escaped, though in so doing he
has faced threats of censorship in South Korea.
Along with the stories of state censorship, there
were worrying reminders of the continued and growing
threat of religious intolerance around the world, from
fundamentalist Christian as well as Islamic groups. One
of the most chilling sessions dealt with the situation in
Mali, where music has traditionally played a pivotal role
in daily life and the national identity, but where music was
banned in those vast areas of the north of the country that
were under the control of Islamist rebels at the time the
conference took place. There were reports of censorship
and intolerance from elsewhere in the Islamic world,
from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and also from women
fighting to win greater artistic freedom in countries that
have seen the changes brought by the Arab Spring in
Egypt and Tunisia. And there were reminders too of the
intolerance that exists within minority communities in the
West, where there can be a clash between the traditional
values of an older immigrant community, and the more
westernised ideas of freedom of expression expressed by
younger generations.
But none of this means that there is room for
complacency in the West, for as Svetlana Mintcheva of
the National Coalition Against Censorship in the USA
pointed out, “we may have the First Amendment, but
there is still subtle censorship”. She went on to describe
the way in which the Christian right and others have
placed pressures on art galleries and other institutions,
that now the fear of the loss of funding, or an aversion
to upsetting others, as a reason to self-censor their work.
The dangers of self-censorship in the West, and the idea
of tolerance now being seen as a way of avoiding issues,
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All that is banned is desired - Introduction
along with the desire to avoid causing offence, rather than
the acceptance of new ideas, was a theme addressed by
other speakers during the conference.
Another often over-looked form of censorship in
the West, and one that led to one of the most lively and
unexpected sessions of the conference is Corporate
Censorship. Three very different presentations outlined
the way in which artists and film-makers can find
themselves facing hostility, and potentially enormous
legal fees, if they try to stand up for themselves against
major international corporations that have wealth, Public
Relations machines and highly-paid lawyers on their
side. As we learned, artists can easily find themselves in
conflict with corporations, if the corporations fear that
the artists are involved in work that could involve them
in controversy or more importantly damage their image
and financial interests. But we also learned lessons on
how corporations can be vulnerable to public pressure,
and how PR can be turned against them when artists act
together in solidarity.
The conference ended with a brave and experimental
dance sequence in which France-based choreographer
Héla Fattoumi explored her fascination with the veil, and
used dance and elaborate lighting to explore her ideas of
women’s freedom, restriction and constraints. There were
no closing speeches, and no summaries of what we had
all witnessed, and those in the hall were left to draw their
own conclusions from what they had seen and heard.
One remarkable aspect of the conference was the
way in which almost all the participants, apart from
those with busy work schedules who were forced to leave,
remained in the hall through the sessions, listening in
fascination to what other contributors had to say, and
learning from their experiences. One of those taking
part, who had suffered from censorship and orchestrated
public outcry at a work she had written, told me that she
had gained enormous strength from the proceedings. She
had felt very alone, she told me, and it was important for
her to come into contact with others who had suffered in
the same way. Another participant said that the event was
part of the healing process. They clearly drew enormous
strength from being together.
There were so many issues and ideas discussed in
such a brief period of time, that the experience seemed
at times to be almost overwhelming. But certain themes
did clearly emerge. Some were bleak and depressing:
the nature of the very real threats of censorship that
artists around the world face today and the way that
dictatorial states, a variety of different religious groups,
corporations, and those determined to impose their views
of society on others, have all attempted to censor artists
whom they regard as a threat to their views of the world.
But despite all this, the mood of the conference was
powerfully uplifting and positive, rather than depressing.
For every story of censorship and suffering, there were
stories of resilience, defiance and survival, and reminders
of the importance of art in the constant battle for freedom
of self-expression. The fight-backs were as varied and
often as original as the work of the artists themselves, and
in many cases, the attempts at censorship had back-fired.
All those who attended will have drawn their own
conclusions from what they saw and heard over the two
days, and I found myself breaking the experience down
into two main categories – the nature of censorship around
the world today, and the many devices used by artists in
surviving these challenges and fighting back, aware of the
importance of the work that they are undertaking.
After all, if art didn’t present a threat to the censors
and their ideas, there would be no reason why they should
try to move against it so brutally.
Robin Denselow
Robin Denselow is a British writer, journalist
and broadcaster.
8
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
THE NATURE OF THE THREAT:
GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP
Over the past year, one of the best-known bands around
the world has been a group of women who have never
released hit records, never toured or performed on
national television – though their videos have been posted
on the internet – and who have arguably done more than
anyone else to draw attention to the opposition to Russian
President Vladimir Putin, and highlight the consequences
for those who oppose him.
On February 21, 2012, five members of the Russian
feminist punk-rock collective Pussy Riot staged an
unauthorised protest performance at Moscow’s Cathedral
of Christ The Saviour, saying their action was intended to
highlight the support for Putin by leaders of the Orthodox
Church. The event was turned into a music video Punk
Prayer – Mother Of God Chase Putin Away, and widely
viewed on the internet. The authorities were furious,
and the musicians found that they faced the full force of
Russian law.
They were charged under laws designed to provide
protection against ‘inciting hatred’ and ‘hooligans’,
though the same legislation that can be used against
Islamic terrorists or neo-Nazi gangs can also be directed
at political activists, bloggers, and artists. Nadezhda
Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, two of the three
Pussy Riot members who took part in the church action,
were sentenced to two years in jail for hooliganism, and
sent to two of Russia’s notoriously harshest prison camps,
far from their children in Moscow. They have argued that
their conviction was part of a growing crackdown on free
speech since Putin was returned to power.
Alexander ‘Sasha’ Cheparukhin, who has organised
an international campaign in support of the jailed
Pussy Riot members, gave his bleak view of the current
situation in Russia. An award-winning music producer,
well-known for his music festivals in Russia and work on
environmental causes, he agreed that the media campaign
surrounding Pussy Riot had been successful in publicising
the situation in Russia, but not in winning their release.
“It would have been successful if it had a result,” he said
adding “and not just world impact”.
Cheparukhin argued that violence and lawlessness
in Russia are worse now in the Putin era than they were
under Leonid Brezhnev in the days of the Soviet Union,
adding darkly that “at that time, no-one thought they were
in danger of being murdered”. Charting the changing
situation since the Soviet era, he said that “at first, the
restrictions were black and white – any practice of
capitalism was prohibited in the country. Then there was
a period when you could do as you wished, and make as
much money as you wished, so long as you didn’t touch the
power of the state. When Putin came to power, it changed
– protesters could now be charged as terrorists – it was
scary and people became very afraid”. He described the
period between 2008-2012, when Dmitry Medvedev was
president as “promising – he even gave an interview to
opposition newspapers”. But since Medvedev’s move to
the position of Prime Minister, with the return of Vladimir
Putin as Russia’s president, the situation had changed.
As for the jailing of the Pussy Riot members, he
argued that this was “a black and white case – they are
not criminals but violated the Code of Administrative
Offences – and insulted President Putin and the Patriarch.
They should have got a small fine, and be told to clean the
streets. But the offence was criminalised – they had to
invent something to show it was dangerous”.
He said that the Pussy Riot case had two effects.
It had shown that there were the beginnings of the new
ideology in Russia, and had also highlighted the links
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
between the Orthodox Church is tied in with Putin. “It’s
a monarchy – let’s forget about democracy. Pussy Riot
shows that the Orthodox Church is tied in with Putin –
and their message was ‘Mary, mother of God, get rid of
Putin’”. And he concluded that “Russia is getting to be a
gangster state, that’s obvious”.
There were no direct contributions from the Pussy
Riot collective themselves, though one of them was in
Oslo during the conference and made a brief appearance
at a party at the end of the event. But there were further
reminders of the political role being played by artists and
musicians in Russia today from Nikolay Oleynikov, a visual
artist, musician and “street politician” who is co-founder
of the May Congress of Creative Workers, and a member
of the collective Chto Delat (What Is To Be Done?). They
took their name from a Lenin pamphlet, he said, and were
a group of writers and philosophers who were “trying to
work out how art can be affiliated with political agenda”.
He, too, talked of the harsh climate in which
politically-motivated artists now struggle in Russia, and
the “anti-extremist laws” that can be used in any cases
of “extremist activities”, from terrorism to the Pussy Riot
demonstration. He discussed the workshops and protests
organised by his group, and examples of actions taken by
the authorities, from the arrest of a group simply because
they were watching the film Sympathy For The Devil, to
the case of Alexandra Dukhanina. An 18 year-old Moscow
student, she joined the mass demonstrations on May 6,
2012, the day before President Putin’s inauguration, and
was placed under house arrest after being accused of
‘assaulting police’. Pictures of her being dragged away by
the neck by a burly police officer featured prominently on
Russian news sites and blogs after her arrest.
Oleynikov also discussed his work with the Arkady
Kots Band, with whom he sings and plays harmonica
and percussion. He said they were working to re-discover
examples of protest songs from all over the world, from
the work of Russian anarchist poets to anthems of trade
union solidarity from the Franco era in Spain. He said that
a concert by his group had been banned “because we are
Pussy Riot supporters”, and described the situation in
Russia as “the worst censorship in 20 years”.
There were further stories of harassment – and a
courageous and potentially perilous fight-back – from an
arts project operating in a refugee camp in the north of
the West Bank, an area nominally under the control of
the Palestinian National Authority, but where there have
been continued Israeli incursions. The Freedom Theatre
opened in 2006 as a theatre and cultural centre in Jenin
Refugee Camp, and is described on its own website as
‘developing a vibrant and creative artistic community in
the northern part of the West Bank’, with one of its aims
being to ‘empower youth and women in the community
and to explore the potential of arts as an important
catalyst for social change’.
It has not been easy. The theatre’s founding
member Juliano Mer Khamis was murdered in April 2011
by unknown killers, and according to co-founder and
administrative manager Jonatan Stanczak, “over half the
theatre’s employees have been arrested by the Israeli
army”.
Stanczak began by paying tribute to his colleague and
said that since his death there has been new harassment
as “the Israeli army started coming in and attacking, but
the Palestinian Authority have also caused us problems”.
He said that the idea of the Freedom Theatre was to create
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
a safe space, but “with the Israeli attacks, that safe space
diminishes. Israelis take people in for interrogation, and
get them to trade information”.
“Half of those who work here have been taken in for
interrogation”, he said, “and that leads to staff insecurity,
and people not wanting to come in for film and theatre
training.” This also causes financial concerns for the
project, as donors don’t like to hear about trouble. “It
creates insecurity – and insecurity for our donors –
we’re a slave to our funders, and they don’t want to be
connected to problems. And it takes focus away from the
work we are supposed to do – and maybe that’s the aim,
to cause insecurity”.
There were further stories of government-imposed
censorship, and fight-back, from Africa. For centuries,
ever since the beginnings of the Griot tradition in West
Africa, African musicians have traditionally used their
work to tell stories of their peoples’ histories, sing praise
songs to great rulers – but also offer criticism and advice
if they feel that their country’s leaders are making serious
mistakes. The leaders sometimes hit back. Africa’s most
celebrated recent musical rebel was Nigeria’s Fela Kuti,
whose outspoken attacks against a series of his country’s
military regimes led to beatings, lengthy terms of
imprisonment, and an army attack on his compound that
led to the death of his distinguished mother.
Musical criticism of oppressive and non-democratic
rule continues across the continent, and the conference
heard about the musical fight-back against two of the
continent’s longest-established leaders.
In the West African state of Cameroon, President
Paul Biya has been in power since 1982, and over the past
thirty years he has won a series of presidential elections
– in 1997, 2004, and again in 2011 – but he was only able
to stand in that election after a clause in the constitution
limiting the number of presidential terms was removed.
Not surprisingly, there are many in the country who have
argued that enough is enough, and their spokesman and
hero is the songwriter Lapiro de Mbanga. Singing in the
local pidgin language, mixing English, French and Douala,
he proved to be a constant scourge of President Biya with
songs chronicling the daily injustices of life in Cameroon.
But it was his 2008 song Constitution Constipée
(Constipated Constitution) that really infuriated the
authorities, and especially the president, with its furious
and witty attack on the amendment to the constitution
that had allowed Biya to stand for an extra seven years.
The lyrics said that the old man was tired and had outlived
his usefulness, and though it was banned on TV and radio,
the song became a massive popular hit, sung by the
thousands of workers and students who took to the streets
in February 2008, rejecting the constitutional changes and
protesting at the steep rise in the cost of living. Lapiro
de Mbanga has described his style by saying “the most
serious things in humanity must be said with a laugh and
not with bitterness. I say serious things with lightness.
With a laugh, things stick in your mind”.
He was arrested two months after the demonstrations,
accused of inciting violence and arson, and sentenced to
the notorious New Bell prison near Douala, with a threat
of an extended term if he refused to pay a fine. Three
years later he was eventually freed, after surviving
harsh conditions in the prison, following an international
campaign for his release staged by Freemuse, during
which he was declared to be a Prisoner of Conscience,
just like Fela Kuti. Maran Turner, the Executive Director
of Freedom Now (USA) described how the campaign was
organised, and the tactics that were so successfully used,
arguing that his arrest “was a violation of his freedom of
expression, because they had censored his music”.
Further south in Africa, music has been used
in another attempt to persuade Zimbabwe’s veteran
President Robert Mugabe that it is time for change.
Mugabe came to power when the country achieved its
independence in 1980, at a ceremony that included a
memorable appearance by Bob Marley. As Mugabe clung
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
to power, the initial euphoria of the independence years
began to fade, and so did the musical scene led by artists
such as the Bhundu Boys, who had found considerable
success in the West. Now, there’s a new music scene in the
country and artists in Harare who are daring to confront
the political stalemate in Zimbabwe. Tongai Leslie
Makawa, better known by his stage name Outspoken, is
the co-founder of Magama, a cultural activist network set
up to fight social and political injustice. Wearing black
jeans and trainers, he gave the conference a condensed
history of Zimbabwe from 1980, from independence to the
current threat of “abductions and killings”. Describing his
own approach, he said that he was “using art as a vehicle
to find a solution, through spoken word and hip hop”. He
followed up with two highly original pieces that made use
of both the spoken word and song, and which both dealt
with what he called “the journey that is Zimbabwe”.
Outspoken. Photo by: Monica Larsen
As several speakers at the conference were to
remind us, the danger of censorship and restrictions
on the freedom of artists is a world-wide threat that
also exists in those countries deemed by the West to
be improving. There have certainly been changes in
Turkey since its government decided to apply for EU
membership, becoming an EU candidate in 1999. In line
with EU requirements, Turkey introduced human rights
and economic reforms, abolished the death penalty and
introduced tougher measures against torture – while also
promising further reforms regarding women’s issues and
Kurdish culture, language, education and housing.
Asli Erdogan has a very different experience of
the realities of Turkish life. A distinguished physicist,
she is also an award-winning writer, whose seven books
have been praised around the world and translated
into 11 languages. From 1998-2000 she was the Turkish
representative on the International PEN Writers In Prison
Committee, and she then started writing a column titled
The Others in the respected newspaper Radikal, dealing
with topics that the Turkish government would prefer to
be ignored – prison, torture, the Kurdish question, and
women’s issues. It made her a highly controversial figure
in Turkey, and she was fired by the newspaper, and then
faced what she called a “lynching campaign” from the
Turkish media.
“I had written about Kurdish girls raped by paramilitaries, and children who had been tortured, and
supported a prisoner hunger strike”, she said, “and they
called me an immoralist and a terrorist”. Describing the
campaign against her in the media, she said “rape is
nothing compared to a mass lynching like this. My eyebrows literally fell out. They called me immoral, and even
discussed my pubic hair, just because I’m a woman”.
Despite her distinguished history as a novelist, she said
that she became so hated by the authorities “that for
seven years while I was in Turkey I was never invited to
give a TV interview”.
In 2010, she was invited to return to Radikal, and was
fired from the newspaper once again. She now infuriated
the authorities even more by moving on in 2010 to write for
the Kurdish paper Özgür Gündem – until the pressure on
her became so great that she was forced to leave Turkey
to live in exile in Austria.
“80 of their journalists have been killed”, she said
“and I began to suffer from ‘5AM syndrome’. That’s the
time when the police come to arrest you, dozens of them,
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
and so I found that I could never go to sleep until after 5
a.m. You wait up that long before going to bed. And I was
afraid – I didn’t want to be sent to jail for 18 years”. Under
the Turkish anti-terror laws, she said, “you can be treated
as a terrorist just for defending the idea that Kurds
should have education in their mother tongue – if the
same cause is being promoted by a ‘terrorist group’ (the
PKK)”. Describing the situation in the Kurdish South East
of the country, she said that “people are taken to court
for listening to Kurdish songs”, and listed the numbers
currently in prison.
She estimated that 6-8,000 people had been arrested,
including members of legal Kurdish parties, along with 68
union men, 740 students, 30 mayors, 30 lawyers, and 77
journalists including 63 from the Kurdish press.
Pelin Basaran, who followed, discussed the
censorship of the arts in Turkey, citing a cultural centre
that had been accused of providing propaganda for the
PKK, and explaining how a song that has been officially
approved, and played on the (legal) Kurdish radio stations
can suddenly be banned if it is sung at demonstrations.
“Turkey’s constitution says the state should protect
art and artists”, she said, “but the line between critical
judgement and censorship is unclear”.
There were also warnings from other countries where
there have been encouraging signs of change. In the
opening session of the conference, there were reminders
of the need for continuing improvements in Burma,
a country where there have been significant reforms
since the elections in November 2010. Military rule has
been replaced by a military-backed, nominally civilian
government, which has started a programme of economic
and political reforms, in which many political prisoners
have been released – most famously, the pro-democracy
leader Aung San Suu Kyi – and censorship has been
relaxed.
But former detainee and musician Win Maw, who
was released from prison early in 2012, has still not
been given a passport, and was thus not able to attend
this conference as planned, although he did make a
video appearance. And the popular Burmese actor and
comedian Zarganar, himself once banned and sentenced
to a very lengthy jail sentence, warned that “some
political prisoners are still behind bars – the country has
not changed”.
From elsewhere in Asia, there were reports of
potential improvement in the situation in China. Si Han,
a curator of the Chinese collections at the Museum of Far
Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, argued that the longterm prospects for the freedom of the arts in the country
seemed promising, despite continuing censorship and
the much-publicised harassment of the internationallyrespected artist Ai Weiwei, who was charged with
economic crime, although it is his political comments that
have irritated the government.
Charting the continuing struggle between artists
and the authorities, Si Han began with the events of
September 1979, which he has described as ‘the first time
in the modern history of Chinese art that the quest of
freedom of art was clearly stated and shouted out loud’.
This was the month in which a group of young artists hung
up their works on the fences of a park outside the National
Art Gallery in Beijing, although most of the paintings
were influenced by Western modernism – a style that
was forbidden and deemed to be politically incorrect. The
exhibition was supposed to last for a week, but was closed
after just two days. Refusing to give in, the members of
the so-called ‘Stars Group’ (which included Ai Weiwei)
held demonstrations, negotiated with the government,
and were allowed to exhibit their works a few times
in the gallery, China’s most important art institution.
Demonstration, Si Han noted, is one way to fight against
censorship of art.
A decade later, in February 1989, there was another
controversial show at the National Art Gallery entitled
China Avant-Garde, which covered the Chinese modern
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
art movement of the 1980s. It was scheduled to run for
two weeks, but closed by the authorities on the same
day that it opened, largely because they objected to the
performance art of Xiaoi Lu, who shot at her own work
Dialogue with a handgun.
It took a year of dialogue with the authorities before a
set of rules were agreed. The exhibition would be allowed
if it fulfilled three conditions:
Chinese – it sounds remarkably similar to an insult to the
Party Central Committee. Another photograph, One Tiger
With Eight Breasts, shows Ai Weiwei with four naked
women – and this could be interpreted as a reference
to the nine members of the Standing Committee of the
Politburo. No-one from the government has explained why
such art is improper, as doing so could be countered by
the right to free speech guaranteed by the Constitution. Si
1. It is not allowed to exhibit works that are against
the Party and the Four Cardinal Principles (which are:
upholding the socialist road, the dictatorship of the
proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party and
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought).
Han compared political censorship to torture or terrorism
“because the rules of the game are never made clear to
those who suffer”.
As for moral censorship, he argued that the naked
body, sex and sexuality are sensitive subjects in China,
despite the Confucian saying ‘sex and food, these are
where the greatest human desires exist’. Even Ai Weiwei’s
One Tiger With Eight Breasts had been investigated for
pornography. But he noted that younger artists have
begun to touch on sexuality in the last fifteen years, and
that the internet played a decisive role in allowing artists
to find audiences both inside China and abroad.
Aesthetic censorship, said Si Han, is a field that
is overlooked, and the convention of art itself has been
used in China as a censorship strategy. Until the late
2. It is not allowed to exhibit pornographic or obscene
work.
3. Performance art is not allowed.
Si Han argued that these restrictions represented the
political censorship of art, moral censorship, and aesthetic
censorship. Victims of political censorship included Ai
Weiwei, who had dared to subtly criticise the government
through his photographs. Grass Mud Horse Covering The
Middle is a play on words when that title is translated into
Hello Comrades 2, Wang Zi. From the exhibition Secret Love curated by Si Han
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All that is banned is desired - The Nature of the Threat: Government Censorship
1970s, socialist realism was the dominant aesthetic,
while impressionism was regarded as bourgeois and not
accepted. Style was an ideological issue, and the paintings
of Ai Weiwei and other members of the Stars Group in
the 1980s were controversial simply because they were
impressionist landscapes, and therefore challenged
the system. Chinese artists now have greater freedom,
thanks in part to the growing art market, but it remains
to be seen how new art is accepted by official institutions
outside of Beijing.
Tenzin Gönpo. Photo by: Monica Larsen
He concluded by arguing that traditional conservative
approaches and values in China are changing, as rapid
economic growth brings large-scale social change and
consciousness of individual rights. But we need more
fighters at the front, he said, and many more standing
behind, so we can push the red line forward.
Attitudes may slowly be changing in China, even
if censorship does remain, but we were reminded
that the situation continues to be far more serious in
Chinese-occupied Tibet. Two Tibetan exiles, the visual
artist and poet Tenzing Rigdol and the musician Tenzin
Gönpo, showed how they are using their work to provide
reminders of Tibetan culture and encourage and support
the exiled community. Rigdol gave examples of how some
of his work had also been censored in New York for being
too political, and how he had also suffered from problems
of self-censorship.
Such problems are of course very minor compared to
the situation in Tibet itself, or in provinces adjoining the
Tibet Autonomous Region. Here, thousands of students
took to the streets in the autumn of 2012, denouncing
what they saw as cultural genocide by the Chinese, as the
extreme protest campaign of self-immolation continued,
with six Tibetans setting fire to themselves in one week
alone. “In Tibet, the arts are censored”, said Tenzing
Rigdol. “They target writers, artists and film-makers – but
there is an underground movement.”
From elsewhere in the Communist world, the
Interdisciplinary Artist Tania Bruguera gave her views
on the artistic climate in Cuba. She argued that there
are “two Cubas”. One that is admired by tourists and leftwingers who are rightly impressed by the country’s lack of
racism and by its excellent welfare system, and another
Cuba seen only by Cubans. She said that censorship was
not evident but that the authorities “censor your right to
grow” because any criticism is seen as an attack on the
Cuban revolution. She said she would like “to see if we can
have a Leftist project without oppression”.
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All that is banned is desired - Religious Censorship
Religious Censorship
15
RELIGIOUS CENSORSHIP
Censorship by repressive governments, military rulers
or occupying powers has been a recurrent problem for
artists around the world, but there is now a growing
form of censorship that many in the West may have once
assumed to be on the decline – censorship by religious
groups. There are of course many different strands and
ideas within the Islamic community, as there are within
other major world religions, but Western attention has
been centred on the rise of militant fundamentalist Islam,
as seen through the influence of al-Qaida, the Taliban
in Afghanistan and Pashtun areas of western Pakistan,
or al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria.
Connected with Wahhabi preachings, and the strict
imposition of Sharia law, this was a doctrine in which
many forms of non-religious music, including traditional
music along with any Western or amplified styles, were
banned. In Afghanistan, musicians had their instruments
broken, and cassettes of their work smashed and
festooned from the trees. I remember meeting musicians
from Afghanistan who had fled in fear across the border
to western Pakistan, only to find that they faced some of
the same attitudes and restrictions there.
No-one thought that events like this could ever take
place in the West African desert state of Mali. Here, after
all, was a country with a Muslim population that – like
neighbouring Senegal – had become known around the
world for the work of its extraordinary musicians, and
where music was not just an entertainment but a crucial
part of life. Malian artists like Ali Farka Touré, Rokia
Traoré or Toumani Diabaté became household names in
the West, performing in concert halls or at major festivals,
and became far better known than Malian politicians.
In the process, they educated Western audiences about
Africa and their country’s ancient civilisation, and the
way in which traditional families of musicians, the Griots,
had acted as advisors to the rulers, and guardians of the
country’s extraordinary history, keeping alive an oral
tradition for generation after generation.
One of the best-known Malian bands around the
world is Tinariwen, who became so successful that they
performed not just at major World Music events, but
appeared alongside the Rolling Stones. These exponents
of ‘desert blues’ are from the north of the country, and
are part of the Touareg or Kel Tamashek people who
are traditionally nomadic, roaming across the desert
to neighbouring Niger or Mauritania. Their popularity,
and that of other bands in the area, was boosted by
a remarkable series of annual Festival In The Desert
concerts which began in January 2001 in the little desert
village of Tin Essako, and attracted music fans, and even
major bands, from elsewhere in Africa and the West.
There has been trouble in northern Mali in the past,
with a series of upheavals that included a major rebellion
in 1990, when Tamashek fighters turned against the Malian
government, demanding greater autonomy, a right to
defend and support their culture, and even independence
for a new country that they named Azawad. But there was
no suggestion then that their demands would include the
imposition of hard-line Sharia law, let alone an Islamic
authority that would ban their beloved music.
Yet that is exactly what happened in 2012. Yet
another major rebellion in the north, in which the rebels
were helped by weaponry acquired after the collapse of
the Gadaffi regime in Libya, led to the defeat of Malian
government forces in the region. And as the rebels
advanced, it was clear that they were now dominated by
hardline Islamic groups, including AQIM, al-Qaida in the
Islamic Maghreb. The extremists, encouraged and helped
by supporters from outside Mali, had infiltrated, won over
and transformed the rebel movement. There had been
warnings that this might happen, according to Manny
Ansar, the former manager of Tinariwen who became
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All that is banned is desired - Religious Censorship
director of the Festival In The Desert. Since 2007, the year
when AQIM was formed, its members became increasingly
active in the region where the Festival In The Desert was
held, and he was advised to hold the 2010 Festival in the
greater safety of the city of Timbuktu.
The Festival in January 2012 went ahead as normal,
but just two months later Timbuktu fell to the rebels,
and now the situation was to change dramatically for
the worse. In August, a spokesman for the Movement for
Unity and Jihad in West Africa – an AQIM off-shoot, made
an announcement in the city of Gao, which had now also
fallen to the rebels. He proclaimed that the broadcasting
of all Western music was now banned, and that “Satan’s
music” would be replaced by Quranic verses.
The ban was in fact already in place. Young people had
been stopped from listening to reggae music, traditional
musicians had also been silenced, and families had their
televisions smashed because they watched music shows.
It was no surprise that large numbers of the population,
including the musicians, fled across the borders, leaving
Mali for Algeria, Niger or Mauritania.
Addressing the conference, Mohamed ‘Manny’ Ansar
reminded us that he is one of the Tamashek people,
and then gave a chilling account of what has happened
to the culture he has done so much to foster. He said he
had spent over a decade travelling around the world and
talking about the Festival In The Desert “and I’m ashamed
at what has happened. It was provoked by people who call
themselves Muslims, like me”. He said he “shivered” when
he saw that his talk had been titled ‘The Day The Music
Stopped’ because “it reminded me of the film The Day The
World Stopped – but this is reality”.
In Mali, he said “music is important as a daily event.
It’s not just entertainment or business, but it’s through
our music that we know our history and our own identity.
Our elders gave us lessons through music. It’s through
music that we declare love and get married – and we
criticise and make comments about the people around us”.
Looking at the historical importance of musicians within
the society, he said that when there were clashes between
communities “they had Griots behind them, encouraging
the fighters and shaming anyone for running away. But
there was a gentlemen’s agreement that the Griots were
not to be killed. At worst, they’d be kidnapped and asked
to play for the victors”.
He complained that “to stop the music is to strip us
of all this. And why are the militias stopping the music?
To impose their authority, so there’s nothing to threaten
them. That’s why they are attacking the traditional chiefs
and the musicians. And they are using concepts of Islam
that are 14 centuries old, and have never been applied. I
find it strange that these ideas are being imposed now. It’s
as if they took a computer and wiped the hard drive, and
then imposed their ideas instead”.
Mali’s celebrated musicians are among those who
have suffered, and the bass player and guitarist Pino
Ibrahim ag Ahmed described how he had been affected.
He said he had been forced into exile, and lost much of his
land, and described how he had lost his guitar to bandits
as he travelled from Algeria to Niger to get a visa. “It’s
dangerous moving around”, he said. “I don’t know these
groups, or what they want.”
But he is determined to keep playing. He was joined
on stage by other members of his band Terakaft, who
treated the conference to a rousing demonstration of the
desert blues that the hard-line Islamists have banned.
Terakaft
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All that is banned is desired - Religious Censorship
Artists working in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan
are already aware of such pressures and dangers. The
Pakistani actor and cultural activist Arshad Hussain
described the events of 2008, when he was on his way home
from Peshawar to celebrate the religious holiday of Eid,
when he was kidnapped, punched and hit and put in a dark
room with no electricity, simply because of his profession.
“I’m an actor and a music promoter”, he protested. “I pay
my taxes and I have done nothing wrong”. He was told by
his captors, who were clearly Taliban supporters, that as
a member of the Pashtun community, he was not allowed
to be involved in such work. “But Pakistanis love film and
music”, he argued back. “Why can’t I be an actor?”
Hussain emphasised the danger of artists in the
community by showing slides of singers who had been
killed, and the plight of musicians living in the province.
But he talked too of his fight-back, his refusal to leave
Peshawar, and discussions with the government to re-start
cultural projects in the region.
The religious censorship imposed by fundamentalist
Islamic groups is also a threat among immigrant
communities in the West. The singer Deeyah explained
how she was forced to stop her music career, and then
leave the country where she was living, although that
country was Norway, where this conference was being
held. Born to a Pakistani father and Afghani mother,
she started singing at the age of seven, and soon became
recognised in Norway as a child protégé and teenage star,
recording her first solo album at the age of 15. Her music
blended her much-praised Pakistani classical influences
and training with more contemporary Western styles,
and although she was clearly a brilliant musician who
had studied the great musical traditions of Pakistan, the
local Muslim community turned against her, insisting that
music was no profession for a young girl.
“They thought that being an artist was as low as
being a prostitute”, she said. “People told my father, a
great music enthusiast, that I should stop doing this, and
they came up to me in the streets of Oslo and said that
I shamed the community. They said I was a prostitute
and would be beaten and raped, and I was told that my
stomach would be cut open so that I could not give birth
to another prostitute. So this has happened in Norway,
just as in Peshawar.”
Explaining the problems of growing up in an
immigrant community, torn between traditional values
and a new Western approach, she said that she felt “not
Pakistani enough, or Norwegian enough – and white
Norwegians didn’t help me. I felt like an unwanted piece
of baggage at the airport”.
It was not just Muslim artists who have suffered
from religious censorship, and the problems and tensions
of growing up in immigrant communities in the West.
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti is a successful and respected
British dramatist who is also a member of the British Sikh
community. In December 2004, a production of her play
Behzti (Dishonour) was cancelled after angry protests
at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the British
Midlands, where it was being staged. Some 400 Sikhs took
part in demonstrations outside the theatre, and a group of
them stormed into the building, leading to the evacuation
of 800 people, who had come to watch a family Christmas
show.
Behzti was cancelled, effectively censored, as its
staging was considered to be a threat to public order,
and Bhatti herself was forced to leave home and go into
hiding, with 24-hour police protection because of death
threats against her. “I had to leave my flat, I felt isolated,
and it affected my physical and mental state”, she said.
“And there was the pressure of knowing that I had caused
all this.” The Guardian’s respected theatre critic Michael
Billington described this threat to artistic free expression
as the most shaming theatrical event of the decade.
The play dealt with a sexually corrupt Sikh
community leader, and the action centred around a visit
to a gurdwara, or temple, by a widowed mother and her
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All that is banned is desired - Religious Censorship
daughter. It later becomes clear that her husband killed
himself after a homosexual affair with the community
leader, who has abused a series of women in the temple.
It involves a rape scene, and ends with the girl’s mother
fatally stabbing the man who has abused her.
Bhatti’s life may have been threatened because of
the play, but she refused to let the issue rest. She followed
the controversial Behzti with another play, Behud, a
satire about censorship, giving a fictionalised version of
the events that followed the staging of the original play.
In Behud, she analysed the events that made censorship
possible, from the self-interest of local politicians to the
motivations of the religious activists and members of the
Sikh community who want to keep control of how their
society is portrayed.
As with the Islamist groups banning music in Mali,
the censorship raises the question of motive. Why is this
particular group trying to take control, and do they really
speak for the whole community? Are ethnic communities
really uniform in their beliefs or are there conflicts and
debates within them?
Speaking at the Oslo conference, Gurpreet Kaur
Bhatti argued that it was the “self-appointed leaders who
disapproved, leading to the theatre choosing to pull the
play. A lot of Sikhs supported it. People hi-jack religion
for their own purposes. I said to the protesters ‘I’m a Sikh,
I’m a believer. Is your faith so weak?’’’ Discussing why she
had written Behzti, she said that “I’m a second-generation
Sikh woman in the UK, and I wanted to talk about
hypocrisy and the pressures of living in a community.
There was anger among some Sikhs that one of their own
was airing our dirty laundry. I’m a writer – this could have
been about any religion. But I wanted to make it local”.
The controversy over Behzti, as with the campaign
against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in 1988,
leads to the question of self-censorship, and whether it is
morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures,
either by writing a book or staging a play. In other words,
should artists avoid causing religious offence by self-
censoring their work? Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti argued that
artists have to be careful “but we should shout and scream
at each other, and get to know each other. It’s harder to
be truthful and to say ‘I find this difficult about you’”.
She argued that the perception of the Asian community
by outsiders was that it is dominated by “food, flags and
festivals. But you should want to look underneath, go
where it’s frightening and look at the issues”.
It is not just Islamic or Sikh communities that
can be accused of religious censorship, and there’s no
reason for any feeling of smugness over the issue in the
West. Christian groups in the US are also responsible
of “conveniently abandoning their First Amendment
principles when it suits them”, according to Svetlana
Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
She began by asking how the USA could have an
organisation dealing with censorship – “haven’t we got
the First Amendment? So how can there be censorship?”.
She then argued that “although we don’t have torture or
arrests there is a subtle but pervasive culture of censorship
in the US, often encouraged by Christian groups that
are fighting for political goals: the pursuit of social and
cultural hegemony”. The strategy is to ‘attribute a simple
and maximally offensive intention to an image, a film, play
or artwork, and use it to trigger long-standing grievances,
while also mobilising and radicalising your constituency
by creating the impression that they are engaged in a war,
and that their most cherished values are under attack’.
And the results of this ‘subtle censorship’ can mean that
galleries lose their funding because they are perceived to
have caused offence – and that there is a wave of fear that
makes self-censorship the order of the day.
Discussing the debate on free speech that resulted
from the uproar and violence caused by the “crappy and
offensive video” The Innocence Of Muslims, she argued
that “there is an aversion to upset and offend sensibilities
– people argue that it’s hate speech just because they
don’t like it”.
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All that is banned is desired - Religious Censorship
She then went on to give examples of the way that
Christian groups have attacked art works, with the
aim of mobilising their constituencies and increasing
their influence at a time when they feared they were
losing control of political and cultural hegemony in an
increasingly diverse and secular society. One of the first
works to be targeted was Andres Serrano’s photograph
Piss Christ, which Mintcheva has described as a
“provocatively-titled but luminously beautiful photograph
of a plastic crucifix in a golden fluid, declared to be the
artist’s urine”. It was part of a travelling exhibition that
closed in early 1989.
Three months later, the Rev. Donald Wildmon, a
Minister from Tupelo, Mississippi, who is also the founder
of the conservative fundamentalist Christian American
Family Association, sent a letter of complaint about the
work to members of Congress – leading to US Senator
Alfonse D’Amato tearing up the exhibition catalogue on
the Senate floor, and launching an attack on the federal
arts funding agency, the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA).
It was the beginning of a lengthy debate that in
1998 led to the US Supreme Court ruling to uphold a
clause requiring the NEA, when awarding grants, to take
into consideration ‘general standards of decency and
respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American
public’. The result of these culture wars was to leave arts
institutions fearful of controversy and much more willing
to censor themselves.
Mintcheva gave further examples of art works
that have been attacked. She stated that nudity is the
cause for the most censorship, and showed photos of
nude statues that had been incongruously clothed by
protesters. She also talked about censorship of literature
by religious groups that set out to impose their values on
homosexuality by disguising what they were doing as the
protection of children, and respect for others. And as an
example, she cited the case of the book In Our Mothers’
House, by Patricia Polacco. Praised as a ‘gem’ by the
School Library Journal, it tells the story of a happy family
with ‘two moms and no dad’ but was removed from some
schools in Utah. This, she said, “was because of pressure
from religious groups that are opposed to books that teach
tolerance”.
“There’s a huge military budget, but tax-payers don’t
get a vote on how that is spent”, she argued. “So should
art be de-funded if some people find it offensive? The fear
of controversy, and the fear of loss of funding, leads to selfcensorship which can hamper thought and imagination.”
There is, then, no room for complacency in the West.
The existence of the First Amendment, which makes
free speech an article of faith in the US, is no protection
against censorship, because many would argue that free
speech does not include the right to offend. And Mintcheva
argues that “the camp of those who take exception to
offensive speech is growing”.
20
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All that is banned is desired - Corporate Censorship
Corporate Censorship
CORPORATE CENSORSHIP
As the conference proved, it’s not just the fundamentalist
Christian groups who have the power to create a climate
of self-censorship in the West. There is also the problem
of major corporations that are determined to oppose
artists whom they perceive to be a threat to their profits,
image or reputation. These corporations have money on
their side, of course, and also have access to teams of
highly-paid lawyers – and therefore the very real threat of
crippling legal action. They can use this enormous power
to try to crush those they see as a threat. But, as this
session showed, these corporations are also vulnerable,
and might back down if they fear that they themselves will
be seriously damaged by any ensuing bad publicity.
One of the most intriguing and – for me – unexpected
sessions of the conference was the one that dealt with
Corporate Censorship, in which three very different
European-based artists told their stories of clashes with
internationally-known businesses.
First there was Larissa Sansour, a Palestinian multimedia visual artist who lives in London, and in 2011 was
nominated for the prestigious Lacoste Elysee Prize, worth
25,000 Euros to the winner. Her highly inventive entry,
Nation Estate, was a film work in which she envisaged
a future Palestinian state being housed entirely in an
enormous skyscraper, built on the edge of Jerusalem.
Different parts of Palestine – from the Gaza shore-line
to Bethlehem – now appeared on different floors of the
skyscraper. The message, clearly, was that Israel had now
taken over so much Palestinian land that there was no
room for Palestinians outside the building. It was a clever,
poignant and witty work, but Sansour suddenly found
she had been removed from the shortlist. Amidst furious
accusations of censorship, the Lausanne institution the
Musée de L’Elysée reportedly claimed that Lacoste were
responsible for her exclusion – which the French clothing
firm then denied, and withdrew their sponsorship for
the prize. Sansour told the conference her version of
what had happened: Lacoste had found the work “too
pro-Palestinian”, she said, and had asked her to say she
had retired from the competition voluntarily. The affair
resulted in bad publicity for Lacoste, but Sansour was
able to finish the film of her extraordinary work, which
was shown to the conference.
Nation Estate – Olive Tree (AP), C-print, 42x59cm, Larissa Sansour, 2011
The Danish artist Nadia Plesner then gave her
account of an extraordinary battle with Louis Vuitton,
the company that makes expensive and luxurious ladies’
handbags – and who threatened to ruin her financially
if she refused to stop using images of their bags in her
work. Wanting to make an artistic statement about the
trivialisation of the media, the humanitarian situation
in the Sudanese region of Darfur, and the disappearing
boundaries between advertising and editorial, she painted
an image of a suffering child from Darfur holding a Louis
Vuitton bag. The company was furious. They took her to
court and demanded that she pay a fine of 15,000 Euros a
day if she continued to use the image and didn’t remove
associated material from her website.
Plesner told of her meetings with the company saying:
“they promised to back me if I apologised, or wreck me
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All that is banned is desired - Corporate Censorship
financially”, and she did agree to stop selling T-shirts of
the picture. But she refused to leave Louis Vuitton alone.
She created a large art work, Darfurnica, that was based
on Picasso’s Guernica, but included celebrity references
– and an image of the child with the bag.
There were further demands and legal moves by
Louis Vuitton, but Plesner now found that she was not
alone. A Danish museum wanted to exhibit her picture –
to prove that it was a work of art – and other artists and
cartoonists around the world championed her cause by
wittily incorporating images of the bag into their work.
The issue finally came to a head in May 2011 when the
eating off their brand. This was an important case. We
need free art and we have to stand up against authorities
who try to silence art work”. When she announced that
the court had decided in her favour, the conference hall
broke out into applause.
Another remarkable and heartening David and
Goliath story of a battle between an artist and a corporate
giant came from the Swedish film director Fredrik
Gertten, whose documentary Bananas! chronicles the
fight between banana plantation workers in Nicaragua,
who didn’t know they were being exposed to pesticides,
and the US food corporation Dole. Dole didn’t want it
Darfurnica, Oil on canvas, 350x776cm, Nadia Plesner, 2010
two sides met in court, and the picture was brought into
the court-room as evidence – with Plesner now threatened
with a legal bill of 485,000 Euros if she lost the case.
Her description of what happened next was one of
the emotional highlights of the conference. “It was the
conflict of two rights”, she said “the right to protect a
brand versus the right to express yourself. I talked about
freedom of expression, and Louis Vuitton talked about me
shown, especially when they learned that it was being
screened in competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival,
and mounted a massive PR and legal campaign against the
film, claiming it was based on fraudulent and fabricated
evidence.
What happened next became the subject of a second
powerful documentary, Big Boys Gone Bananas! , which
tells the story of Gertten’s fight-back. It shows how
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All that is banned is desired - Corporate Censorship
CTV Morning Show July 9, 2009, from the film Big Boys Gone Bananas! Photo: CTV
pressure from Dole led to the film being withdrawn from
the competition, after they had contacted all the sponsors,
and how he eventually managed to get it screened in LA,
but only out-of-competition and after a disclaimer against
it had been read first. He then faced horrific law suits,
but his fortunes eventually changed after his film was
shown in the Swedish parliament and a boycott campaign
against Dole bananas was mounted in Sweden. Eventually
Dole backed down, and Gertten won through, though at
financial cost to himself. The moral to this being that “it’s
naive to think you can take a pop at a big multi-national
and not walk away without some kind of a fight”.
After telling his story to the conference, Gertten
gave a warning about the shifting balance of power in
Western media, at a “critical period when journalists are
losing their jobs and the PR industry is booming, with
Crisis Management teams solving problems for important
people”. It is hard getting documentaries shown, but it
was important that there is support for documentarymakers, as we “have to keep telling the stories”.
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All that is banned is desired - Censorship of Women
Censorship of Women
23
CENSORSHIP OF WOMEN
Censorship takes many forms and can be found even in
countries that pride themselves on having fought and won
earlier battles against oppression. Other limits on freedom
of expression may still remain – such as the continued
discrimination against female artists, especially if they
are gay.
Zanele Muholi is one of the most brilliant but
provocative photographers in the new South Africa,
celebrated for her humane and tender images of lesbian
couples in the townships. When she came out, she said,
she realised that there were no photographs that spoke
to her. Photography was a largely male occupation “men
photographed women”, and there were few black artists
using a camera. Her aim was to “capture the reality of
what is going on” in work that she describes as “mapping
Being, Triptych 1, Silver gelatin print, 30x22,5 cm, Zanele Muholi, 2007
and archiving a visual history of black lesbians in postapartheid South Africa”. “We have got to have images and
visuals”, she said “just as we have to have performers and
singers”. But she discovered that aims clashed with those
of senior members of the ANC government.
In 2009 her photographs were shown at a major
exhibition, Innovative Women, in Constitution Hall, a
former women’s jail. The then Arts and Culture Minister
Lulu Xingwana was invited to attend, but walked out on
seeing Muholi’s photographs, reportedly calling them
“immoral, offensive and against post-apartheid nation
building”. Muholi hit back, accusing the minister of
encouraging hate crime against lesbians. “We fought
apartheid in South Africa”, she argued “and now we are
fighting on-going hate crime. When a minister makes
homophobic comments it could perpetuate hate crime”.
Muholi explained to the conference that she now spends
much of her time photographing the funerals of black
lesbians who have been the victims of these hate crimes.
“Men fear lesbians because they fear they will take away
their girl-friends”, she said “and they challenge male
masculinity”. She explained the rape of lesbians as being
a result of the belief that if a lesbian has sex with a man
she would be cured of her sexual inclinations.
She then showed a film examining such male attitudes
– and the violence that result from it. It included images
of a seriously-beaten rape survivor in Gugulethu township
near Cape Town “who is lucky to be alive”. In Durban, she
said, a lesbian had been raped, stabbed and murdered in
her own home by a neighbour “and there have been ten
such killings recently. It is far too many”.
Muholi argued that some police were not sensitised,
or homophobic, and that became an issue when they took
statements from women involved in such cases. The same
was true of some doctors. “The Constitution is supposed to
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All that is banned is desired - Censorship of Women
protect people”, she told the conference “but women are
being killed. In South Africa today, equality is a fantasy.
It’s the worst period ever, and it’s unnerving”.
From Egypt, another country where it had been
hoped that repression had been lifted following the
euphoria of the Arab Spring, there were further stories
of the censorship of women as the singer Sherine Amr
told of her on-going battles to play the heavy metal music
she loves, in the face of hostility from the authorities, her
family, and male musicians. The Arab Spring has led to
a blossoming of new musical styles in some countries,
and has been chronicled by the Arab Hip-hop movement.
But such developments have not helped Amr, founder
of Mascara, the first all-female heavy metal band in the
country. Announcing herself to the conference as “the
only woman in Egypt who screams”, she explained how
she could never show her face on screen in the film The
Other Side Of Mascara, which deals with her band and
the underground music scene in Alexandria “which is now
dead”.
Although she has been able to perform outside the
country alongside such leading bands as Motörhead and
ZZ Top, she said it was difficult for her to sing in Egypt
“because some think that metal music is satanic, and we
are accused of rituals and slaughtering cats!”. Her role
was made even harder because society discriminates
against women, she said, and that was even true in the
heavy metal scene. Male musicians had told her that she
only got to play alongside famous Western bands because
she was a girl. Now, she said, she was only allowed to play
at one venue – the El Sawy Cultural Wheel in Cairo – and
she could only do so once every three months “after they
have checked what I am wearing and the lyrics to my
songs”.
Sherine Amr. Photo by: Mik Aidt
But she has refused to give in and stop singing, and
deserves to find a far wider audience, as she proved
when she performed one of her songs “about being
pushed to be someone you don’t want to be”. Backed by
a heavy rock backing track, and with her band appearing
on a screen at the back of the stage, she proved to be an
impressive and exciting singer with a distinctive hoarse
voice – and a powerful scream. The conference was
remarkable for the way in which live performances were
constantly mixed in with the presentations, and Sherine
Amr gave a rousing demonstration that she has refused
to allow her music to be crushed.
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All that is banned is desired - Fighting Back
Fighting Back
25
FIGHTING BACK
Censorship and restrictions on the arts can come in many
forms; from governments, religious groups, corporations,
or those refusing to allow sexual equality. Some of the
sessions brought bleak and troubling reports from across
the world, but the overall mood of the conference was
the exact opposite. For this was also a celebration of
enormous courage and bravery in the face of adversity,
with constant reminders of the many different ways that
artists have found to make their voices heard, and to hit
back at those trying to oppress their work.
Several artists present had been jailed or risked death,
because of their work, and they discussed the techniques
they used to survive, and to continue creating.
Zargangar, the Burmese comedian, actor and director,
was banned from publically performing, jailed on several
occasions, and finally released from a 59-year sentence
Zarganar
in October 2011 in a mass amnesty of political prisoners.
“I’m a comedian”, he said. “In a country under military
dictatorship, I lost the freedom to write, so I made jokes.”
He has been tortured with electric shocks, and at one stage
was buried in the sand. He explained how he managed to
keep writing in his cell, by using plastic bags on which he
wrote his jokes, along with screen-plays and a diary. Even
after his years in jail, he has retained his sense of humour.
“In our parliament, 25% of the seats are controlled by the
military”, he said. “I’d like another 25% to go to comedians
– and then half the parliament would be crazy!”
He has also retained his sense of humanity. At one
stage during his imprisonment he found that one of
his fellow-inmates was an army colonel who had once
tormented him in prison, but had now himself been
arrested by the military authorities. Understandably,
the colonel was frightened that Zargangar would take
his revenge, but in fact the exact opposite took place.
Zargangar forgave his former tormentor, arguing “it’s
important to forgive but not forget”. And on his release
from prison he began to send food and clothing to the jailed
colonel. One of his beliefs, he said was that “if you want to
change anything, you should first change yourself”.
Zarganar also addressed the art of survival in
prison, while still retaining one’s humanity, in his film
Invisible Moon. It showed a prisoner finding escape from
the misery of life in his cell by urinating into a pot and
delighting in the reflections in the liquid, and was, as the
session moderator Francis Harrison pointed out, a film
about having the courage to find beauty even in a horrific
situation.
The conference also saw Uninterruptedness, a short
film by Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, that made use of piano music
and Burmese text in its homage to the banned Burmese
writer Min Ko Naing.
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Another of those who have been arrested because of
their work is the distinguished Algerian writer, dramatist
and poet Mustapha Benfodil, who has written 15 plays,
which have been performed abroad – but not in his
own country. Three years ago, in an attempt to get his
voice heard, he started his Wild Readings, performing
“in gardens, or parking lots or other public spaces”,
sometimes by himself, and sometimes with the help of
actors. He said that he once started a riot “the first for an
artist in Algeria”, and – perhaps inevitably – he has been
jailed because of his unauthorised activities.
Mustapha Benfodil said that in Algeria, artists are
getting round such restrictions by turning private space
into public space. So film-makers who can’t get their
work shown publically now show their work privately in
their apartments. The other alternative is to show their
work abroad. Benfodil said that “many artists are invited
to perform by foreign institutions in Spain or Italy; our
culture is now produced abroad”.
The session on Public Space and Art Clashes, in which
Benfodil was speaking, was introduced by Alessandro
Petti, chair of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices
programme at Al Quds/Bard College, Palestine, who
discussed the problems that artists face when working
in public spaces, at a time when they can be confronted
with obstacles ranging from the privatisation of that space
to the authorities’ obsessions with security and control.
One man who has tried to break down such barriers is
the Norwegian conceptual artist Lars Ø Ramberg, who
discussed the thought-provoking, often witty and at times
highly controversial art works that he has constructed,
or attempted to have constructed, in public spaces in
Norway, Germany and elsewhere. He began by asking
Norwegians to think critically about themselves, arguing
that the country was “famous for Peace Prizes and for
conferences like this one”, but also had a negative side.
He then explained how he had attempted to construct
an art installation in Germany that would provide a
reminder of the Norwegian project to provide Heavy
Mustapha Benfodil, arrested during a Wild Reading. Photo by: Salim Mhamssadj
Water for a German nuclear weapon during the World
War II. The project never went ahead, and he accused
the Norwegian authorities of censorship. Other Ramberg
projects have been more successful; he showed pictures
of his Palace Of Doubt in Berlin, and the public toilets in
the colours of the Norwegian, French and American flags
that he constructed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of
Norwegian independence.
Other artists have risked death to escape from their
countries, in order to win the freedom to work abroad.
One of the most dramatic sessions at the conference
was the presentation by Sun Mu, the so-called ‘faceless
painter’ from Korea. This is not his actual name but a nom
de plume, and his real identity has to be kept secret for
his own safety and that of his family and relatives living
back in North Korea. He came on stage wearing a silver
mask to conceal his face, and began with a performance
art sequence in which he slowly removed the tape that
he had placed over his mouth and eyes, and removed the
taped word ‘ideology’ from his T-shirt. Only then did he
begin to discuss his extraordinary life story and work,
with illustrations provided by his own paintings.
Trained in North Korea as a propaganda artist,
painting banners and posters to glorify his country’s
leaders Kim Il Sung and then Kim Jong-il, he said he was
“ready to die” for them, and explained how the leaders’
birthdays were a favourite time of year for children in the
country, for this is when they received presents, sweets
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All that is banned is desired - Fighting Back
and candies. Now, having escaped, he uses the same art
style to turn the propaganda on its head, to show up the
brutal realities of life in the North. Such pictures, of Kim
Jong-il in a track suit, or a girl giving an obviously faked
exaggerated smile to her leader, would have led to his
execution.
He showed paintings showing his escape, first dodging
army patrols to flee across the river to China, and later
making his way to Laos, for fear that the Chinese would
send him back home. He was arrested in Laos, moved on
to Thailand, and eventually reached Seoul in South Korea.
Here, ironically, he found that his work was censored for
the first time: paintings showing North Korean leaders
aroused concern and suspicion in the South, despite the
artist’s surely obvious intent in using his work to criticise
the North.
Sun Mu. Photo by: Monica Larsen
Sun Mu is now an international success; some of his
work has sold for $20,000. But his aim now is to bring
reconciliation. Explaining his painting Children On A
Cloud, he asked “when will such a day come? Children
from the North and South, on a cloud together and
laughing”. He said that “North Korea is a nice place, but
people there don’t live as human beings. But if you are
inside the bubble, you don’t know that. I only learned
when I crossed the river”.
Sun Mu had to change his name and hide his identity
to create his art, but others have shown equal bravery
by openly continuing their work in the knowledge of
the dangers and threats that they face. For such artists,
international support and recognition can play a crucial
role.
Jonatan Stanczak argued that the pressures on
the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, occupied
Palestine, can be made to have a positive benefit “because
it leads to solidarity. As soon as things happen we have
international campaigns operating. It gives meaning to
our work and shows we are on the right track. There’s a
ring of energy around us, and it gets stronger with every
attack”. He said that financial aid was important, but a
campaign of solidarity from the outside world was even
more important.
The same positive message was stressed at almost
every session. Artists have an important role to play in
using their work to publicise repression, and they have
even greater power than journalists in explaining or
exploring a situation, simply because of the power and
lasting nature of their work. There are many in the West
who would never have even heard of the desert African
state of Mali if it hadn’t been for the country’s magnificent
music scene, and now that music is being used to
remind the outside world of the repression brought by
fundamentalist Islamic groups to the vast swathes of the
north of the country where they gained control in 2012.
Mohamed ‘Manny’ Ansar, who founded the celebrated
Festival In The Desert, said that he had not given up on
Malian music or the Festival, but planned to move the
venue. He hoped that the 13th Festival In The Desert
would go ahead as a Caravan of Artists for Peace and
National Unity, with musicians travelling from Morocco,
Mauritania, Mali, Algeria and Niger, giving concerts
during their journeys, and all meeting up in Burkino Faso.
Publicity surrounding the events would hopefully add to
international pressures to resolve the crisis in Mali, and
bring music back to the desert.
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The importance of influential outsiders in helping
artists with their struggles against censorship was
stressed on several occasions during the conference. It
remains to be seen whether the international campaign
to free the Pussy Riot members in Russia has any effect,
but their plight has been publicised around the world. In
different circumstances, in the far less powerful West
African state of Cameroon, outside pressure certainly
played a crucial role in freeing another jailed musician,
Lapiro De Mbanga.
As Maran Turner, executive director of Freedom Now
(US) explained, he too became the focus of an international
campaign. It involved lawyers such as herself working pro
bono and preparing a petition to the UN Working Group
on Arbitrary Detention, which then issued a legal opinion
that his arrest was an infringement of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The campaign,
which was initiated by Freemuse, also involved a series of
petitions, sent to the Cameroon Embassy in Paris on Music
Freedom Day, while in the US, Senator Richard Durbin
also became interested in the case and approached the
Cameroon Embassy in Washington. The UN SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon also became involved and raised the
case with Cameroon’s President Biya. Eventually, after
further legal battles, the musician won his freedom.
Powerful outside help was also important for filmmaker Fredrik Gertten in his legal battles with the
Dole corporation. The turning point came when his film
Bananas! was shown in the Swedish parliament, for this
screening led to a boycott of Dole Food by members of the
Swedish public, bad publicity for the corporation which
was to lead to Gertten eventually winning through.
It was outside help, and the fear of bad publicity by
her opponents, that also helped Nadia Plesner, in her legal
battle with Louis Vuitton, the manufacturer of luxury
hand-bags. For her, the turning point came when other
artists and cartoonists around the world also started
making use of the Louis Vuitton design, in solidarity with
what she had been doing.
For many, the battle for self-expression in an often
hostile climate can be a solitary and lonely affair, and the
conference constantly showed the bravery of performers
like Outspoken, who would be returning to Zimbabwe to
continue to use hip hop and song to question his country’s
development, or Sherine Amr, with her continuing
campaign to promote female metal music in Egypt.
Then there was Sondos Shabayek, also from Egypt,
who has battled to get women’s voices heard through
her Bussy Project, in which actors perform real stories
taken from the lives of women in the country, and has also
performed a monologue, Don’t Tell Your Story, consisting
of stories from the Project that had been removed by
the censors. She had prepared a monologue, of her own
for the conference, but decided to abandon it at the
last minute, and instead offered a spontaneous piece,
describing how she had discovered courage after almost
being trampled to death during the demonstrations of the
Arab Spring. Later, in a film montage by Petr Lom, we saw
Sondos performing street/public theatre in the women´s
only metro cars of the Cairo subway recounting stories of
public sexual harassment. One conservative woman finds
this offensive screaming that “things like this should not
be talked about” and then yells “someone call the police!”.
From elsewhere in North Africa, there were further
stories of the way in which the arts have been used to
reflect and inspire the continuing political change –
and warnings of the censorship that still remains. From
Tunisia, where the current upheavals in the Arab world
began, the academic and film director Rachida Triki gave
examples of how Facebook and other social media sites
had been used to combat censorship, and discussed the
case of the artist Nadia Jelassi, who in August 2012 was
charged with breaching the peace and moral standards
because of a work she had exhibited at the Printemps
Des Arts exhibition in the El Abdelleya gallery in Tunis
earlier in the year. It was titled Let Him Who Has Not,
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and showed sculptures of three veiled women emerging
from piles of stones. It was a powerful image that clearly
made the viewer think about a stoning, and though no-one
who had viewed the work had complained to her about it,
the Examining Magistrate in Tunis asked her whether she
had wanted to provoke people through her work. Jelassi
faced a possible prison sentence because of her work,
and proceedings against her were only dropped after a
campaign by local supporters and Human Rights Watch.
From Syria, where the uprising against President
Bashar al-Assad had developed into a continuing and
bloody civil war at the time of the conference, there
was a report on User-Generated Creativity and the
Art of Resistance. Donatella Della Ratta, a PhD fellow
at Copenhagen University and the Danish Institute in
Damascus, showed how street artists had been inspired
by the uprising, and how posters showing hands –
originally a motif used by the government in an attempt
to make people obey the law – were now cleverly used to
convey a range of anti-Assad messages.
Donatella Della Ratta. Photo by: Monica Larsen
Azhar Usman showed a different way of fighting back.
A Chicago lawyer turned bearded stand-up comedian, he
showed how humour could be used in a one-man campaign
to try to make Americans re-think their views on Islam,
and was in turn very funny and thoughtful. “I’m from the
USA, and a Muslim”, he announced. “Should you hate me
or hate me?” But then suddenly he referred to his faith,
Azhar Usman. Photo by: Monica Larsen
with a quote from the Sufi mystic Rumi “discussing the
existence of God is like a fish discussing the existence of
the ocean”.
There was another welcome, and unexpected display
of the way in which humour, and a bravely unexpected
approach, can be used to counter oppression, in the
entertaining session from the Australian film-maker,
painter, photographer and former war correspondent
George Gittoes. Currently based in Afghanistan, he has
set out to bring new values and ideas to Jalalabad and
surrounding areas controlled by the Taliban, with an
apparently eccentric series of arts projects that have a
serious purpose. Operating in an area where he said the
Taliban “had blown up the last video store”, he shows
films to local villagers in a travelling circus tent, and said
that he encouraged first children “and then the Taliban”
to come into the tent because they wanted to watch this
“crazy Australian” doing tricks with his pet monkey.
The films that he makes and shows attempt to
change attitudes to marriage and the role of women not
by polemic and lecturing but through the simple device
of love stories. Gittoes said that in the Pashto language
dramas he is producing it is important to show high
achievement women as role models and gave the example
of one such film, Talk Show, dealing with social issues like
arranged marriages and young lovers who are murdered
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All that is banned is desired - Fighting Back
for defying traditional customs. He showed a clip from
the film in which a girl in a wedding dress is driven to
a remote valley and killed, by having her arm severed,
all because a photograph was found of her with her arm
around a boyfriend. Gittoes explained how one of the
actors in the film had told him that he himself was beaten
almost to death and his girlfriend stabbed multiple times
because they had fallen in love and did not want to be
parted by an arranged marriage. Arguing the importance
of the freedom to love, and the pain of enforced marriage,
Gittoes explained how he had also set up the Yellow House
Collective in Jalalabad as a sanctuary for artists and a
place where young people can get together. His aim, he
said, was to “change society, so that people can meet
and fall in love”. Remarkably, he seemed to have won the
confidence not only of local people but also the Taliban,
who have not disrupted his projects.
In other sessions, gay and lesbian artists discussed
their attempts to combat hostility and change attitudes
to their sexuality. In South Africa, the photographer
Zanele Muholi has bravely fought back simply by keeping
going, drawing public attention to the horrors of the rape
and killings of lesbians by photographing their funerals.
During the same session on ‘Moral Panics: Sexuality and
Art’, Robert Sember, who was born in South Africa but
now lives in New York, discussed the use of art in the battle
over the “violent silencing of gay men and women” and
AIDS, while Pang Khee Teik, a Malaysian Arts Consultant
and Human Rights Activist, discussed his lengthy battles
with his parents over his sexuality, religion, and political
activism. “I don’t demand the right to be gay”, he said. “I
demand the right to be human.”
One of the constantly recurring themes of the
conference was the danger of self-censorship, an issue
that was explored in several of the sessions in which the
writer and columnist Kenan Malik acted as moderator.
Born in India but based in the UK, Malik explored the
issue first in a session dealing with Religion and Artistic
Freedom of Expression, agreeing with Gurpreet Kaur
Bhatti and Azhar Usman that “to create change, you have
to offend some group”.
He returned to the subject again in a later discussion
with William Nygaard, who in October 1993 was shot and
seriously injured outside his home in Oslo. His attackers
have never been found, but it was widely assumed that the
assassination attempt resulted from his publishing house
bringing out the Norwegian edition of Salman Rushdie’s
novel The Satanic Verses, after Iran’s leader Ayatollah
Khomeini had called for Rushdie’s execution because of
the book in a fatwa four years earlier.
Discussing the lasting impact of the Rushdie case,
Nygaard stressed that self-censorship, triggered by fear,
Manta, Dance performance, Héla Fattoumi.
Photo by: Laurent Philippe
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must be defeated. There should be zero tolerance of
violence, he said, but mutual understanding is promoted
by critical dialogue. Exploring this idea of self-censorship
further, Malik suggested that the idea of tolerance once
meant the acceptance of other ideas, but now it has
come to mean avoiding issues and not wishing to offend.
Nygaard agreed. It was important to stick to the old
meaning of tolerance, but if tolerance was now equated
with not standing up for one’s beliefs “then we are sliding
into a different situation – self-censorship”.
Liberals, Malik suggested, have retreated from free
expression, “leaving the space to be taken over by bigots”.
Again, Nygaard agreed. “That space has definitely been
filled up.” He went on to discuss how the fall of the Soviet
Union has led on to the conflict of two religions “driven
by politics”. But the way to solve the situation was, he
suggested, “not to stand back”. So long as it didn’t lead
to violence, the effect of challenging what was going on
could have a positive effect, perhaps leading to curiosity
in others and form part of a multi-cultural new world.
The conference ended with the hall in darkness for
the first time, for the solo dance performance by the
France-based Tunisian artist Héla Fattoumi. Exploring
her fascination with the veil, and its increased visibility in
society, she danced with her face partly covered to explore
through movement its impact on her understanding of
women’s freedom to live their lives without constrictions
and restraints. It was a dramatic performance, punctuated
by sound effects and flurries of dazzling white light, and
provided a suitably powerful close to this remarkable
conference.
The 22 very different sessions had covered a brave
and widely varied array of topics, from the causes of
contemporary censorship to the techniques that can be
employed to overcome it, interspersed with performances
from many of the artists themselves. Of course it would
have been good if the event had gone on longer – there
were many in the audience surely desperate to ask
questions, and perhaps debate the question of a limit to
free speech that was raised by the Hungarian conductor
Adam Fischer, when he discussed his campaign against
the production of an anti-Semitic drama in Budapest.
It was a conference that provided at times chilling
reminders of the pressures on artists by those in authority
who fear their work, but equally thrilling and encouraging
reminders of the bravery of musicians, dramatists, artists
or writers to continue to create in the face of those
pressures.
For me, the most powerful moments of all were
those that took place off-stage, as different artists who
had suffered and fought back against persecution came
together to discuss their experiences. This conference
made them appreciate that they were not alone.
Robin Denselow
London December 2012
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Annex – Conference Programme
33
THURSDAY, 25 OCTOBER 2012
Session 1
10:00: BEAUTY UNDER PRESSURE
Zarganar, Comedian, Actor, and Film Director (Burma)
Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi, Poet and Filmmaker (Burma)
Win Maw, Musician and Composer (Burma)
Moderator: Frances Harrison, Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 2
10:40: RELIGION AND ARTISTIC FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Svetlana Mintcheva, Director of Programmes, National Coalition Against Censorship (USA)
Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Playwright and Screenwriter (UK)
Azhar Usman, Comedian, Activist and Lawyer (USA)
Moderator: Kenan Malik, Writer, Lecturer and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 3
11:40: MORAL PANICS: SEXUALITY AND ART
Zanele Muholi, Visual Artist (South Africa)
Pang Khee Teik, Arts Consultant and Human Rights Activist (Malaysia)
Robert Sember, Artist and Researcher (South Africa/USA), Moderator
Session 4
13:45: CORPORATE CENSORSHIP
Larissa Sansour, Visual Artist (Palestine/UK)
Nadia Plesner, Visual Artist (Denmark)
Fredrik Gertten, Film Director (Sweden)
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Session 5
14:30: PUBLIC SPACE AND ART CLASHES
Mustapha Benfodil, Writer and Visual Artist (Algeria)
Lars Ø Ramberg, Artist (Norway/Germany)
Alessandro Petti, Architect and Researcher (Italy/Palestine), Moderator
Session 6
15:15: HUNGARY: ARTISTIC FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY IN THE AGE OF XENOPHOBIA
Adam Fischer, Chief Conductor (Hungary)
Silvia Moi, Soloist at the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet (Norway)
Session 7
16:00: TIBET: ARTISTS IN EXILE
Tenzing Rigdol, Visual Artist and Poet (Tibet)
Tenzin Gönpo, Musician (Tibet/France)
Moderator: Frances Harrison, Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 8
16:30: THE INVISIBLE RED LINE: MANOEUVRING CHINESE ARTS CENSORSHIP
Si Han, Curator (China/Sweden)
Moderator: Frances Harrison, Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 9
17:00: THE DAY THE MUSIC STOPPED: MALI
Manny Ansar, Festival Director (Mali)
Terakaft, Performance (Mali)
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FRIDAY, 26 OCTOBER 2012
Session 1
09:00: OVERCOMING: WOMEN, ART AND EGYPT
Sherine Amr, Singer (Egypt)
Sondos Shabayek, Writer, Theatre Director and Actress (Egypt)
Petr Lom, Filmmaker (Czech Republic/Canada), Moderator
Session 2
09:45: STOP THIS FILTH: ARTISTS UNDER THREAT
Deeyah, Music Producer (Norway/UK)
Arshad Hussain, Actor and Culture Activist (Pakistan)
Moderator: Ole Reitov, Program Manager, Freemuse (Denmark)
Session 3
10:05: THE ART OF LOVE: CULTURAL TABOOS AND ARTISTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF ROMANCE
IN TRIBAL PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN
George Gittoes, Painter, Photographer and Filmmaker (Australia)
Moderator: Frances Harrison, Writer, Journalist and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 4
10:30: ORGANISING FOR FREEDOM: CULTURAL WORKERS IN RUSSIA
Nikolay Oleynikov, Visual Artist (Russia)
Session 5
11:20: ARTS IN RESISTANCE | RESISTANCE IN ART: SYRIA AND TUNISIA
Rachida Triki, Film Director and Researcher (Tunisia)
Donatella Della Ratta, PhD Fellow (Italy), Moderator
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All that is banned is desired - Conference Programme
Session 6
12:00: FREEDOM THEATRE: WHAT KIND OF FREEDOM?
Jonatan Stanczak, Co-Founder and Administrative Manager, The Freedom Theatre
(Sweden/Palestine)
Session 7
12:15: ARTISTS IN AN INESCAPABLE POLITICAL CONTEXT: CUBA
Tania Bruguera, Interdisciplinary Artist (Cuba/USA)
Session 8
12:30: OUTSPOKEN
Artist and Community Activist (Zimbabwe)
Session 9
14:00: NOTHING TO ENVY IN THIS WORLD
Sun Mu, Painter (North Korea/South Korea), Interpreter: Kim Hyo Young
Moderator: Sigrun Slapgard, Writer, Foreign Correspondent and Board Member of Fritt Ord
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Session 10
14:20: THE LASTING IMPACT OF THE RUSHDIE CASE
William Nygaard, Publisher and Defender of Freedom of Expression (Norway)
Moderator: Kenan Malik, Writer, Lecturer and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 11
14:30: TURNING OUT THE LIGHT: TURKEY
Asli Erdogan, Writer (Turkey/Austria)
Pelin Basaran, Researcher and Arts Producer (Turkey)
Moderator: Kenan Malik, Writer, Lecturer and Broadcaster (UK)
Session 12
15:00: THE ARTIST VS. THE STATE: THE CASE OF LAPIRO DE MBANGA
AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR PUSSY RIOT
Maran Turner, Executive Director, Freedom Now (USA)
Alexander Cheparukhin, Music Producer, Promoter and Founder and Director of GreenWave Music
(Russia)
Session 13
15:30: MANTA, extract from a dance performance
Héla Fattoumi, Dancer and Choreographer (Tunisia/France)
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All that is banned is desired - Violations of Artistic Freedom of Expression in 2012
Annex – Violations of Artistic Freedom of Expression in 2012
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VIOLATIONS OF ARTISTIC FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IN 2012
Violations of artistic freedom of expression were monitored and documented on www.artsfreedom.org as part of the
conference. The documentation found the basis for a statistical compilation presenting a glimpse of the situation for
artists worldwide in 2012 and includes cases in more than 50 countries across the fields of dance, film, music, theatre,
visual arts and literature (journalists are not included).
A total number of 186 cases of attacks on artists and violations of their rights have been registered. The cases include 8
artists being killed, 16 imprisoned, 1 abducted, 5 attacked, 15 threatened, 37 prosecuted and 37 detained, as well as 67
cases of censorship.
Please note that the documentation is based on reports published on artsfreedom.org. It is not a complete survey
but the first collection of its kind.
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Number of violations
50
40
30
visual arts
theatre
20
music
literature
10
film
dance
0
threatened
attacked
abducted
killed
detained
prosecuted
imprisoned
censored
The statistics are based on reports covering violations of artistic freedom of expression published on artsfreedom.org between
20/3/2012 – 16/1/2013 and includes incidents taking place during 2012.
The following principles of statistical registration have been used: If an artist is threatened and attacked while abducted the case
is only listed as “abducted” in the statistics. If an artist is detained, prosecuted and then consequently imprisoned for the same
incident of the violation is only listed as “imprisoned”. Artists who were imprisoned before 2012, but who are still in prison are
only included in the statistics if their case was presented in a news article.
The statistics do not, for example, include the serious situation for thousands of musicians in northern Mali who are prevented
from performing their music due to bans by Islamic fundamentalist rebels. Neither does it include all cases presented by the
PEN International Writers in Prison Committee which has produced an extensive case list and statistics concerning violations
committed against writers as well as journalists.
For further information please visit: www.pen-international.org/campaigns/how-to-campaign/caselist
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All that is banned is desired - Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our gratitude to our funders and to the Norwegian National Opera & Ballet, and
to all the colleagues around the world who supported the conference with advice and suggestions.
The conference was funded by Fritt Ord, Svenska Postkodlotteriet
and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
www.artsfreedom.org