During last night’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write event, writer Salman Rushie talked about the fact that censorship exists to change the subject. When it is introduced in the realm of art, it becomes the subject; the attack onto the work becomes the work. As Rushdie said, “Assumptions of guilt replace assumptions of innocence.” The question redirects to, why are artists so troublesome?
KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait — On the evening of March 5, contemporary Kuwaiti artist Shurooq Amin opened her anticipated solo exhibition in Kuwait’s Al M. Gallery. A large crowd of people was in attendance, and many pieces were sold immediately after the doors opened at 8 pm. But by 10 pm local police ordered the exhibition closed and started questioning the artist and gallery owner on-site.
“The controls are very strong,” Ai told Reuters by telephone. “They (the government) are very insecure, they are not ready for any kind of change.”
When I read Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke in the late 1980s the Soviet empire was beginning to totter and crack. An English version of the book, published in 1961 in the UK, had been re-issued in 1986 as part of Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series, edited by Philip Roth. The project aimed to disseminate Eastern European writers in the Anglophone world: a worthy endeavor, though judging from the cobbled-together edition of Ferdydurke — an offset duplication of the 1961 text, with a Czeslaw Milosz essay from another occasion tacked on as an introduction — one with a limited budget.
LOS ANGELES — Last year, Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years in prison for “propaganda against the state.” In addition to the prison sentence, he was banned from making films for twenty years. But his latest film is shot entirely on iPhones.
Yesterday, Twitter announced that it will start censoring tweets in certain countries as a concession to governments as the service expands globally. Some, including Ai Weiwei, are not happy.
We were notified this morning via Twitter that the Istanbul Modern has released the following statement.
There are claims of censorship in Istanbul as eight artists and an artist collective have made a joint decision to withdraw from the Istanbul Modern museum’s Reality and Dream exhibition. The debate has since snowballed into a discussion about the role of contemporary art in Turkey and the problems associated with corporate sponsorship.
We caught up with the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, who as we reported on Wednesday is the artist that the French luxury apparel label Lacoste wanted to exclude from the 2011 Lacoste Elysée Prize for being “too pro-Palestinian.”
Yesterday, performance artist Amber Hawk Swanson began her latest performance that was to feature the transformation of a life-sized sex doll of her likeness into a small replica of a bull orca at SeaWorld Orlando. Sure, the performance may sound out of the ordinary for veterans of the “there’s nothing I haven’t seen before” art world, but the artist, who was using the free Ustream livestreaming service, encountered an unexpected obstacle. Two hours into her performance, the online broadcast stopped and viewers where provided with a message that clearly states that the broadcaster was “banned due to violating terms of service.”
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