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Art under threat

Freemuse Annual Statistics on Censorship and Attacks on Artistic Freedom in 2015

"Artistic freedom is under extreme pressure in far too many countries. The Freemuse annual report summarises censorship and threats on artistic freedom in 2015 in over 70 countries.

In total, Freemuse registered 469 cases of censorship and attacks on artists and violations of their rights in 2015, making it our worst recorded year yet, nearly doubling the number of cases from 2014 with a 98% increase from the year previous, wherein 237 cases were registered.

While at the UN level there have been positive signs of larger attention being paid to the importance of protecting artistic freedom in 2015, sadly the year was dominated by a 20% increase in registered killings, attacks, abductions, imprisonments and threats, and a staggering 224% increase in acts of censorship."

Read the full report at http://artsfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Freemuse-Annual-Statistics-Art-Under-Threat-2015.pdf

Source: artsfreedom.org

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New publication on the relation

between art and politics

IETM, international network for the performing arts, launches its new publication The Art of Disobedience, that looks at how art interferes and engages with politics. It is the third issue of IETM’s Fresh Perspectives – series of publications exploring how the contemporary arts sector is engaged with the crucial issues of today’s reality.  The Art of Disobedience is produced in collaboration with LIFT – London International Festival of Theatre and written by Daniel Gorman.

Artists have power. The power not just to create, but also to transform. For as long as ‘art’ has existed, it has been ‘socially-engaged’. Political art, socially-engaged art, art activism, is nothing new. However, the world is becoming more political. What role do artists have at this key moment, where political engagement and apathy lie side by side? What is art for?

Artist, cultural manager and activist Daniel Gorman is the author of this challenging publication. Talking from his own practical experience in Europe and in zones in times of conflict, he takes us on a journey through four crucial questions:

• What use are the arts when your country is burning?
• Can the arts help to build a better world?
• Can you accept funding for your arts coming from ethically controversial sponsors?
• Is it ‘right’ to call for the cultural boycott of a country?

With courage, experience and lucidity, the author presents the complexity of the topic, not giving in to pessimism, and providing food for thought both for seasoned practitioners and for beginners in the arena of politically engaged arts.

This publication focuses primarily on case studies which are based on in- person, online and email interviews, with further support from questionnaires completed by over 60 individuals from the IETM network and wider afield.

As usual for the Fresh Perspectives series, The Art of Disobedience aims to scratch the surface of some of the important debates currently taking place in the contemporary arts sector. We hope this new issue will further the discussion within the IETM membership and with the wider international performing arts community. The opportunity to continue the conversation was our recent plenary meeting – IETM Budapest 2015 on the theme Democracy.

Fresh Perspectives 3: The Art of Disobedience

Free download at  https://www.ietm.org/sites/default/files/the_art_of_disobedience_ietm_fpnov2015.pdf

All IETM Publications: https://www.ietm.org/publications

IETM’s Fresh Perspectives

is a series of publications that explore how the contemporary arts sector is engaged with the crucial issues of today's societies: politics, economy, gender, environment, globalisation, etc. Fresh Perspectives give an expert’s view on the value of contemporary arts and cultural practice to individuals and society.

IETM

is a dynamic, engaged and forward-looking network for the performing arts sector as well as a resource and reference point for innovative contemporary art. IETM consists of over 550 subscribing professional performing arts organisations from more than 50 countries. They are engaged in innovative, contemporary performance work and are committed to cross-border artistic exchange and collaboration.

LIFT

For over three decades LIFT has presented the stories of the world to every corner and community of London, supporting and nurturing artists and organisations who have changed the landscape of arts practice in the UK. The core values of LIFT remain constant: being passionate about providing opportunities that develop the talent, skills and creativity of artists and young people and that break down the barriers to participation in the arts.

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Curitiba International Biennial

World Light

October 3 – December 6, 2015

The VentoSul exhibition project was conceived in 1990. In its first edition in 1993 it emerged as one of the main exhibitions of Latin American art, including the participation of some of the most expressive contemporary artists from the region. Since the beginning VentoSul has had an itinerant character, which was kept in the following editions. In the first editions, the VentoSul exhibition took place in important cultural spaces in São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro amongst other, and more than a hundred artists, selected by established Latin American art critics, participated.

For the fourth edition in 2007 Fabio Margalhães, Fernando Cocchiarale and Ticio Escobar were selected as general trustees. In this edition artists from seven countries participated: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Paraguay. The fifth Latin-American Visual Arts Biennial – VentoSul took place in the Brazilian city Curitiba in 2009, curated by Ticio Ecobar and Leonor Amarante. The Vento Sul Biennial has gradually consolidated itself as an important contemporary art exhibition in the Americas and is currently referenced as one of the greatest events dedicated to Latin American art.

About the exhibition:

Light is the necessary condition for the existence of most  artworks, if not all of them.  But there is one specific contemporary art domain  that addresses light in itself as the sufficient condition for its manifestation.  Among all art forms, light art is possibly the freest from any kind of rhetoric and cerebrality. There is in  light art a silence of words and images that is most appropriate to create around  the beholder the conditions for his direct contact with the deepest and purest esthetic experience, the kind of experience a number of artists looked for in the late 19th century and in the early decades of the 20th without actually succeeding before abstract art came into being. The invention of the first operational light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879 opened the way for a new kind of art, a possibility that was not perceived as such until several decades later. To paint with a light ray was possibly the oldest dream of many artists up to modern times, the most immaterial medium for art if ever was one.

Free from representational intents and aims, light as an art form in itself was likely to say what could not be said, to speak the unspeakable. “Writing led me to silence”, said Samuel Beckett just a few shades of meaning away from Wittgenstein’s “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.  One must be silent about that but we may show it. The visual arts are free from Beckett’s curse, if it was one for him. It usually does not appeal to words and representational images, but when it does it gives to what is being said and shown a denser and more interior dimension that can be better felt than understood. There are forms of light art that do resort to words and images, an exception to this picture: that is just as well, art is not a closed and poor system that manifests itself in one way only and whose components correspond entirely to previously established structures and functions, like the system of meaning in a traffic light with its three colors that always mean the same thing and always come in a very same and strict order.  Even then, those forms operate more according to the picture here described than to the more traditional languages in art.

Light art creates with its beholder a direct and immediate connection that avoids the interface of reasoning  and, therefore, dismiss with interpretation. There are no prevailing trends in art these days anymore, which is just as well; however, that does not stop art from being again and repeatedly documentational and argumentative in a time when these two kinds of narratives in art have probably  lost most of their meaning. This absence of meaning is often replaced today, not surprisingly, by new modes of representational images, metaphorical or conceptual, that suggest a meaning while leaving to the beholder all responsibility of interpretation.  In its nakedness, light art goes beyond that. All issues are abolished in the iconical scene built by light art, an art that more often than not does not feel the drive  to address any issue at all, an art free also from concepts and logical schemes, apt to reveal and to present itself as  sense-refreshing and  literally eye-opening.

This kind of art is not historical, psychological, social or philosophical, not even spiritual in a strict sense: it may have traces of all that but it is above all phenomenological, linked to the actualexperience of the beholder in front of it or involved by it, a beholder who is not an spectator anymore but a living component of the art situation thus created.  Art narratives in an exhibition  usually start by suggesting    a concept that is not necessarily translated into the content actually displayed, and that therefore does not offer the observer an opportunity  to experience any actual sense and feeling. Contrary to that and independently from any specialized requirement, usually available for the art professionals only, light art offers itself  as a direct experience. The  greatest tragedy in the art situation is the almost always unsurmountable distance between the  artist’s and the beholder’s  perspectives and expectations . In light art, such a distance tends to disappear or to be sized down to its lowest possible dimension.  Estrangement, however, which still is what one  expects from an authentic  work of art, manifests itself in light art, either in the traditional gallery inside a museum  or in open and public spaces. Estrangement and fascination, this is what best defines light art, a perfect  and rather unusual combination.

The title for the 2015 edition of the Curitiba Biennial is taken from the eponymous novel by the Finnish author Halldór Laxness, the 1955 Nobel Prize winner.  The title of his novel, published in 1937,  is not the only reason for it being reproduced in this version of the Curitiba Biennial. Living and writing in one of the world’s end,  Halldór Laxness affirmed the power of beauty, which  he believed to be at the core of poetic experience whichever it may be. Halldór  Laxness also venerated and paid his tribute to nature, whose “inexpressible music” he could hear and in which he was able to find the “sonic revelation” of a deity that for him was not only purely imaginary or religious but resulted from the sense of all living beings in their relation with one another and the world – a world that, he wrote,  should be guided by the idea of freedom and social justice. It could hardly be more contemporary than that.

Light has been consistently identified with beauty, there is and there has been a culture of light and humanity rightly sees beauty in light,  besides a medium as indispensable to life as water and air. It is now rightly acknowledged that light comes from all corners of the world, not from some of them only, another reason for trusting the beauty in it.  Light is not positivity only,  though,  and this edition of the Curitiba Biennial, not oblivious of the fact that darkness and light are a strictly tied couple, will remind it once more.  Nevertheless, light calls for more light, just as Goethe may have said in his last words;   and that is what the  2015 Curitiba Biennial wishes to suggest once more.

Source:

www.bienaldecuritiba.com.br

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The SCAPE Public Art Christchurch Biennial

New Intimacies

October 3 – November 15

The SCAPE 8 Public Art Christchurch Biennial is a contemporary art event, curated by Rob Garrett. SCAPE is New Zealand’s only international biennial dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary art in public space. It is organized and managed by the Art & Industry Biennial Trust.

SCAPE 8 mixes new artworks with existing legacy pieces, an education program, and a public program of events. The SCAPE 8 artworks will be located around central Christchurch and linked via a public art walkway.

SCAPE 8 will see the installation of one major legacy/permanent public artwork for Christchurch. This legacy artwork, backed by the Christchurch City Council Public Art Advisory Group and Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), will be that of renowned British sculptor, Antony Gormley.

The title for the 2015 Biennial – New Intimacies – comes from the idea that visually striking and emotionally engaging public art works can create new connections between people and places. Under the main theme of New Intimacies there are three other themes that artists will respond to: Sight-Lines, Inner Depths and Shared Strengths.

Site-Lines engages with the changed landscape of the city centre, with its new vistas opened up across city blocks, out to the Port Hills and beyond. Artists have been invited to consider how the city’s new spatial character has the potential to stimulate fresh thinking.

Inner Depths recognises Christchurch as a water city; where liquefaction, flood and failed infrastructure mean that water has taken on a new significance.  Through this theme, artists were invited to explore subterranean strata and water flows; as well as exploring underground water as a metaphor for the city’s cultural layers and memories.

Shared Strengths recognises the resilience of people, and the power of helpfulness and self-organising communities to buoy the city through tough years. Several SCAPE 8 projects honour and celebrate the ongoing, everyday phenomenon of people helping each other.

Participating Artists:

• Peter Atkins

• Antony Gormley

• Fiona Jack

• Hannah Kidd

• Judy Millar

• Nathan Pohio

• Pauline Rhodes

Public participation projects:

#ThatTimeYouHelped – Our Portraits of People Reaching Out to One Another, invites locals to create photo-portraits of “a person who has helped you or others” and to upload them to an online gallery.

For those who want to gain some new skills or insights, there will also be a series of free Saturday workshops during SCAPE 8 – The ‘How-To’ Guide to Making Portraits – which will be run by members of the local creative sector. A call-out to Christchurch’s creative sector for workshop proposals was released at last night’s launch.

www.scapepublicart.org.nz