News
October 7, 2011
3 Human Rights Groups Call for Release of Liu Xiaobo
Three prominent human rights groups called on China on Friday to release the imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a year ago, and to end the house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia.
Since the announcement of his Nobel Peace Prize on October 8 2010, Mr. Liu has seldom been permitted to talk to his family, and only at one occation has he been allowed to leave the prison where he is being held in Liaoning Province, according to the three human rights groups, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and China Human Rights Defenders, that now call for his release. Ms. Liu has not been charged with any crime but she has been incarcerated in their home in Beijing.
“The only thing that would force the government to reassess the decision is if there was some strong international pressure on China in this case, but the pressure is not there,” according to Human Rights Watch researcher Nicholas Bequelin. “There’s no incentive for the government to revisit this decision. We’re talking about a climate where standing defiantly against the West is reaping more political awards than collaborating.”
Mr. Liu, writer and longtime human rights defender was detained on Dec. 8, 2008, for playing a leading role in drafting Charter 08, which demands gradual political and legal reforms based on constitutional principles. The document was circulated via e-mail and was signed by thousands of Chinese. However Mr. Liu still remained largely unknown inside the country, partly due to government censorship. On Dec. 29, 2009, a court in Beijing sentenced Mr. Liu to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion of the state.
Security agents outside the Lius’ Beijing apartment building prevented reporters from seeing Ms. Liu when the Nobel committee announced its decision. She was also prevented from going to Oslo to collect the prize in December, and it was placed on an empty chair instead. This was the first time since 1936, when the Nazi government in Germany barred the writer Carl von Ossietzky from collecting the prize, that no winner or representative had come to the ceremony. The Nobel committee announced on Friday that it was giving this year’s Peace Prize to two women from Liberia and one from Yemen for their promotion of democracy and gender equality.
A statement released by Amnesty International on Friday said that Ms. Liu had been almost entirely prevented from contacting anyone outside her apartment since February. She had a brief online chat at the time with a friend during which Ms. Liu “said that she was feeling miserable, was unable to go out and that her whole family was being held hostage,” Amnesty International said.
Ms. Liu’s mother lives in the same compound; she is the only person permitted to see Ms. Liu, and only on occasion. According to unofficial reports, Ms. Liu has been able to meet with Mr. Liu twice since January, Amnesty International said.
Mr. Liu’s Nobel Peace Prize has not taken the edge of the Chinese government’s severe measures against dissenters. The country’s leaders, anxious about recent Internet calls for protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East, have carried out a broad crackdown on liberal intellectuals.
One of Mr. Liu’s brothers, Liu Xiaoxuan, told Agence France-Presse this week that he had visited Mr. Liu in prison on Sept. 28 and that he “was looking very well.” Liu Xiaobo was allowed to travel to Dalian on Sept. 19 to attend a memorial service for his father, the brother said.
Human rights advocates said the Chinese government had allowed Mr. Liu’s brother to leak news of his recent visit to the prison in order to demonstrate leniency on the eve of the anniversary of Mr. Liu’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. But fundamentally, the advocates said, nothing has changed regarding Mr. Liu or his wife.
In its winter 2010 issue, Asia Literary Review published a poem called “You Wait for Me With Dust” that Mr. Liu had written for his wife.
The final lines were:
Just let the dust bury you altogether
Just let yourself fall asleep in the dust
Until I return
And you come awake
Wiping the dust from your skin and your soul
What a miracle — back from the dead
The quotes in this news article are from The New York Times, October 7.
October 8, 2011
Mapping Subjectivity:
Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s to Now, Part II
October 5 – 23, 2011 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York
This three-part film exhibition aims to map a largely unknown heritage of personal, artistic, and sometimes experimental cinema from the Arab world. The program highlights kinships in sensibilities and approaches and explores connections and potential conversations between films. The works selected for this second edition of Mapping Subjectivity hail from Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and the UAE. They reflect a diversity and richness of voices and of imaginative visual languages.
From the 1960s onwards, filmmakers and artists have used existing footage—whether found or borrowed from television, cinema, or public or personal archives—to create montages and forge visual narratives that are profoundly daring, innovative, and subjective. These works engage critically, sometimes provocatively, with official stories, often giving voice to what might be considered “unmentionable.” A number of films in part two of Mapping Subjectivity achieve this through personal histories constructed in the first-person singular, including Akram Zaatari’s This Day, Yto Barrada’s Hand-Me-Downs, Ahmad Ghossein’s My Father Is Still a Communist, Ali Essafi’s Wanted, and Hakim Belabbes’s In Pieces. Azzeddine Meddour's How Much I Love You tells the “other” story of liberation from colonialism by allegorically turning colonial film archives upside down.
Audiovisual archives are a repository and chronicle of memories and lived moments; as such, they are as much a part of the fabric of collective imagination as cinema. Rania Stephan boldly explores this idea in her film The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni. Néjib Belkadhi’s VHS Kahloucha tells the story of an ordinary man’s appropriation of film classics, while Ali Essafi’s Ouarzazate, the Movie uncovers the alternate reality of film production on location. Mohamed Soueid’s Tango of Yearning is a cinephile’s poetic elegy to film and Beirut’s movie theaters, pieced together from memories and traces of a city undergoing a radical transformation.
Another film by Soueid, My Heart Beats Only for Her, blends fiction and nonfiction to tell a singular story about a father and son and their reveries of glory. Tales of sons with dreams for a better life—forging their destinies and enduring a rupture between generations—inspired a number of films in the series, such as Ahmed el-Maanouni’s The Days, the Days, Oussama Mohammad’s Stars in Broad Daylight, and Yousry Nasrallah’s El Madina. We inaugurate part II with Lakhdar Hamina’s majestic The Chronicle of the Years of Embers, an epic of sons and daughters forging their destiny and struggling for liberation from colonial rule.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019
(212) 708-9400
MoMA.org
August 15, 2011
Ai Weiwei recounts his experiences during 81 days' detention
This weekend the recently released, 54-year-old Chinese artist Ai Weiwei recounted parts of his experiences during 81 days' detention which ended on June 22. His arrest was part of the largest crackdown on dissidents and intellectuals in many years, that was initiated in the beginning of 2011, notably against people who expressed a will to take their forms of protest from the internet to the streets. Officially proclaimed by authorities to be a tax case, also Ai Weiwei's detention is widely understood as a retaliation for political activism. Ai has been one of the most explicit critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and has among other things claimed that government corruption played a role in the deaths of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake due to the poor construction of schools. In 2010, he created an Internet audio project in which volunteers read the names of nearly 5,000 children who were killed during the earthquake, and also made an art installation composed of thousands of children’s backpacks, in response to this. Ai has also been an active supporter of Liu Xiaobo, the political prisoner who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
Ai's explicit opinions in two specific cases have been seen as the incitement Shanghai officials used to first tear down his studio (which was planned to become an education center and art residency), and then later detain him, members of his family and associates. The first case was that of Yang Jia, a Beijing resident who killed six policemen in a Shanghai police station after being arrested and beaten for riding an unlicensed bicycle, and who was later executed. The second was the case of Feng Zhenghu, about whom Ai Weiwei made a documentary. Zhenghu is a lawyer and activist who spent over three months in Tokyo’s Narita Airport after Shanghai officials denied him entry.
“Performance art” is Ai's term for his ongoing conflict with government officials over the Communist Party’s authoritarian rule. This definition of performance took a sinisterly unpremeditated form during a visit to an art exhibition in Munich in 2009, during which he had to be rushed to the hospital, where surgeons drained a pool of blood from his brain. According to doctors he would have died without this emergency surgery. This happened one month after he had been assaulted by officers in his hotel room, in the middle of the night, as he was preparing to testify at the trial of a fellow dissident in Chengdu.
Well aware that his risk of further prosecution depends on his public behavior, on Twitter Ai last week turned the attention to other colleagues currently imprisoned, and who face greater danger than him because of their lesser public stature: "If you don't speak for Wang Lihong, and don't speak for Ran Yunfei, you are not just a person who will not stand out for fairness and justice; you do not have self-respect," he stated. Wang awaits trial to start within weeks for "creating a disturbance" after demonstrating in support of bloggers that have been accused of slander after they wrote about a suspicious death. Ran, a high profile blogger, was detained in March and later formally charged with "inciting subversion of state power".
Four of Ai Weiwei's associates were also detained for two months and released shortly after him: "Because of the connection with me, they were illegally detained. Liu Zhenggang, Hu Mingfen, Wen Tao and Zhang Jinsong innocently suffered immense mental devastation and physical torment."
On August 12 Ai Weiwei described that during the three months he was detained and interrogated more than 50 times in total, he was kept in a tiny room, watched 24 hours a day by shifts of two uniformed military policemen who were never more than 30 inches from his side, sometimes just four inches away, and the same was the case as he slept, showered and used the bathroom. “It is designed as a kind of mental torture, and it works well,” he explained.
The quotes in this article are taken from The New York times, August 12 and The Guardian, August 9.
Summer twist of anticapitalist, institutional critique at heart of Oslo business
area with The Parallel Action at Kunsthall Oslo
July-August 2011
This time the Parallel Action will invade and inhabit Kunsthall Oslo and its firm placement in the midst of the riveting economic growth that is Bjørvika, Oslo - an attempt to de-stabilize our own impossible position as a hired-for-help megaphone of institutional and capitalist critique.
Issues concerning contemporary capitalism's influence on radical tendencies in and around the art world - its subversion of alternative artistic strategies in socio-political endeavours displays the impossibility of maintaining autonomous projects based on the following points;
unselfishness
responsibility
participation
ephemerality
The flattening discourse within a variety of these so-called autonomous and radical movements refers to an economically assumed necessity that in turn creates a desert of the real - a mirage of an enemy continuously escaping definition. Even if these interactions predetermine our steps towards the very margin of our fictional realities - the essence of our past - it does not mean that the revolutionary project is anything more than a confirmation of the simulacrum that constitutes the mirror images of a political life in a world of doubles.
By boat we will attempt to escape the constraints of this situation daily. Kunsthall Oslo will be our harbour and the Oslofjord a realm of content yet to be discovered.
We represent the disabled arm of artistic production - a crew in constant mutiny.
Real independence is in the aknowledgement of the dependency on forces outside ourselves.
Continents are shifting, buildings are crumbling, the movement of masses of bodies.
Last year somebody surfed a hospital off the Pacific coast.
Insurrections are in abundance.
Guerillas killing gorillas.
Anders Dahl Monsen
Leander Djønne
Snorre Hvamen
Anders Smebye
More information at
Kunsthall Oslo
and
Paralellaksjonen
THE JOURNEY TO THE EAST
Because of the Polish Presidency of the EU Council the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok is organizing an exhibition titled “The Journey to the East” . Poland, along with Sweden, is the initiator of Eastern Partnership project, therefore we invite artists from countries participating in it - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – as well as artists from Poland.
We do not want to group the works in nationality pigeonholes; however, at the same time we do not pretend that the issues of ethnicity and nationality are invisible. Young political systems and post-communist heritage still influence art in many countries. Artistic activity is connected not only to artist’s personal resources - artistic schools, institutions supporting the artists’ work and the existence of artistic circles and presence of art critics and curators play an important role as well. These are important issues, which were presented to us in virtually every country we visited. And finally, artists make statements concerning only the topics pertaining to them and their lives
Edwin Bendyk prophesizes, that the solution to various global problems is the creation of interpersonal relations based on love, not competition, hierarchy or domination. We are interested in love, which transgresses the notion of relation between two people. We seek positive emotions, which create bonds between people all over the world – bonds that are an alternative to government authority and economic capital.
We want to ask the artists what role they think these emotions play in post-communist society and whether building new social capital on interpersonal relations is a utopia or perhaps it can be realized.
We see our project as an open situation, creating various modes of participation and interpretation – from watching and listening to discussion, active participation and writing. We will gather objects, organize meetings, discussions, lectures, workshops, performances and installations in public space.
The artists we invited are:
Vahram Aghasyan
Rashad Alakbarov
Ruben Arevshatyan
Babi Badalov
Samvel Baghdasaryan
Alicja Bielawska
Anatoly Belov
Bouillon Group
CHINGIZ
Anna Chkolnikova
Lado Darakhvelidze
Kuba Dąbrowski
Veaceslav Druta
Tatiana Fiodorova
Arman Grigoryan
Nicolas Grospierre
Armine Hovhannisyan
Orkhan Huseynov
Elżbieta Jabłońska
Dominik Jałowiński
Alevtina Kakhidze
Yaroslava-Maria Khomenko
Tigran Khachatryan
Aleksander Komarov
Maxim Kuzmenko
Volodymyr Kuznetsov
Anna Molska
Marina Naprushkina
Dumitru Oboroc
Joanna Rajkowska
Stefan Rusu
Elene Rakviashvili
Nino Sekhniashvili
Sergey Shabohin
Sabina Shikhlinskaya
Jakub Szczęsny
Sophia Tabatadze
TanzLaboratorium
Stas Volyazlovsky
Oleg Yushko
Project concept: Anna Lazar, Monika Szewczyk
Curator: Monika Szewczyk
Contributing curators: Anna Łazar, Marianna Hovhannisyan, Magda Guruli, Lena Prents and Stefan Rusu
Exhibition design:
Robert Rumas
For more information, visit
Galerie Arsenal
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