Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity 9780815396185, 9780815396192, 9780815396215

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“I don’t think it’s possible to underestimate the book’s contribution. The issues it raises are timely, indeed urgent. Finding ways to negotiate self-censorship is imperative, especially in today’s political climate.” – Alan Wallach, Ralph H.Wark Professor of Art History, The College of William and Mary, USA “This invaluable book is destined to become a must read for curators as the profession comes to terms with the challenges posed by social media which is being used to amplify pressure on galleries and museums to respond to certain community concerns. How to balance an appropriate response to the rise in activism while adhering to vital principles of free speech has become a key question for curators. This book bravely confronts the unpalatable truth of self-censorship and offers practical guidance.” – Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney “An important collection that warns of the pressures facing artists and curators worldwide to self-censor and of the treacherous political water they have to negotiate. A book that is both worrying and hopeful.” – Kenan Malik, Independent Author and Broadcaster, UK

CURATING UNDER PRESSURE

Curating Under Pressure breaks the silence surrounding curatorial self-censorship and shows that it is both endemic to the practice and ubiquitous. Contributors map the diverse forms such self-censorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity. This is the first book to look at pressures to self-censor and the curatorial responses to these pressures from a wide range of international perspectives. The book offers examples of the many creative strategies that curators deploy to negotiate pressures to self-censor and gives evidence of curators’ political acumen, ethical sagacity and resilience over the long term. It also challenges the assumption that self-censorship is something to be avoided at all costs and suggests that a decision to self-censor may sometimes be politically and ethically imperative. Curating Under Pressure serves as a corrective to the assumption that censorship pressures render practitioners impotent. It demonstrates that curatorial practice under pressure offers inspiring models of agency, ingenuity and empowerment. Curating Under Pressure is a highly original and intellectually ambitious volume and as such will be of great interest to students and academics in the areas of museum studies, curatorial and gallery studies, art history, studio art and arts administration. The book will also be an essential tool for museum practitioners. Janet Marstine is Honorary Associate Professor (retired) at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK. She writes and consults on diverse aspects of museum ethics with a particular interest in supporting the agency of practitioners to make informed ethical decisions. She sat on the Ethics Committee of the UK’s Museums Association from 2014 to 2019, helping to move their approach from one of policing to empowering. Svetlana Mintcheva is the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), an alliance of US national non-profit organizations. She is the founding director of NCAC’s Arts Advocacy Program, a 20-year-old unique national initiative devoted to the arts and free expression. Dr. Mintcheva frequently speaks and writes on emerging trends in censorship.

Museum Meanings Series Editors Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps

Museums have undergone enormous changes in recent decades; an ongoing process of renewal and transformation bringing with it changes in priority, practice and role as well as new expectations, philosophies, imperatives and tensions that continue to attract attention from those working in, and drawing upon, wide ranging disciplines. Museum Meanings presents new research that explores diverse aspects of the shifting social, cultural and political significance of museums and their agency beyond, as well as within, the cultural sphere. Interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and international perspectives and empirical investigation are brought to bear on the exploration of museums’ relationships with their various publics (and analysis of the ways in which museums shape – and are shaped by – such interactions). Theoretical perspectives might be drawn from anthropology, cultural studies, art and art history, learning and communication, media studies, architecture and design and material culture studies amongst others. Museums are understood very broadly – to include art galleries, historic sites and other cultural heritage institutions – as are their relationships with diverse constituencies. The focus on the relationship of the museum to its publics shifts the emphasis from objects and collections and the study of museums as text, to studies grounded in the analysis of bodies and sites; identities and communities; ethics, moralities and politics. Also in the series: Curating Under Pressure International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity Edited by Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age Natalia Grincheva www.routledge.com/Museum-Meanings/book-series/SE0349

CURATING UNDER PRESSURE International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity

Edited by Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Janet Marstine and Svetlana Mintcheva to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9780815396185 (hbk) ISBN: 9780815396192 (pbk) ISBN: 9780815396215 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To the artists and curators whose courage and imagination inspire us

CONTENTS

List of figuresxi List of plates xiii List of contributors xiv Introductionxviii Acknowledgmentsxxv PART 1

Understanding self-censorship

1

  1 Rethinking the curator’s remit Janet Marstine

3

  2 Much ado about nothing: policing of controversial art in the UK Julia Farrington   3 Curating contemporary global art in Doha, Qatar: anticipated “conversations,” undesirable controversies and state self-censorship Serena Iervolino   4 No names, no titles, no further explanations Noam Segal  5 Lady disrupted: self-censorship and the processes of feminist curating in South Africa Candice Allison

36

51 72

85

x Contents

  6 Bishan project: efforts to build a utopian community under authoritarian rule Ou Ning

100

PART 2

Negotiating self-censorship

117

  7 Navigating censorship: a case from Palestine Jack Persekian

119

  8 Truth or dare? Curatorial practice and artistic freedom of expression in Turkey Özge Ersoy   9 The complexity of taking curatorial risks: case studies from East Asia Oscar Ho Hing Kay 10 Negotiating self-censorship in the representation of Colombian armed conflict Cristina Lleras

128 145

155

11 Experimental curatorship in Russia: beyond contemporary art institutions170 Nadia Plungian 12 From Carbon Sink to WASTE LAND: a case study in navigating controversy182 Susan Moldenhauer 13 The bigger picture: rethinking curatorial approaches to photographs of childhood Ceciel Brouwer 14 Smart tactics: toward an adaptive curatorial practice Svetlana Mintcheva

195 211

Index229

FIGURES

1.1 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies, 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong 4 1.2 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong 5 1.3 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong 5 1.4 Kacey Wong, I Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong 6 3.1 Adel Abdessemed, Coup de Tête (Headbutt), 2011–2012, as installed at the Corniche of Doha. Qatar, 4 October 2013 57 3.2 Damien Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, Doha, Qatar, photographed fully unveiled in August 2019 62 4.1 Neta Shira Cohen, proposed cover for a prayer text, 2015. Unrealized work for Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives, Tel Aviv Museum of Art 79 6.1 Ou Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia in a Moleskine Notebook (detail), 2010 103 6.2 Villagers engaging with the exhibition Mutual Aid and Inheritance, Bishan Harvestival, Bishan, China, 2011 105 6.3 Qian Shi’an and Ou Ning, The Happiness Pavilion (under construction), Bishan, China, 2016 110 8.1 belit sağ, Ayhan and Me, 2016. Video, 14′17″ (still) 134 9.1 Zunzi, Lee’s Garden, 1998. Destroyed 146 10.1 Workshop space in Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018 159 10.2 Installation (detail), Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018. Indigenous leader Gil Farekatde stands in front of the piece that represents responsible parties in land dispossession as well as those involved in land restitution163

xii  List of figures

12.1 Chris Drury, Carbon Sink:What Goes Around Comes Around, University of Wyoming, 2011, installation view 12.2 Chris Drury, Sketch of Carbon Sink and Its References (Spores, Eye, Vortex), 2011 12.3 Brandon Ballengée, Love Motel for Insects, Laramie Depot Variation, Laramie Depot Park, 2016, day and night installation views

183 184 192

PLATES

  1

  2

  3   4   5   6

  7   8   9 10 11

12

Add Oil, Countdown Machine, 2016. LED light installation, International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong. Installed 17 May 2016, as part of the exhibition Human Vibrations, curated by Caroline Ha Thuc; switched off 22 May 2016 Police stand guard as protesters with placards gather at the entrance of the Vaults gallery during a protest that led to the closure of Exhibit B by South African artist Brett Bailey. London, 2015 “Mimsy,” Isis Threaten Sylvania (detail of Picnic), 2015 Damien Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, as unveiled in Doha, Qatar, October 2013 Damien Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, covered by white tarpaulins, Doha, Qatar, as photographed in February 2015 Anri Sala, Names in the Doldrums, 2014. Altered snare drum, loudspeaker parts, snare stand, drumsticks, soundtrack (mono), duration: 2′40″, dimensions: 75 cm × 56 cm × 41 cm, edition of 1 + 1 AP Bishan Commune logo, 2011 Outdoor film screening, Bishan Harvestival, Bishan, China, 2011 The Bishan Bookstore, Bishan, China, 2014 Hale  Tenger,  I Know People Like This II, 1992. Cast brass Priapus and three-money statuettes, 700 cm × 9 cm × 140 cm Installation (detail), Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018. Luz Marina Bernal, mother of Fair Leonardo Porras, a victim of “false positives,” stands next to a clip of Johan Stiven from the video capturing conversations among victims who contributed to the installation Brandon Ballengée, Collapse, University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2016, installation view

CONTRIBUTORS

Candice Allison is a curator, researcher and writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is currently Director of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. Previously, she was Curator at the New Church Museum in Cape Town. As an independent curator, she has realized exhibitions in London, Harare, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Hamburg and Venice and she recently curated Kudzanai Chiurai’s solo exhibition Madness and Civilization which traveled to Goodman Gallery Cape Town (2018), Kalmar Konstmuseum (2018) and Södertälje Konsthall (2019). She holds an MA in curating from Kingston University London and is a PhD candidate at University of the Western Cape. Ceciel Brouwer is Research Associate at the Research Centre for Museums and Gal-

leries at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research focuses on ethics, photography and young people’s agency in museums. She received her PhD in museum studies at the University of Leicester. During the PhD, Brouwer undertook a curatorial research internship at Tate Modern, where she explored ethics and intimacy in Tate’s photography and time-based media collections. Her postdoctoral research has taken Brouwer to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Programme. Brouwer is at present developing further collaborative research on rights-based museums and young people’s ethical literacy. Özge Ersoy is Public Programs Lead at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. She is also Managing Editor of m-est.org, an online publication conceived as an artist-centered initiative. Ersoy is Research and Programming Associate of the Thirteenth Gwangju Biennale (2020) and was Assistant Curator of the Pavilion of Turkey for the 2015 Venice Biennale. Her writings have been included in The Constituent Museum (Valiz and L’Internationale, 2018), Speculation, Now (Duke University Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, 2014) and Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education (New Museum, 2010), among others. Ersoy holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

List of contributors  xv

Julia Farrington is Associate Arts Producer at the Index on Censorship in London, UK.

Starting out as a jazz and improvising musician, Farrington joined Echo City – a collective of musicians, artists and instrument makers – in 1990, performing and working in community settings internationally. In 1995 she ran the performance program at Union Chapel, in North London, while continuing to tour with Echo City. In 2009 she started the UK arts program at Index on Censorship. In 2014 Farrington went freelance, continuing with Index and joining Belarus Free Theatre for two years. In 2016 she trained as an Impact Producer for documentary film to add a new dimension to her freelance portfolio. Oscar Ho Hing Kay is Associate Professor of Practice and Director of the Masters Pro-

gramme in Cultural Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Formerly he was the Exhibition Director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, Senior Research Officer of the Home Affairs Bureau of the Hong Kong government and the Founding Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai. He is the founder of the Hong Kong branch of the Art Critics Association, founding Board Director of the Asia Art Archive and a member of the International Committee that recruited the artistic director for documenta 13. Serena Iervolino is Lecturer and Programme Director in the Arts and Cultural Management

Masters Course at King’s College London, UK. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL Qatar, where she previously directed the Museum and Gallery Practice Masters Course. Serena holds a PhD in museum studies from the University of Leicester. Her research explores the politics and ideologies of museums and exhibitions, their role in constructing identities and addressing diversity and issues of cultural policy, power and selfcensorship in Gulf museums. Serena’s research has featured in influential edited collections. She has led Arts and Humanities Research Council and Qatar National Research Fund projects such as the 2019 Museums in Arabia Conference. Cristina Lleras is a Colombian independent curator. Her interests center on the uses of the past in museums and exhibitions. After earning her PhD in museum studies at the University of Leicester, she worked as Visual Arts Manager for the District Institute of the Arts in Bogotá and then as Art and History Curator at the National Museum of Colombia. She led the Museology Department of the Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia from 2016 to 2018 and continues to reflect upon the challenges of human rights museums as well as the crossroads between contemporary art and historical representation. Janet Marstine is Honorary Associate Professor (retired) at the School of Museum Studies,

University of Leicester, UK. She writes and consults on diverse aspects of museum ethics from codes of practice to artists’ interventions as drivers for ethical change with a particular interest in supporting the agency of practitioners to make informed ethical decisions. She is author of Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics (Routledge 2017), editor of The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First Century Museum (Routledge 2011), co-editor of New Directions in Museum Ethics (Routledge 2012) and editor of New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Blackwell 2005). She sat on the Ethics Committee of the UK’s Museums Association from 2014 to 2019, helping to move their approach from one of policing to empowering.

xvi  List of contributors

Svetlana Mintcheva is the director of programs at the National Coalition Against Censorship

(NCAC), an alliance of US national non-profit organizations. She is the founding director of NCAC’s Arts Advocacy Program, a 20-year-old unique national initiative devoted to the arts and free expression. Mintcheva frequently speaks and writes on emerging trends in censorship. She is the co-editor of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (New Press 2006). An academic as well as an activist, Mintcheva has successfully mobilized support for culture producers and led free speech campaigns, while also working to educate about the complexities of free speech. She has taught literature, critical theory and free speech debates at the university level, including at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, Duke University, North Carolina, from which she received her PhD in critical theory, and New York University. Her current research focuses on challenges to the concept of free speech posed by the growth of social media and the perception of a global sociopolitical crisis. Susan Moldenhauer is an artist, arts administrator, curator, arts advocate and community arts

leader. Her 32-year career in arts administration and curation includes director positions at Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville) and University of Wyoming Art Museum. Her leadership efforts include advancing public art initiatives and visual artist opportunities, including co-founding the Laramie Public Art Coalition, Laramie Mural Project and Laramie Artist Project. She has sustained a studio practice in photography throughout her museum career. Her artistic practice includes the collaborations Sequencing and Pipeline Art Project. She is a recipient of the Wyoming Artist Fellowship and Wyoming Governor’s Art Award. Ou Ning is the director of two documentary films San Yuan Li (2003) and Meishi Street

(2006). He was Chief Curator of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (2009), a jury member of the Eighth Benesse Prize at the Venice Biennale (2009), a member of the Asian Art Council at the Guggenheim Museum (2011), Chief Editor of the literary journal Chutzpah! (2011–2013) and a visiting professor at Columbia University (2016–2017). He founded Bishan Commune (2011–2016) and School of Tillers (2015–2016) to join the new rural reconstruction movement in China. His selected writings on Bishan Project will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jack Persekian is an artist and curator, founder and Director of Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art and Gallery Anadiel in Jerusalem, Israel. He previously held the positions of Director and Head Curator of the Palestinian Museum  (2012–2015); Founding Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation (2009–2011); Artistic Director of the Sharjah Biennial (2007–2011); Head Curator of the Sharjah Biennial (2004–2007); Founder and Artistic Director of The Jerusalem Show  (2007–present) and Qalandiya International (2012, 2014, 2018). Persekian is recipient of the Order of Culture, Science and Arts, Innovation level, from the State of Palestine (2016). Nadia Plungian is an art historian and independent curator. She was formerly Senior Researcher

in the State Art History Institute (2008–2019) and a member of the Moscow Feminist Group (2008–2013). Plungian is curator/author of a series of experimental exhibitions and papers on the history of Soviet painting of the 1930s–1950s. She has also developed projects in contemporary queer and feminist Russian art. Plungian is Lecturer at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, and co-founder of the art-theoretical group “Synthesis and Question.”

List of contributors  xvii

Noam Segal is an independent curator and researcher based in New York, USA. She holds a PhD in hermeneutics and culture studies. Her practice focuses on curating, contextualizing and producing new media and performance work. Segal is the founder of Rothschild 69, a non-profit art space in Tel Aviv. She has collaborated on exhibitions with the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, BAM New York, Kunst Werke, Berlin, MOCO Panacée Montpellier and many other museums and galleries. She teaches at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, and Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2020 Segal will be a visiting scholar at Tisch Department of Performance Studies of New York University.

INTRODUCTION

The familiar old binary of freedom versus suppression – of unfettered speech versus censorship – has receded into what now appears to be a simpler past. Our informational environment is changing faster than we can make sense of it. The euphoria of an open, non-hierarchical flow of ideas has yielded to a nightmare of corporate surveillance, harassment and ethnic and racial hatred. Many of those formerly committed to free speech seek the solution in more government regulation and extensive private platform self-regulation. Authoritarian states, while continuing to pursue the traditional tactics of persecuting or eliminating critics and creating ambiguous regulations so as to create anxiety and encourage self-censorship, are also developing new means to discredit emergent civic discourse by drowning it out and questioning its veracity. Governments in democratic states increasingly endorse such tactics. Multinational corporations, whose financial might makes them a key player in culture (and elsewhere), use their power to advance ideologies, as well as to protect their brands. Among the left in democratic countries, support for free speech principles is waning. Protests over cultural appropriation (the use of ideas and practices traditionally associated with marginalized cultures by those belonging to the dominant culture) and calls for deplatforming controversial speakers have racked cultural institutions and higher education. University students are demanding “safe spaces” – spaces free from speech that might cause emotional distress among socially marginalized groups – and “trigger warnings” – warnings issued before the classroom use of material that might prompt vulnerable students to experience post-traumatic stress symptoms. The global turbulence around speech resonates within the domain of the arts. Curators and cultural institutions face pressures to self-censor from every side of the political spectrum. Failing to yield to those pressures carries steep costs. As a result, in all parts of the world today, negotiating self-censorship – which requires creative strategies, political acumen, ethical sagacity and resilience over the long term – is a significant part of the curator’s remit. This is especially true in light of the critical role museums play in civil society by offering space to engage with difficult issues. At a time of worrying political, social and cultural upheaval across Europe and the United States, of tightening cultural controls in authoritarian regimes such as those in China and Russia and of the destabilization of democracy elsewhere, including

Introduction  xix

in Hong Kong, South Africa and Colombia, developing curatorial agency to negotiate selfcensorship has particular urgency. Curators ask themselves: where are the under-the-radar spaces in which it is possible to work freely? How can I anticipate particularly fraught moments or sites? To what extent should the pursuit of curatorial autonomy be balanced with respect to diverse local, regional and national contexts? Is it necessary to respond to social media attacks or is it wiser to ignore them? How can I balance my commitment to politically meaningful exhibitions and programming with my ethical responsibility to protect artists from government retaliation? How can I deploy language strategically to shield my projects? How can I communicate productively through the media? What kinds of alliances should I enter into to foster mutual support and advocacy? How should I weigh up a need to defend curatorial values with the risks to the survival of my institution? Curating Under Pressure defines censorship broadly as the suppression of ideas, including artistic expression, by an entity with the power to do so. While legal definitions of censorship focus on state action, our use of the term reflects the fact that culture in contemporary neoliberal economies is increasingly privatized, giving private entities a power to silence artistic expression that often exceeds that of the state (Jansen 1991; Atkins 2006). We define self-censorship as the suppression of ideas or artistic expression by an individual during the creative process or by an institution during the curatorial process. Such suppression is subtle, often blending with non-censorious creative and curatorial decisions. It violates no laws. Therefore, it is difficult to oppose and sometimes even hard to identify or distinguish from the routine process of curatorial selection. Although it is true that the lines between editorial choice and self-censorship sometimes blur, self-censorship is recognizable through its primary motive: fear. This fear comes in many forms, including the specter of reprisal from an authoritarian state; the threat of reduction in public or private funding and the possibility offending publics (Coetze 1996; Mintcheva and Atkins 2006: xxiii; Mintcheva 2012; Farrington 2013; Shaheed 2013: 11–12; Mintcheva 2016). Self-censorship can occur on both individual and institutional levels. Curating Under Pressure focuses primarily on institutional self-censorship as enacted by museums, galleries and alternative spaces/platforms. While institutional self-censorship is often propelled by a decision made by an individual – such as a curator or museum director – that individual is acting on behalf of the institution and the pressures at play are generally different from those experienced by an individual censoring his/her own work. Shedding light on an oft-opaque area of curatorial practice, Curating Under Pressure is the first book to look at self-censorship and the curatorial responses to it from a wide range of international perspectives and from a position at the intersection of curatorial, museum and censorship studies. Collectively, the contributors map the diverse forms that institutional selfcensorship takes and offer creative strategies for negotiating curatorial integrity. Throughout, the focus remains on the thought and actions of curators as they seek creative solutions to the pressures they face. We offer this approach as a corrective to the assumption that censorship pressures render practitioners impotent.The book demonstrates that curatorial practice under pressure offers inspiring models of ingenuity and empowerment. Contributors include academics, free speech advocates, artists, curators and museum directors. Many have faced pressures to self-censor and draw from these experiences in their chapters; some have assumed considerable professional risk to publish their accounts. Others have conducted extensive interviews and worked with practitioners grappling with

xx Introduction

institutional self-censorship. A majority of the authors write from “outsider” positions – such as independent curating, retirement or immigration – that give them relatively greater freedom to express themselves frankly than many of their peers, who remain embedded within institutions. Two parts – Understanding Self-Censorship and Negotiating Self-Censorship – provide a structural framework for the book, together signifying our dual – analytical and actionbased – approach. While the individual contributions are grouped in those sections according to what we see as their primary thrust, in various degrees they all simultaneously identify pressures to self-censor and offer strategies to negotiate such pressures. Part 1, Understanding Self-Censorship, interrogates the silences around institutional self-censorship to help readers recognize and understand the phenomenon. It looks at how self-censorship operates in diverse political and cultural contexts. In so doing, contributors explore the complex mechanisms by which acts and threats of censorship lead to self-censorship. In Chapter 1, Janet Marstine provides key groundwork for the book by arguing for a new concept of curation in which the skills to recognize and negotiate censorship and selfcensorship feature prominently. She also shows how censorship, self-censorship and freedom of expression are mutually constitutive and slippery categories. She examines conditions and curatorial responses to them in mainland China, which is experiencing increasingly tight restrictions, and in Hong Kong, where pro-democracy activists are testing the limits of the city’s political, economic and cultural autonomy. Marstine sets the discussion of China and Hong Kong within a wider international context so as to demonstrate how the insights yielded by one locale are relevant to practitioners in other parts of the world. Driving the chapter is the notion, initially proposed by one of Marstine’s Hong Kong interviewees, that understanding and resisting the pressures of self-censorship represent a kind of “craftsmanship” to be nurtured and honed. Marstine identifies common ground for knowledge exchange, mutual support and joint advocacy around this “craftsmanship.” In Chapter 2, Julia Farrington examines the subtle ways that the state can suppress artistic expression within a liberal democracy. Her analysis focuses on incidents of police intervention in the UK where heavy-handed “advice” to close down a performance or remove a work in the name of public order constitutes de facto state censorship. While acknowledging that budget cuts for policing have created resource limitations, Farrington identifies two major problems at the heart of this situation: a lack of recognition among police forces that supporting the rights to exhibit, engage with and protest provocative art is a core duty; and a lack of understanding among arts organizations of how they might and should withstand the pressures of policing that limits freedom of artistic expression. Farrington offers guidance to help arts organizations prepare to meet such pressures so as to avert the preemptive cancellation of contentious programming. In Chapter 3, Serena Iervolino, writing from the context of Qatar, identifies the state itself as self-censoring. Iervolino explains how, with support from powerful members of the Qatari royal family, Qatar Museums, the state-funded body responsible for the country’s cultural heritage and policy, commenced an ambitious program of collecting and exhibiting global contemporary art as a gesture toward reform. They did not, however, consider the problems that transplanting Western ideas into local culture might bring. After sparking controversy for challenging traditional morals, works by Adel Abdessemed and Damian Hirst, unveiled by Qatar Museums in 2013, were quickly removed or hidden from view. Iervolino argues that these incidents of state-led self-censorship represent a political maneuver performed to shield

Introduction  xxi

the royal family from criticism. The chapter offers a rare glimpse into the secretive censorship apparatus in the Arabian Gulf countries. Silences and political jockeying equally characterize the self-censorship enacted by art institutions in Israel, as discussed by Noam Segal in Chapter 4. Segal, who has worked in Israel as an independent curator, offers several case studies from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, including a sound piece that was quieted, literally and metaphorically, because of its political resonance and a conceptual work, in the form of a prayer, which, despite championing by the curator, was ultimately not commissioned because of its religious content. Segal analyzes the mechanisms behind this institutional self-censorship within the wider context of tense political conflict in Israel. In unpacking her case studies, Segal focuses particularly on the ways that institutions use language, aesthetic justifications and a lack of transparency to justify riskaverse decision-making. Like Segal, Candice Allison in Chapter 5 writes from the perspective of an independent curator working in a turbulent political context and issues of transparency are vital to her analysis. Allison shares her oft-painful reflections on co-curating a feminist exhibition in South Africa. Though intended to reconfigure hegemonic narratives, the exhibition was criticized and disrupted by artists, activists and publics who interpreted the project as discriminatory. It fell apart after the organizing institutions removed almost half the works. In retrospect, Allison blames the exhibition’s unraveling, in part, on the curatorial team’s reluctance to be transparent about their values, agenda and ethical quandaries. Such transparency is particularly essential, Allison asserts, when curating in a culture reckoning with historical and contemporary racial and gender injustices. Allison identifies self-censorship not only in the removal of works from the show but also in the curatorial team’s withholding of their deliberative processes from their publics. Sharing the deliberative processes of curation, she holds, is fundamental to constructive discourse and mutual understanding. Sometimes, however, no matter how well considered one’s strategies, censorship prevails. Social practice artist Ou Ning in Chapter 6 recounts such a story in his analysis of Bishan Project in rural China. Bishan Project created a small-scale utopian society featuring festivals, exhibitions, workshops and social enterprises. It was a collaboration with local people and tourists meant to address village problems by developing sustainable methods of farming and encouraging economic development and progressive education. The approach was reformist, rather than revolutionary, and Ou Ning sought government support and partnerships. Nonetheless, as Ou explains, local and national authorities responded by encouraging acts of self-censorship and, when this was unsuccessful, launching a campaign of rapidly escalating censorship until, eventually, he was evicted from Bishan Village, placed on a national blacklist and his work on the project erased from the village. Ou’s willingness to try again in a different region and with new strategies underscores the importance of maintaining one’s agency and resilience in the disheartening process of trying to anticipate when, how and why censorship may be exercised under authoritarian regimes. Part 2, Negotiating Self-Censorship, while continuing to examine the silences of curatorial self-censorship, focuses on the strategies and tactics that practitioners have developed to maintain the integrity of their curatorial vision. Contributors offer nuanced responses to the pressures they encounter, arguing that sometimes a degree of self-censorship is inevitable and that small steps can be more productive than radical gestures. Invariably, our contributors demonstrate acute awareness of the effect that pushing political or social boundaries may have on artists, institutions or society at large.

xxii Introduction

Jack Persekian in Chapter 7 argues that the very existence of cultural institutions depends on balancing cultural, economic and power tensions and, for that reason, self-censorship is, to some degree, inevitable – and even advisable; it is part of strategically choosing one’s battles. But most of all, Persekian argues, decisions on if and how to self-censor should be based on a thorough examination of the political context and focus on what would make a lasting difference now and in the long run. This is true in Palestine, where Persekian currently works, as well as globally. In Palestine, where censorship and self-censorship are pervasive, Persekian suggests forming collaborations with other cultural institutions, as well as with civil society institutions, grassroots organizations and community centers working to accomplish societal change as the best protection against authoritarian state interference. For Özge Ersoy as well, decisions to self-censor are not an all or nothing proposition, and collaborating with other organizations is key to the ability to resist pressure. In Turkey, where all practitioners are under heavy pressure from both state and non-state actors and institutional solidarity remains weak, Ersoy in Chapter 8 sets out a survival strategy based on sustained discussion about how to expand the limits imposed on artistic expression while being careful about the selection and presentation of work. She outlines an alarming situation in which anti-terror legislation and ever-widening and ambiguous definitions of what constitutes criminal activity create unease and fear in the visual arts, especially in predominantly Kurdish regions. Due to their distrust of state institutions, many artists and curators choose to work instead with the private sector and at temporary and fringe exhibition sites. However, private philanthropists and corporations that support contemporary art are also subject to government and political pressure while fringe sites are vulnerable to community demands, which offer almost as strong a motive for self-censorship as threats from the state. In this context, protecting and expanding freedom of expression is a slow and uneven process. In authoritarian regimes in East Asia, similarly ambiguous regulations generate fear: the fear in this case being that of violating unspoken rules, thus putting the institution, its staff and the artists it works with at risk. Through five case studies, Oscar Ho in Chapter 9 details the ethical and other professional struggles he experienced when dealing with censorship and self-censorship. Under the pressure of possible punishment for allowing “inappropriate” art to be seen, and in the absence of any clear regulations and standards, curators face a tough judgment call when weighing the aspiration to uphold artistic freedom against the need to protect the individuals and institutions involved. Ho shows that curators must be aware of the risk factors that affect all parties but also be willing to take some calculated risks themselves. An acute – even too acute – awareness of risk, as well as of the oft-competing needs and interests of a diverse network of stakeholders, is equally central to Cristina Lleras’ contribution. Lleras in Chapter 10 offers an insider look into the deliberations of the curatorial team of the Museum of Memory of Colombia in developing a narrative that represents the unique and shifting nature of conflict in Colombia. In representing a conflict sustained by silences, the team had to take into account the context of a society still deeply divided over the meaning of peace, the causes of conflict and what to do with the past. Lleras examines the team’s fears in pushing the boundaries of what the Colombian public would accept, given the high stakes of potential fallout that could prove counterproductive to the ongoing peace process. In the unfolding of events, Lleras argues, a valuable lesson was learned: negotiating the complex challenges of representing the realities of armed conflict requires significantly more research, analysis and discussion than was built into the developmental processes for the exhibition.

Introduction  xxiii

Nadia Plungian in Chapter 11 shares the strategies that she developed over the last decade as an independent curator practicing in contemporary Russia, where creativity is hampered by political pressure and rigid systems of institutional control inherited from the Soviet era. Chief among these strategies are the creation of alternative platforms necessary for the development of novel artistic thought and the blurring of boundaries between research and independent curation. Bringing a strong feminist vision to her resistance of censorship and self-censorship, Plungian has curated exhibitions in collaboration with activist groups and other feminist practitioners, engaged art as a bridge to broad-based social movements and activism, worked outside of Russia to explore ideas censored within Russia and collaborated with private galleries rather than state museums. In countries with more robust protections from government censorship, such as the United States, it is primarily private interests that curators need to take into account. Corporate entities often wield financial power over both legislatures and cultural spaces. Susan Moldenhauer in Chapter 12 reflects on her work at the University of Wyoming Art Museum developing an exhibition that featured a work about the history of biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico as impacted by the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. This was a challenging project, particularly because it took place in the aftermath of a major controversy in which an environmental sculpture installed at the University led to funding cuts and attacks from the fossil fuel industry. Moldenhauer traces the steps in the proactive strategy the museum deployed to see the exhibition to fruition, including fostering collaborative relationships with academic departments and preparing the Museum and the University for any potential pushback. In Chapter 13, Ceciel Brouwer shifts the conversation to ethical concerns: in this case managing the fraught issue of if and how to exhibit and interpret artists’ photographs of children. In order for museum practitioners to effectively address concerns around consent and protection, Brouwer argues, a more dynamic ethics discourse is necessary. Such an approach would actively acknowledge and analyze the complexities of ethical issues, rather than resorting to an aesthetic defense. She uses the example of the 2015 North Carolina Museum of Art exhibition The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood in the NCMA’s Photography Collection as a model of a move toward a more democratic and ethically engaged practice in the representation of children. She especially cites the selection of an 8-year old to provide an online audio interpretation of the show. Such collaborations with young people, Brouwer argues, shift the focus from protection of children to their participatory rights and offer a way for museums to address the social, ethical and political significance of photographs of children. Finally, Svetlana Mintcheva in Chapter 14 suggests an adaptive curatorial practice, i.e. a practice always actively aware of the sociopolitical environment and the interest vectors converging onto art institutions, a practice which, nevertheless, succeeds in navigating the resulting pressures and concerns and preserving the integrity of an artist’s and curator’s vision. Developing such a practice, she argues, is an urgent need, as the openness of our public sphere depends on the agility with which curators negotiate these pressures. Mintcheva first looks at pressures to self-censor facing US art institutions, starting with a brief history of how some of these pressures have developed in the last 30 years, and then focusing on specificity of the present moment of political turmoil and technological transformation; she then analyzes specific strategies and advocates for tactical approaches to dealing with sensitive and potentially controversial subject matter. In her conclusion, Mintcheva expresses a conviction shared by all

xxiv Introduction

the contributors to this book: more than ever, art institutions need the leadership of prepared risk-takers equipped to preserve the complexity of an exhibition and integrity of their vision. With its global reach, Curating Under Pressure challenges the silences, denial and seeming invisibility of institutional self-censorship. Seen as a group, the chapters refute the notion that self-censorship happens “somewhere else,” instead showing that it is endemic to curatorial practice everywhere.They also demonstrate that self-censorship is not always something to be resisted but is sometimes an ethical imperative. Moreover, they provide conceptual and practical tools for curators to work, both individually and collaboratively, to negotiate institutional self-censorship through deliberative decision-making. Curating Under Pressure recognizes the agency of practitioners and inspires proactive, nuanced approaches to maintaining curatorial integrity.

Bibliography Atkins, R. (2006) “Money Talks: The Economic Foundations of Censorship.” In Atkins, R. and Mintcheva, S. (eds.) Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, New York: New Press, pp. 3–9. Coetzee, J.M. (1996) Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Farrington, J. (2013) “Taking the Offensive: Defending Artistic Freedom of Expression in the UK,” Index on Censorship. May. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/takingtheoffensive/ Jansen, S.C. (1991) Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meyer, R. (2002) Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Ideologies of Desire Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mintcheva, S. (2012) “Scare Tactics,” Index on Censorship, 41(4): 167–176. Mintcheva, S. (2016) “Introduction: Self-Policing and Self-Censorship,” Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83(1): 207–210. Mintcheva, S. and Atkins, R. (2006) “Introduction: Censorship in Camouflage.” In Atkins, R. and Mintcheva, S. (eds.) Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, New York: New Press, pp. xv–xxiv. Shaheed, F. (2013) “Report of the Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights:The Right to Freedom of Expression and Creativity,” Human Rights Council 23rd Session, United Nations General Assembly. 14 March. Online. digitallibrary.un.org/record/755488?ln=en#record-files-collapse-header

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was made possible with support from the British Academy, the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, and the National Coalition Against Censorship.We are grateful for the generosity of trusted friends and colleagues who helped us along the way: Richard Sandell and Christina Kreps, Museum Meanings series editors, championed the project from its very earliest stages; Heidi Lowther, our Routledge editor, was always insightful and enthusiastic; Oonagh Quigley provided adept proofreading and great patience; the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal offered helpful comments that guided us through our editing process; finally, the brilliant contributors to the book dealt with our barrage of queries and suggestions with grace and dedication. We are indebted to those who have given us the balance, perspective, love and humor to sustain us through the project. Janet thanks her beloved students and colleagues in the School of Museum Studies who made teaching and research so immensely joyful and satisfying, her friend Cathy for keeping her grounded, her father Sheldon for teaching her to stand up for her beliefs, her husband Mark for being a model of artistic integrity and her children Jean and Jake for magically finding their own artistic voices. Svetlana is grateful that her work collaborators are also her friends and that the artists and curators she assists are a source of inspiration: this is what makes a job where you are often in the trenches possible – and satisfying. She would especially like to thank Marshall Reese, Julia Farrington, Mary Anne DeVlieg, Xandra Eden, Sheryl Oring, Radhika Subramaniam, Courtney Fink, Vanessa Place, Robert Atkins, Laura Raicovich, Carin Kuoni, Sergio Munoz Sarmiento, Maria Vassileva, Dimitar Kambourov, Boryana Rossa, Carlo LaMagna, Christopher Finan, Nora Pelizzari and Joy Garnett, who have, in one or another way, helped bring this project into the world.

PART 1

Understanding self-censorship

1 RETHINKING THE CURATOR’S REMIT Janet Marstine

“I Have No Enemies” In the days after the July 2017 death in custody of Liu Xiaobo, who won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership advocating political reform in China, artists and activists around the world posted tributes and staged memorials honoring his work and protesting his long imprisonment by the Chinese government. Because the Chinese authorities staunchly censored any direct mention of Liu, a range of tropes referring to him emerged as acts of resistance in China and globally. One of the most common focused on a single chair, referencing the 2010 Nobel awards ceremony in which an empty chair stood prominently on stage, signaling Liu’s absence due to his incarceration. Another popular trope adopted Liu’s birth and death dates, rather than his name, to mark his legacy. Many of the tributes and memorials also deployed oceanic imagery, alluding to the fact that Chinese authorities cremated Liu’s body and pressured his family to scatter his ashes at sea in an attempt to prevent a site of pilgrimage from materializing through a stateside internment (Hernández 2017; Phillips et al. 2017; Sui 2017). In mainland China, when censors became aware of these tropes and their meaning, punishment was swift (Gan 2017). In Hong Kong, where, in theory, the “One Country, Two Systems” policy (Favre 2019) guarantees the city’s economic and legal independence until 2047, 50 years after its 1997 handover to China following British colonial rule, artists and curators have had greater freedom of artistic expression than their mainland colleagues. Hong Kong artist and curator Kacey Wong claims this freedom while probing its limits in his tribute to Liu Xiaobo, the site-specific sculpture I Have No Enemies (2017) (Figure 1.1). Set in a space apart, I Have No Enemies calls out the dangers of self-censorship as it models an adept strategy to navigate political pressures. Crafted from steel and placed in an undisclosed, remote Hong Kong coastal location (Wong 2017a), Wong’s sculpture shows solidarity with the larger movement memorializing Liu and provides an alternative platform for expression censored in China. It references prevalent tropes: it harks back to the empty seat at the Nobel ceremony; the inscription made through perforations in the steel manifests Liu’s birth and death dates; and its placement speaks to the scattering of Liu’s ashes at sea.

4  Janet Marstine

I Have No Enemies, 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

FIGURE 1.1 Kacey Wong,

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Wong’s sculpture creates a unique memorial through its use of text and light. Aside from Liu’s birth and death dates, perforations in the chair (Figures 1.2 and 1.3) also spell out Liu’s name and most celebrated phrase, “I Have No Enemies” (Wong 2017b).When the sun shines, light streaming through the perforations projects the words “I Have No Enemies” along the horizon; it also projects those words, along with Liu’s name and dates, down through the rocks and into the earth (Figure 1.4). As Wong’s piece rusts and erodes, it serves as a moving elegy to the shifting, unstable nature of freedom. For Wong, whose wider body of social sculpture shows his commitment to democracy and freedom of expression (Wong 2019), the phrase “I Have No Enemies” has particular relevance to political circumstances in Hong Kong today. Liu (2009) wrote those words for a statement he had planned to read at his 2009 sentencing but was prohibited from speaking, “I have no enemies and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, none of the prosecutors who indicted me, and none of the judges who judged me are my enemies.” The statement was finally read a year later by actress Liv Ullmann as part of Liu’s Nobel acceptance speech in absentia. The generosity of spirit captured by Liu’s words has made them a mantra for activists worldwide (Hernández 2017). Central to Liu’s human rights work was his fight for freedom of expression (Simon 2017). His statement “I Have No Enemies” asserts, “Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth.To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth” (Liu 2009). Wong’s sculpture champions this vision. By siting the sculpture off-grid, without seeking authorization

Rethinking the curator’s remit  5

FIGURE 1.2 Kacey Wong, I

Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

FIGURE 1.3 Kacey Wong, I

Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

6  Janet Marstine

FIGURE 1.4 Kacey Wong, I

Have No Enemies (detail), 2017. Steel. 54 cm × 55 cm × 107 cm. Location undisclosed, Hong Kong.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

from relevant authorities, and by keeping the location secret, thus limiting the possibilities of encounter, Wong champions Liu’s vision while acknowledging the current and future uncertainties of freedom of expression in Hong Kong. Indeed, as China’s “One Country,Two Systems” policy for Hong Kong rapidly deteriorates and self-censorship in Hong Kong’s arts ecosystem becomes more pervasive, Wong’s I Have No Enemies serves as a gesture of resistance to the threat, increasingly invoked, by mainland China authorities and their proxies in the Hong Kong government that “freedom of expression is not absolute” (Kong 2018). Wong (quoted in Guthrie 2016) speaks to the need for effective strategies to recognize and subvert the pressures to self-censor: Resistance work should be done before a full-blown occupation happens. What is fullblown occupation? Look at mainland China. . . . We are in the middle of a culture war; most didn’t recognize it but this is how I see it. If we win, we get to keep our language, our identity, and our ways of living. Isn’t that worth fighting for? As Wong’s I Have No Enemies looks out eloquently toward the South China Sea, it prompts us to ask: How does China’s ever-shifting “red line” (Kong 2018) impose boundaries for freedom of artistic expression in the Mainland and in Hong Kong? How do government, economic and cultural actors exercise self-censorship in fear of this red line? How are those of us who stand assured in the assumption that censorship happens “over there, not here” complicit? How must we recognize the slipperiness between censorship and self-censorship

Rethinking the curator’s remit  7

and the ubiquity of the latter? Finally, how can we appreciate and support the agency of artists and curators in negotiating the pressures of self-censorship?

The “craftsmanship” of negotiating self-censorship In this chapter, I argue that self-reflective practice in recognizing and negotiating the pressures of self-censorship is vital to the curator’s remit.This claim should not be surprising, given that the museum is a complex site of arbitration among many oft-competing stakeholders who hold differing levels of power. My argument represents a radical shift, however, in how curating is defined; it proposes an expanded concept of curation in which the skills by which to negotiate censorship and self-censorship feature prominently. Drawing from interdisciplinary censorship studies, I also provide a new understanding of the complex relationship between censorship and self-censorship in the museum sector. Although, until the 1990s, it was widely assumed that censorship operates in authoritarian countries while self-censorship takes place in liberal democracies, since then censorship studies have offered a corrective to this binary construction; while recognizing the distinctively pernicious nature of censorship enacted by repressive regimes (Müller 2004), contemporary censorship studies interrogates the blurred boundaries between censorship and self-censorship (Moore 2013) and argues persuasively that censorship is constitutive. As Holquist (1994: 17) asserts, the censor and the censored shape one another as they “are locked into a negotiation, an exchange with the works they seek to abridge.” Further, as Holquist (ibid.: 14–15) observes, those who engage with a domain that they know to be censored develop a sophisticated ability to identify and understand the exclusions. In art history and curatorial studies, Meyer’s (2002) groundbreaking study on censorship and representations of homosexuality powerfully unsettles the dialectic between censorship and self-censorship while also recognizing the agency of contemporary artists in resisting the pressures of the latter. Nonetheless, the US “culture wars,” the battles of the late 1980s and 1990s between the political left and right over controversial works and interpretation in exhibition content, have continued to shape censorship discourse in the museum sector (Bolton 1992; Dubin 1994, 1999;Wallis et al. 1999; Hartman 2015).This has created reductive, entrenched understandings of censorship (enacted or threatened) as a unidirectional phenomenon in which conservative voices erase those that challenge the status quo. In these accounts, institutional and individual self-censorship and the agency that practitioners claim to resist these pressures are too infrequently examined. In addition, such accounts leave little room to consider more recent pressures exerted by the political left and through social media. This chapter rejects the notion that censorship and free speech within the museum sector are to be conceptualized as polarities. I posit, rather, that they are informed by the complex dynamic between them which can only be understood through the lens of self-censorship; censorship, self-censorship and freedom of expression function in a mutually constitutive spectrum characterized by its slippages. For example, institutional self-censorship exercised by a museum director in an exhibition may be experienced by the exhibition curator as direct censorship. And what might appear to be institutional self-censorship enacted by a museum may actually be state censorship imposed behind the scenes by a ministry of culture. Moreover, I challenge the assumption that self-censorship implicitly and inevitably represents an ethical wrong; instead, I offer a pragmatic approach, accepting that self-censorship is sometimes necessary and that deciding if and how to resist by weighing up the ethical costs is

8  Janet Marstine

fundamental to curatorial work. In addition, I refute the idea that the pressures of self-censorship engender disempowerment and erasure. I show that artists and curators have agency to wrangle effectively with these pressures and I explore the innovative strategies they deploy. I focus on practice in two distinct contexts – China, which is experiencing increasingly tight restrictions under the rule of President Xi Jinping (Economy 2018); and Hong Kong, where pro-democracy activists are testing the limits of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy (Favre 2019). I frame my analysis within a wider international context including that of the UK – where museums have increasingly become sites for examining rights-related issues (Sandell 2017) and anxieties about causing offense are rising (Farrington 2013). Through this approach, I demonstrate how insights concerning censorship and self-censorship in one locale are relevant to practitioners in other parts of the world. My framework purposefully resists the assumption that the pressures of institutional self-censorship are less of an issue in democracies than in authoritarian states. What unites curators globally is the impetus to develop effective measures in response to these pressures. As one of the Hong Kong–based informants for my study remarks presciently, “Our situation in Hong Kong is not as difficult as that in the Mainland but maybe in the end it’s the same. I want to learn the ‘craftsmanship’ of a tactics of resistance from my mainland colleagues” (Hong Kong Informant 2 2016). My research offers snapshots of particular places in time through which I identify common ground for knowledge exchange, mutual support and joint advocacy around the “craftsmanship” of negotiating self-censorship. In making my argument, I first provide an overview of institutional self-censorship, identifying the challenges that the topic poses to practitioners in diverse international settings, setting out a new framework for deliberative practice and arguing for the need to position this framework within the curator’s remit. I then discuss how censorship operates in museums and galleries as one cannot comprehend the phenomenon of self-censorship without this context. I look at mainland China, where censorship is omnipresent and chiefly overt, and Hong Kong, where it is growing, due to the pressures of “mainlandization,” but remains, to date, mostly covert. A case study of covert censorship in Hong Kong illuminates the destructive potential of such acts and demonstrates how this kind of censorship can readily lead to self-censorship. Next, through a brief look more globally, followed by a sustained discussion of the China and Hong Kong contexts, I consider the conditions that have created institutional selfcensorship and how self-censorship is manifest. I also explore the difficulties of recognizing self-censorship, given its embeddedness in curatorial practice and the silences that delineate it. Finally, I deconstruct the perpetrator–victim binary characterizing censorship discourse in the museum sector by looking at the empowering strategies and tactics deployed by practitioners in China and Hong Kong. I show that, while eradicating self-censorship is neither attainable nor advisable, self-reflective curating involves assessing the ethical implications of when and how to resist and accept self-censorship. I emphasize the diversity of creative approaches that have been piloted in China and Hong Kong to counter the pressures exerted by political and business interests. The chapter is informed by discussions among a research network composed of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese practitioners, convened in Hong Kong, and among national and international contributors to a symposium convened in Leicester, UK. These are supplemented by interviews with practitioners based in China, Hong Kong and the UK and by media accounts. Many of the Hong Kong–based artists and curators have also worked in China, as have a few of the UK-based informants. All of the informants – including eight

Rethinking the curator’s remit  9

based in China, 13 based in Hong Kong and 10 based in the UK – have direct experience of or have contributed to research on censorship and self-censorship in the arts ecosystem. I have maintained the anonymity of all Hong Kong and China informants, due to security issues, unless the ideas and opinions they have expressed are already a matter of public record. Two of the UK-based informants have also participated anonymously.1 During my research journey, which included extensive periods spent in Hong Kong and China, I found myself, ironically, exercising self-censorship to meet the project aims. Sometimes, I was protecting others. At other times, I was protecting myself. Throughout, I was engaged in difficult ethical deliberation as I weighed up the need to self-censor in the short run so as to uphold the integrity of the research in the long run. The strategies and tactics I developed are directly inspired by those of the practitioners who contributed to the chapter.

The elusiveness of institutional self-censorship Museum and gallery practitioners constantly run up against the pressures of institutional self-censorship. For example, at the UK Museums Association’s 2016 annual conference, a poll of 63 delegates attending a session on institutional self-censorship revealed that 51% had consciously withheld information from audiences due to its controversial nature (Steel 2017). Making self-reflective decisions about how to grapple with the pressures of self-censorship is central to curatorial practice. Most practitioners, however, are ill-prepared to deal with these pressures. What Next? (2016) notes that, of 117 UK cultural organizations polled, two-thirds had faced ethical dilemmas with potential to cause controversy, but only 50% had strategies for dealing with controversy. In China, even the term “censorship” (shen cha) is frowned upon, in favor of the bureaucratic euphemism “approval” (China Informant 3 2015). There is steadfast denial of institutional self-censorship across the museum sector. The widespread denial of institutional self-censorship stems, in part, from the myth that museums are neutral spaces which maintain a strong hold in much of the world (Fleming 2016). Sharon Heal (2015), Museums Association Director, explains within the UK context: The very low level of awareness of self‑censorship is partly rooted in the complete misconception that museums are neutral spaces. In this misconception, there is no curatorial voice, no authorship, just a neutral narrative – and thus no censorship. I think that message really persists. If you don’t tackle the idea that museums are not neutral spaces, you can’t then talk about what you do and don’t display, what stories you tell and which voices you exclude. Two long-held and intertwined assumptions have shaped the insistence on neutrality. First is the rationale that, because public museums are funded through taxes, they should not represent particular political or social viewpoints. Epitomizing this position is the response of the Natural History Museum London’s former Director Michael Dixon (quoted in Steel 2005) to the question of why the 2005 diamond exhibition, for which it accepted sponsorship from the De Beers diamond company, did not adequately explore the issue of conflict diamonds, “We recognised that there were going to be socio-economic issues, but we are not a political organisation so don’t normally concentrate on those areas.” Second is the belief that objectivity is more truthful than subjectivity. However, over the last decade, scholars

10  Janet Marstine

have argued persuasively that museums’ stance of neutrality and its associated silences also convey specific viewpoints, made all the more dangerous because they are unspoken, and that museums have an ethical obligation to contribute to the good of society (Marstine 2011; Janes 2015; Sandell 2017). Institutional self-censorship in the public sector is equally motivated by risk aversion – the drive to lower uncertainty – even when risk assumption will more likely lead to successful outcomes (Bozeman and Kingsley 1998). In fact, as What Next? (2016) reports within the UK context, governing bodies in the cultural sector are increasingly making decisions that prioritize risk aversion. In a risk-averse museum climate, attempting to avoid controversy through self-censorship is a default position as leaders see controversy as exposing an institution to a host of potential dangers, including reputational damage, loss of income and a reduction in audience numbers. In addition, the pressures to protect a museum’s “brand” are strong, as independent curator Voon Pow Bartlett (2015) holds. These pressures can be particularly fraught within the context of social media. Curator Katie Bruce (2017) describes such pressures as exerted by the social media training required within her institution: We have all gone through training if we are using social media.The training makes clear that if we in any way raise controversy or damage the brand, we are subject to disciplinary action. Negotiating self-censorship is quite a complicated issue. The pervasive silence around self-censorship in museums and galleries makes the phenomenon difficult to fathom (McClean 2016; Brouwer 2019: 31, 120). Much of this stems from the shame associated with self-censorship that is common to many cultures. In China, selfcensorship is commonly associated with self-criticism (China Informant 3 2015), a mode of political self-examination and chastisement perfected during the Cultural Revolution that curators in some public museums continue to endure (Catching 2012: 242–243). In Western democracies, publicly exercising institutional self-censorship is frequently viewed as a violation of principle. When Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art Director Bartomeu Marí canceled the 2015 exhibition La bestia y el soberano (The Beast and the Sovereign) and fired the in-house curators for refusing to remove from it Ines Doujak’s sculpture Not Dressed for Conquering, which depicts former Spanish King Juan Carlos I sodomized by the late Bolivian labor leader Domitila Chúngara who, in turn, is sodomized by a wolf, Marí was forced to resign (Muñoz-Alonso 2015; Voon 2015). Further, three influential board members from the International Council of Museums (ICOM) Collections of Modern Art group, which Marí chaired, resigned to protest his leadership, given these actions (Voon 2015). Paradoxically, privately exercising self-censorship in one’s own curatorial practice is easily misconstrued as simply part of professional editing. UK Informant 1 (2015) reflects, “I would choose the word ‘editing’ rather than self-censorship but, in a way, that is also what I do.” The growing recognition that museums and galleries have a critical role to play in fostering civil society through engaging with contentious issues (Cameron and Kelly 2010; Lehrer et al. 2011; Janes and Sandell 2019) has made increasingly urgent the need for robust, ethically informed practice concerning institutional self-censorship. The ethics of institutional selfcensorship is particularly fraught because not everyone has the same rights to freedom of

Rethinking the curator’s remit  11

artistic expression. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights Farida Shahid (2013: 10) notes: Restrictions on artistic freedoms may target some categories of the population more specifically. Women artists and audiences are at particular risk in some communities. . . . Ethnic and religious minorities may also suffer from prohibitions such as using a language or artistic style specific to a region or a people. People with disabilities may suffer particular prejudice when wishing to perform or display their work. Museum sector ethics codes do not provide the necessary guidance. The UK’s Museums Association (2015: 10) ethics code embraces freedom of artistic expression as an ideal but without acknowledging the complexities of this; the ethics codes of ICOM (2017) and the American Alliance of Museums (2000) do not address the issue of censorship at all. Advocacy organizations have helped to fill this void by providing guidelines for procedures that support museums to prepare for potential controversy (National Coalition Against Censorship 2019; What Next? 2016), reporting current trends (Farrington 2013) and focusing on topical issues (Index on Censorship and Vivarta 2015). Still, wider curatorial engagement is needed to combat the elusiveness of self-censorship.

How censorship works In the domain of the arts, acts of censorship are usually performed by the state, corporate interests or other powerful entities such as religious authorities. Censorship deployed by authoritarian regimes such as that found in China is typically recurrent and overt; even when the authorities do not declare themselves or directly explain why a project has been censored, the source and larger motivation of the censorship is obvious. In limited democracies, as exemplified by the government in Hong Kong, censorship is episodic by comparison (Movius 2019) and more commonly covert in nature; in this covert form, a complex web of proxies performs the work of the censor, making it hard to understand if, how and why censorship has occurred and who is behind it. Within liberal democracies, such as that of the UK, overt censorship is rare; it is exercised primarily to quash art projects that test legal and ethical boundaries, for instance, bioart employing human tissue (Wilding 2006; Levy 2011). Covert censorship is relatively more frequent – as seen with “soft power” funders of cultural diplomacy, for example, the British Council, for whom international relationship-building takes precedence over freedom of artistic expression in collaborative projects held in authoritarian states (Farrington 2013). Within liberal democracies, fears of censorship are greater than is recognized and readily trigger self-censorship. In the UK art sector, such fears come from diverse sources, including public funding agencies who, as UK Informant 2 (2015) reports, “have got really quite covertly held positions;” corporate sponsors, particularly where a misalignment in values between the corporation and the museum prompts the sponsor to try to influence programming; and community groups with particular political or social positions. The growing impetus to become a safe space for exploring difficult issues, given the complex dynamics of diversity politics, has created a museum environment increasingly characterized by the fear not to offend (Farrington 2013). And while social media has introduced empowering platforms

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for publics to shape museum discourse and action, when weaponized through mob mentality, these platforms can readily induce museums to attempt damage control through selfcensoring exhibitions and programs. As UK Informant 1 (2015) notes, “Most people I talk to here believe that, because we are in Europe, we have freedom of speech and that artists working in an international environment will not be affected but, in reality, that is not true.” In fact, the common assumption among practitioners in Western democracies that censorship and its corollary, self-censorship, happen “somewhere else” is not only short-sighted but also carries colonial implications; Marko Daniel (2015), who has curated exhibitions in China, the UK and Europe, remarks: With regard to China . . . there is a knee-jerk reaction to identify censorship as equivalent to state repression. That is one of those lines that people draw internally as way of defining this is something that we do not experience here but is experienced over there. This is part of a process of setting up “the other.” It’s a kind of colonialism. UK Informant 2 (2015) adds, “We suffer a different kind of censorship in Western democracies but it is still here; it is more insidious.” The strong reach of censorship makes understanding it indispensable to curatorial practice everywhere.

Censorship in China: the illusion of seamlessness In China, the structures and systems of censorship create the illusion of a totally censored world. China Informant 3 (2015) reflects, “In China, there is nothing truly independent; the reality we know is reality that has been censored.” The Communist Party of China (CPC) has created an environment in which censorship is so pervasive that it is normalized, making selfcensorship integral to everyday practice. China Informant 2 (2016) explains, “We never talk about censorship in mainland China. Because we’ve grown up and been educated in China, we know instinctively what we can or should do to avoid being censored.” The Chinese government deploys a wide and ever-shifting array of tactics to generate this semblance of a censored reality, including what MacKinnon (2011) calls “networked authoritarianism,” a system of internet surveillance that makes China among the most restrictive media milieus in the world (Freedom House 2019). However, this remains an illusion as no apparatus of censorship is flawless and sometimes even deliberately so: in China, pockets of creative practice that remain unencumbered are necessary to demonstrate ascendancy and influence. As China Informant 6 (2015) notes, having a thriving museum and gallery industry is essential for China to maintain its cultural prominence on the world stage. Hence, authorities engage in a balancing act in which they cannot suppress the cultural sector too much and so rely on opaque and inconsistent policies and enforcement without any possibility of appeal (China Informant 3 2015). China Informant 2 (2016) recounts: Whenever an exhibition is censored, we have to cooperate 100 percent. If we mount any kind of defense, the officials will censor other things, maybe works in storage, maybe items on your computer. We try to explain the concerns of an exhibition but they don’t care. . . . Communication doesn’t work for us. We are completely voiceless.

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The state’s approach encourages citizens to feel that they have no uncensored space and engenders fear, provoking widespread self-censorship. Thus, the apparatus of censorship – which is limited – depends on self-censorship – which is limitless.

Motives and priorities Censorship of the arts in China is largely politically motivated (China Informant 7 2016a) and can be traced back to Mao Zedong’s (1942) famous speech at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in which he declared art to be a weapon of the proletarian revolution and a vehicle to serve the masses.Though this ideological approach has waxed and waned, President Xi Jinping has reclaimed Mao’s propagandistic fervor (Ramzy 2014).The unprecedented growth of museums and galleries in China over the last decade has thrown a spotlight on art – Chinese museums received approximately one billion visitors in 2018 (Zuo 2019) – which, in turn, has prompted new levels of censorship (Steinfeld 2016). Given that censorship cannot be omnipresent, particular patterns emerge in regard to priorities of the state. Chief among them is a strong correlation between the degree of censorship exercised and the potential public impact of a project or initiative (Catching 2012: 234; China Informant 6 2015; China Informant 2 2018). A major exhibition receives greater scrutiny than a one-off public program; a globally influential artist is seen as more dangerous than one that is more obscure (Judkis 2011). And, because the work of curatorship is not well understood, curators do not usually receive that same level of surveillance as artists (Daniel 2015). In exhibitions, the subjects and associated interpretive texts most likely to trigger censorship engage with politics, gender, sexuality and religion (Catching 2012: 241; Brady and Movius 2018). Artists from Hong Kong and Taiwan undergo scrutiny at the national level when exhibiting in China while their mainland peers generally require approval only at the local level (Catching 2012: 237). International exhibitions of contemporary artists also necessitate national-level approval (China Informant 6 2015). Genres that are frequently targeted include performance art – because of its unpredictability (Yau 2013), video art – because it is linked to the highly regulated Chinese film industry which has wide potential impact (China Informant 6 2015; Brady and Movius 2018) and community art – because public gatherings that involve civic discourse are seen as a possible threat to political stability (China Informant 5 2017). Censorship can be strongest in the epicenters of government and business, Beijing and Shanghai (China Informant 6 2015). “The Emperor is far away” is a long-quoted phrase (China Informant 2 2015) suggesting that cities and towns far from Beijing experience relatively fewer interventions from the state. However, as China Informant 7 (2016a) notes, the CPC maintains central control across the country. At the same time, as China Informant 5 (2017) explains, even within Beijing, the number of artists and activists working there makes it impossible for the security forces to police everyone; conversely, in remote artists’ villages, one cannot easily hide from local officials.

Mechanisms The Chinese censorship apparatus deploys both covert and overt tactics in its attempts to limit freedom of artistic expression.The primary covert mechanism is the seduction of increasing a

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practitioner’s standard of living through a system of rewards – opportunities and promotions meted out for self-censoring behavior and outputs that do not push boundaries; the thinking behind this, as China Informant 5 (2017) asserts, is that, “as your economic situation gets better, you will forget politics.” Simultaneously, a system of overt constraints hinders museum innovation and productivity (ibid.). Major state-run museums and art academies typically have a “minder” responsible for keeping staff accountable to CPC agendas (China Informant 7 2016a). And though Communist party membership is not required of every curator or art professor, it is often essential for those assuming a leadership role in a public institution (China Informant 4 2015). The process of advancing a project is frustrating. For example, as China Informant 3 (2015) recounts, private contemporary arts venues are typically required to have a license to both operate and stage any particular project, a situation the informant refers to as “double censorship”; the approval process is extremely time-consuming and can represent approximately 50% of the total time on each project. It takes many months to hear back and often works have to be resubmitted (Daniel 2015; Brady and Movius 2018). It is not uncommon to receive a final answer just before the scheduled launch, meaning museums cannot adequately publicize a show in advance. Additional scrutiny is injected when officials inspect the exhibition just before the opening (Daniel 2015) and censorship is often enacted at this final stage. The timing is a conscious strategy to encourage self-censorship from the earliest phases of a project; censorship at the last moment inflicts serious damage as so much resource and emotional energy have gone to naught (China Informant 3 2015). The reasons for censorship are rarely explained but, instead, cloaked as bureaucratic or technical problems. Not having the proper permit, not following import regulations and late submission of paperwork are frequently invoked (Catching 2012: 237–240) but sometimes authorities simply shut off the power, citing electrical problems (China Informant 3 2016). In some cases, a museum or gallery will discover, only after a project has been censored, that one of the artists involved is on a “blacklist;” because this blacklist is never made public and is always changing, one never knows for certain who is on it (China Informant 2 2016). Because there is no independent journalism in China, curators do not have the option of going to the media to gain public support in the face of censorship (ibid.). In fact, the organization must do all it can to deflect media attention as any negative or sensationalizing press can escalate the possibility of censorship by authorities (China Informant 3 2016). China’s “great firewall,” the synthesis of legislation and technology that polices the domestic internet, has strongly enhanced the effectiveness of arts censorship over the last decade. The Chinese social media applications WeChat (similar to Facebook) and Weibo (similar to Twitter), which museums and galleries employ for marketing purposes, closely surveil and censor user posts through techniques such as keyword blocking to meet government requirements (Janser 2011: 244; Freedom House 2019). The censorship exercised by commercial platforms is supplemented by the “50 cent army” of some two million party members paid 50 renminbi (RMB) per comment to report content deemed unacceptable to the CPC and to post content supportive of CPC views (Economy 2018). China Informant 3 (2015) remarks, within the context of the arts, that “if you post something controversial, your post and often also your account will be deleted very quickly.” The system also relies on the wider public to exert the pressures of censorship through “fake news” and mob mentality. China Informant 3 (2016) recounts how unfounded rumors of sexually predatory behavior perpetuated on social media dogged a performer, eventually forcing his show to close, after an audience member in

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the front row reported an innocent wardrobe malfunction during the production. Without independent media to foster robust arts criticism, it is difficult for most people to engage in substantive discourse. Digital monitoring is supplemented by physical surveillance performed by neighborhood party committees and public security “volunteers” who are visible during large public events, including gallery openings (Catching 2012: 236–237). A social credit system, piloted in Xinjiang at the time of writing and expected to be implemented nationally in 2020, will provide a more encompassing online vehicle of punishment and reward based on assessing citizens’ opinions and behaviors on the internet (Freedom House 2019), including those related to museums and galleries.

Censorship in Hong Kong: the pressures of “Mainlandization” In Hong Kong, while freedom of expression is protected under the Basic Law (People’s Republic of China 1997: 11), conditions are deteriorating as Chinese and Hong Kong authorities attempt to suppress pro-democracy protests with increasing vigor. The situation has been fraught since the 2014 Umbrella Movement, the student-led civic disobedience calling for universal suffrage that employed umbrellas as both symbolic expression and protection from the pepper spray and tear gas used by police (Lee and Sing 2019). Tensions have worsened dramatically since the 2019 pro-democracy movement initially sparked by a proposed bill, which has not been formally rescinded, that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China (BBC News 2019). Censorship in Hong Kong today is often politically motivated but is also exercised in response to a wide range of other subjects considered potentially controversial from gender and sexuality to death. Galvanizing these protests is a resistance to the phenomenon of “mainlandization,” the pressures for Hong Kong to assimilate the economic and cultural conventions of mainland China, thus abandoning local traditions and ideals (Chan et al. 2019). Mainlandization impacts all aspects of Hong Kong life. Fifty percent of Hong Kong’s trade and 25% of its direct “foreign” investment now come from the mainland (Zhong et al. 2019); “patriotic” education is being embedded in Hong Kong schools (Higgins 2019); and the Hong Kong Liaison Office of the CPC has an 80% stake in the city’s bookstores (Kong 2018). As Hong Kong Informant 5 (2016) declares, “The problem in Hong Kong is that everyone has some business interests in China. Even if, theoretically, we are protected by Hong Kong laws, it is more complex than that.” Many Hong Kong art organizations and artists are active in the pro-democracy movement not only because they share its ideals but also because they believe that the erosion of the “One Country, Two Systems” policy jeopardizes the sector (Pollack 2015; McMahon 2019). The extradition bill, for instance, is viewed as a grave threat as it could be used against Hong Kong artists and curators critical of China. To collectively voice their opposition to the bill, some 100 Hong Kong arts spaces participated in a city-wide strike by closing their doors on 12 June 2019 (Uttam 2019).

“Mainlandization” and censorship Though the “great firewall of China” does not extend to Hong Kong, mainlandization has created an environment in which censorship in all sectors is on the rise. Moreover, incidents

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that make the headlines are merely indicators of a more pervasive situation of both overt and covert censorship (Kong 2018). In the museum and gallery sector, censorship is sometimes overt and clearly performed by Chinese authorities or their Hong Kong intermediaries. For example, the Hive Spring was forced to cancel the 2018 exhibition Gongle, featuring the work of Chinese-born, Australianbased political cartoonist Badiucao (a pseudonym), after Chinese authorities threatened the artist (Woodhouse and Lui 2019). Part of the city’s celebration of free expression week, the show aimed to test the limits of freedom of artistic expression in Hong Kong (Lam 2018). Many mainland Chinese artists who in the past came to Hong Kong for a safe space to work now go elsewhere when possible (Galvan 2018). Most often, censorship in Hong Kong operates through covert means. Chief among these is a lack of diversity in funding sources and the subsequent overdependence on the Hong Kong government arts granting agency, the Arts Development Council (ADC). Hong Kong curator and academic Oscar Ho (2016) warns, “singularity of resources is dangerous” because it gives the funder undue power. This is coupled with an insufficient number and variety of venues. Projects deemed to contain challenging content can easily be censored through the denial of a venue (Hong Kong Informant 3 2015). For example, the collected archival materials emerging from the Umbrella Movement have been neither accessioned nor exhibited by a Hong Kong public museum (Mannering 2018). In addition, the lack of venues creates value misalignments between venues and projects which also leads to censorship. Hong Kong is a high-density city with some of the highest real estate prices in the world. Given the scarcity of public space, shopping malls and other commercial sites have become common but not always appropriate venues for art (Hong Kong Informant 7 2015). As Hong Kong Informant 6 (2016) declares, censorship by property developers that control these commercial spaces is common, “This kind of ‘soft censorship’ will always take place in Hong Kong as long as there are close relationships between property developers and the pro-establishment government camp. But we don’t need to accept this.” The case study of Add Oil’s Countdown Machine (2016) illuminates the complex dynamics of covert censorship in Hong Kong. This commission represents a perfect storm brought on by the collision of public funders, a commercial venue, a pro-democracy arts collaborative, a highly visible project and a sensitive political moment in which it is difficult to ascertain responsibility and motive. The ambiguities are typical of covert censorship and show how such an environment can readily lead to acts of self-censorship.

Switching off “Countdown Machine” Originally titled Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now, Countdown Machine (2016) (Plate 1) was a monumental LED light installation for Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, the iconic International Commerce Centre (ICC) Tower, which boasts Asia’s largest video screen (Pau 2016). Created by Sampson Wong (hereon in referred to as Wong and distinct from Kacey Wong, referred to as Wong earlier in this chapter), Jason Lam and their collaborators known collectively as Add Oil, the piece consisted of six one-minute animations, interposed with slogans in English and Chinese, all musing on the theme of tracking time (Add Oil 2016). The animations included a clock, numerical digits and units of traditional Chinese measurement (Man 2016); the slogans read “Our 60-second friendship begins now,” “I will remember this minute” and “You can’t change this fact.” As the artists explain, the piece was inspired by Days

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of Being Wild (1990), a Hong Kong film directed by Wong Kar-wai, which concerns running out of time. In the movie’s most memorable scene, the male and female leads gaze at a clock for 60 seconds while the male protagonist refers to this experience as a “one-minute friendship” that rings eternal (Add Oil 2016). On one level, the project functioned as a socially engaged artwork; it invited viewers to make their own one-minute connections with a friend or stranger nearby (ibid.). However, Add Oil was well known for public art that champions Hong Kong’s selfdetermination. For example, to support the Umbrella Movement demonstrations, Add Oil created Stand by You: Add Oil Machine (2014), in which the public was invited to send encouraging messages to the protesters that were then projected onto the facade of the Central Government Offices (Wong and Lam 2015). Moreover, the name “Add Oil” itself evokes the artists’ political inclinations: a literal translation of the Cantonese phrase “ga yao,” “add oil” is a common Hong Kong English expression connoting encouragement or support (Oxford English Dictionary 2018). In discussing Stand by You, Wong and Lam (2015) declare, “It is our hope that this emancipatory episode will ‘add oil’ to the civic life of our city.” Add Oil’s ICC installation was commissioned by the ADC as part of the 2016 new media exhibition Human Vibrations, curated by Caroline Ha Thuc. The ICC Tower, which is frequently used for commercial light displays, is owned by Hong Kong real estate giant Sun Hung Kai Properties, which is aggressively expanding into mainland China (Chow 2016; Yu 2016). For Human Vibrations, all artists were required to sign a contract that commissions would not contain explicit sexual or political content (Pau 2016). At the opening, Add Oil notified several media organizations that they had changed the title of their piece from Our 60-Second Friendship Begins Now to Countdown Machine and that the last of the six animations represented the countdown in seconds to 1 July 2047, when Hong Kong is due to lose its status as a Special Administration Region and become fully integrated with mainland China. Add Oil did not clear the change in title or alternative reading of the final animation with the curator or with ADC (Man 2016; Pearlman 2016). It remains uncertain whether the curator had earlier privately suspected the alternative reading. Wong (quoted in Yu 2016) asserts that staff from both the ADC and ICC asked about the significance of the numbers but “didn’t ask further after [we] the artists said the digits were “random.” Wong (quoted in Qin 2016) justified the reframing of the piece by stating that the commission was a critique of the commercialism of the typical ICC light displays, “Most of the animations shown on the ICC are ad-like, meaningless videos. . . . We wanted to show something relevant to the social situation of Hong Kong.” Wong argued that the uncertain political future of Hong Kong is the city’s most pressing concern and requires the kind of public attention that the ICC Tower can garner (Cheung 2016). The animation of the countdown to 2047 ironically appropriates the language of the monumental clock installed in Tian’anman Square counting down to the 1 July 1997 hand­ over of Hong Kong from the UK to China (Yang n.d.), which bore the slogan “The Chinese government resumes exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong” (Wu 1997). Given this context and Add Oil’s reframing, the ICC piece called into question, through the “machinery” of the clock, the underlying machinery of state rule (Yang n.d.). Of course, the monumentality and high visibility of what was now Countdown Machine raised the stakes for parties challenged by its new message.

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The timing of Add Oil’s announcement of the new title and interpretation was clearly strategic. The artists waited until the project was live and in the public domain to communicate the news. But what made the announcement particularly subversive was that it coincided with a visit to Hong Kong of Chinese leader Zhang Dejiang, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and in charge of Hong Kong Affairs (Cheung 2016). In fact, Countdown Machine would have been visible from Zhang’s hotel (Hong Kong Informant 8 2016). On 22 May 2016, four days after the exhibition opening, the ADC announced that the ICC installation would be switched off (Man 2016). The removal occurred amidst a whirlwind of security measures described by police as “counterterrorism,” including calling up 8,000 extra officers to quell potential protests against Zhang (Pearlman 2016). ADC Film and Media Art Group chair Ellen Pau (2016) insisted, however, that the removal of Countdown Machine was not politically motivated, “If ADC removed a work for political reasons . . . I would hold a press conference and tell the world.” Indeed, the fact that the work was not switched off until four days after Add Oil’s announcement – and after Zhang had departed Hong Kong – undercuts the widely held assumption that the removal represents political censorship by ADC (Man 2016). At the same time, the ADC felt compelled to distance themselves from any political associations with the work.“If there is any hidden message behind, it is solely the personal idea of the creators,” ADC (quoted in Yu 2016) noted. The ICC’s owners made a similar statement; the ICC (quoted in Yu 2016) “was not involved in the process of selection or curation of the artworks.” Pau (2016) notably admitted that an increase of political censorship beyond the sphere of the arts in Hong Kong had made the city’s Leisure and Cultural Service Department, through which the ADC operates, more cautious. Pau (2016) also acknowledged that these pressures had prompted her to self-censor in her own curating: I have to be very creative to sneak in a few political works by writing a curatorial statement that is kind of elusive. I’m more aware of this change of practice now. I don’t have to do this every day but I am aware that there is change. Nevertheless, Pau and Ha Thuc (2016) justified the decision to remove the work by declaring on the ADC website that Add Oil’s changes were disrespectful of both the contract and the curatorial vision, endangering funding and venues for other artists: We do believe in the freedom of artistic expression, and do support our artists.Yet, the disrespect demonstrated by Mr Sampson Wong and Mr Jason Lam against the original agreement and understanding made with the curator and ADC is jeopardizing our profession and put at risk any future possibility to work further in the public space. Adding to this was Pau and Ha Truc’s charge that the new framing reduced Countdown Machine to propaganda. Ha Thuc (quoted in Chow 2016) asserted, “amid the visit of Zhang Dejiang, the artists suddenly reduced the artwork to a straight-forward political statement. The artists did not respect the rules.” Add Oil responded, in turn, by arguing that the work itself was not altered and that reinterpretation is integral to engaging with art. Wong (2016) stated: I have never done anything to change the work. I don’t have the technical expertise to change it, even if I were allowed into that part of the building. I can’t hack into the

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system. . . . If you have a basic understanding of post-structuralism, you will know that I can always change the interpretation of an artwork. Simultaneously,Wong admitted that reframing the work through the new title and interpretation had been integral to the project from its conception.Wong (quoted in Sanchez-Kozyreva 2016) confessed, “We had always planned to reveal the meaning of the work, this seemed the most effective way.” Clearly, controversy was a defining element of the piece (Man 2016) and the artists deliberately misled the organizers. They did so, however, from a position of desperation in their commitment to fostering freedom of expression in a rapidly deteriorating cultural climate which offered little public space for political discourse. Despite the denials of Pau and Ha Thuc, did the ADC exercise political censorship? Was the ADC responding to intimidation or potential intimidation from the Chinese government or its Hong Kong proxies, given the visit of Zhang? Or were the ICC owners the driving force behind the removal? If so, was the motivation of the property company primarily commercial or political, given the pressures executives may have felt from their mainland Chinese partners? And, as a private venue, does the ICC have a right to exercise censorship, where ADC might not? In fact, it is not clear who made the decision to remove the work. In their declaration on the ADC website, Pau and Ha Thuc state that they made the call. Neither of them are ADC staff or council executives. Hong Kong artist and curator Phoebe Man (2016) surmises, “A possibility is that they [Pau and Ha Thuc] were the ones who had recommended the artists and thus felt obliged to . . . shield the ADC from political attack.” However, the issue of who made the decision distracts from a more important concern – that the ADC contract can itself be thought of as a form of censorship. It required exhibition participants to self-censor in order to take part. Hong Kong Informant 8 (2016) challenges the legitimacy of this censorship through a contract; “why do we accept a contract that restricts political work?,” she asks. Wong (2016) adds that the nature of such a contract makes it an obstacle to be overcome: It’s impossible to maintain such a contract, no matter how you see it, I can still politicize it afterwards. When the curator came to me with the contract, the whole idea became my discontent with that contract. An exercise. You can’t define what is political. Ho (2016) warns that it is too easy to hide censorship behind such procedures and bureaucracy – as do authorities in mainland China. In regard to the ICC, though Pau (2016) claims that the building’s owners exerted no pressure on the ADC, it is widely understood that Sun Hung Kai Properties played a significant role in the removal and may have influenced the terms of the contract as well. As Hong Kong Informant 8 (2016) notes, “This incident has brought into sharp focus the unspoken rule that, in Hong Kong, commercial organizations prefer not to express or endorse political messages of any sort. This is because, in China, business and political interests always intersect.” This is particularly problematic when the facilities of a private enterprise are offered as a venue for public art that is funded by the public purse, as was the case with Countdown Machine. The lack of public venues in Hong Kong makes the issue of censorship motivated by both commercial and political interests particularly germane. Wong (2016) remarks, “if we unconditionally accept the property developer’s judgment, then it undermines our right

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to the city.” Man (2016) suggests that funding councils such as the ADC might well rethink whether they should partner with venues that restrict freedom of artistic expression. Add Oil’s act of civil disobedience sheds light on the slippery nature of covert censorship – for which no party takes responsibility – which Wong (2016) characterizes as continually “being repackaged.” Ultimately, what Countdown Machine called for was frank discourse to shed light on covert censorship as a symptom of mainlandization. “There was no adequate theoretical discussion about whether the work can be removed and no real reason [for the censorship] provided,” exclaimed Wong (2016). And so, prompted by the illumination of the ICC a year later with a patriotic slogan celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China and the first visit of President Xi to the city, Wong (quoted in Lim 2017) warned that, without robust censorship discourse, Hong Kong risks sliding further into a default position of self-censorship: What was not sensitive yesterday has become sensitive today. . . . Once that atmosphere exists, those with power simply have no need to issue any orders. Everyone will prematurely submit: there will be no day where a new standard for “sensitivity” is not reached; fear will wipe out everything. Wong’s words are a stark reminder that informed deliberation concerning the limits of free speech and the relationship between censorship and self-censorship is central to the curator’s remit. But how exactly does the phenomenon of institutional self-censorship manifest and under what conditions? How is it distinct from censorship? And what are the particular challenges that it presents to curatorial practices?

How self-censorship works Self-censorship has a clear and direct relationship to censorship. And, like censorship, selfcensorship does not take place exclusively in authoritarian states, though it is more pervasive and deep-seated under such regimes. Self-censorship can result from an environment of covert, as well as overt, censorship. It can also manifest where censorship has not been exercised but where there is fear that censorship may occur. In fact, the limitlessness of selfcensorship is more effective at restricting expression than acts of censorship which are, by nature, limited. Given today’s strong fears not to offend, institutional self-censorship, as artist Goshka Macuga (2015) notes, often functions as a kind of “othering” that reinforces the marginalized status of disenfranchised groups. Celebratory frameworks championing diversity and inclusion in the name of social cohesion often exculpate painful issues and analysis that might have been deployed to transformative effect (Walsh 2008). Containing difficult histories in alternative culturally and thematically specific museums enables mainstream institutions to maintain authorized narratives (Bunning 2017). And aestheticization, as seen, for example in the 2019 Gauguin: Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery (Homburg and Ripelle 2019; Jones 2019), allows art museums to gloss over the urgent ethical issues arising from collections and exhibitions. Moreover, when engaging with difficult issues, as Elizabeth Carnegie (2006) argues, curators are always required to make assumptions about audience needs and expectations that involve self-censorship; they must decide how much to challenge communities without shaming or alienating them and how much to hold back.

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Though pressures for museums to self-censor have long come from politically conservative camps, increasingly, they are exerted also by voices from within political liberalism. Even the most progressive institutions find that a certain level of self-censorship is endemic to the work that they do. Ann Bukantas (2015), Head of Fine Art at National Museums Liverpool, describes this phenomenon within the context of writing interpretive texts which need to follow the protocols of institutional terminology documents: A document intended to empower staff to explore contentious issues, and thus aiming to counter self-censorship, at the same time also has the potential to foster self-censorship because it is intimidating and also because on some level the document itself is a mechanism of censorship. Such documents often raise more questions than they answer. The extent of self-censorship will vary from one context to another, depending on the degree of risk perceived in pursuing free expression and the degree of fear perceived in causing offense, but patterns of its materialization are shared across cultures. Given the high stakes that many artists, curators and organizations face, self-censorship is sometimes an ethical good; China Informant 1 (2016) explains, “Self-censorship is the way that we are protecting ourselves.” But because self-censorship is often enacted in the name of protection, it is vital to consider who is being protected and for what reasons. The silences around self-censorship make this a challenging endeavor. As Hong Kong artist and curator Wen Yau (quoted in Galvan 2018) describes self-censorship, “It is . . . like a ghost or spirit that is haunting you. You cannot really see or touch it. Because it is intangible, you really feel scared.”

Self-censorship in China In China, because the apparatus of censorship is made to appear seamless, the climate for self-censorship is completely naturalized. Indeed, it can be argued that, in China today, selfcensorship is culturally prescribed. According to China Informant 7 (2016a), self-censorship is a “basic instinct” that only those who have spent time in the west feel compelled to discuss. State authorities make use of the cases where they do intervene – and a strategic unpredictability to these interventions – to elicit self-censorship at times and places of non-intervention (China Informant 3 2015). Within large state museums, the minder plays an important role. As China Informant 3 (2015) recounts, the minder “organizes a weekly meeting in which everyone has to criticize themselves first and then criticize the others in the group. That is our culture of selfcensorship.” At the same time, China Informant 3 (2015) explains, such self-criticism sessions operate on a superficial level to satisfy CPC directives; “honest self-reflection is not to be shown as this is understood as exposing weakness.” And in every museum and gallery, leaders anticipate what might spark the authorities’ ire and deliberate how to remove potential triggers. Public museum directors commonly do a walkthrough of an exhibition before the opening and, if they see a potential problem, require that the relevant curator and/or artist make the necessary changes. This might include the removal of works and the revision of interpretive texts (China Informant 6 2015). The art market is among the most powerful vehicles of self-censorship in China’s arts sector, as politically oriented work does not sell well in the domestic arena. China Informant 6 (2015) remarks, “Undoubtedly, the market is the major factor. It is an effective mechanism for

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regulation. It requires no other hard measures. Art is a commodity.” The systems of government patronage and tenure equally encourage artists and curators to avoid risk-taking and to develop their work in popular and commercial directions (Silbergeld 1997: 302–303; China Informant 7 2016a). Representative of this phenomenon are exhibitions with patriotic themes that continue to be developed by state institutions. For example, the 2016 Chinese Civilization Theme Art Project at the National Museum of China commissioned artists from every province in the country to produce large-scale works that glorify Chinese civilization (Organizing Committee of the Chinese Civilization History Theme Art Project 2016). Artists were assigned particular subjects, titles and even sizes (China Informant 7 2016a) and the Publicity Department of the CPC approved the works in conjunction with the exhibition’s organizing committee. This “approval” process, as detailed by the organizers (Organizing Committee of the Chinese Civilization History Theme Art Project 2016), captures the pressures of self-censorship in such a tightly controlled environment: The Organizing Committee and Experts Committee . . . played an important role in providing guidance for artworks submissions including with regards to their subject matter, variations of expressions, repeated deliberation of initial proposed sketches, and the execution of the final project and end review. Such projects send a message to the wider arts sector that self-censorship is essential to professional success and recognition. Of course, there are many practitioners that work against the grain. But in China, without international connections, it is difficult to work outside the system of self-censorship and earn a living wage (China Informant 7 2016a).

Self-censorship in Hong Kong In Hong Kong, though the pressures to self-censor have traditionally come from the city’s commercial sector, they are increasingly motivated by fears of offending political and business interests in mainland China (Qin 2015; Renfrew 2017: 13, 43–44) such as those that drove the shutdown of Countdown Machine. China’s 2015 abduction and detention of Hong Kong booksellers and publishers who had sold works banned in the mainland sent shockwaves through the city’s cultural sector (Tsui 2017; Palmer 2018). Several high-profile cases of institutional self-censorship over the last several years have prompted artists and curators to recognize the growing intrusion of an ambiguous and shifting “red line” imposed by China. For instance, in 2016, the Asia Society Hong Kong canceled the screening of Evan Chan’s Raise the Umbrellas (2016), a documentary about the Umbrella Movement.The Asia Society justified its decision by stating that a panel discussion due to follow the screening was too heavily weighted with pro-democracy speakers (Lai 2016). And, in 2014, the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery covertly refused to exhibit Otto Li’s Faces of Representatives (2014) advocating universal suffrage. The work was part of the traveling show Conforming to Vicinity – A Cross-Strait Four Region Artistic Exchange Project, previously hosted in Macau and Taiwan and scheduled to move subsequently to Shenzhen in mainland China. Consisting of four busts depicting the leaders of each of the four locales to which the exhibition would tour, Li’s sculpture was produced with a 3D

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printer. He programmed the printer to fabricate the finish of the busts along a spectrum of smooth to rough quasi-pixilated surfaces corresponding to the number of votes each of the leaders had won to be elected; the bust of Xi Jinping, reflecting 2,952 votes, was smoother than that of Hong Kong’s then Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, representing 689 votes, while the bust of Taiwan leader Ma Ying-Jeou was smoothest of all, portraying almost seven million votes. Li submitted his proposal when the exhibit was in Taiwan and it was accepted; however, the Hong Kong venue, the Hong Kong University Museum, insisted that the work could only be displayed in a peripheral space outside the galleries where the larger exhibition was installed (Li 2015) and where the busts would be easily overlooked. The Museum denied it had exercised institutional self-censorship, pinning the blame on Li (ejinsight 2015). Li (2015) explains that the situation for freedom of artistic expression in Hong Kong is so volatile that it is challenging to understand when and how self-censorship is occurring. The ambitious new Hong Kong museum of contemporary art, M+, due to open in 2020– 2021 and funded through the public purse, is a case in point. In a 2015 pre-opening exhibition of works from its permanent collection, held at the Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, England, and ArtisTree in Hong Kong, M+ conveyed mixed messages. At all three venues, the exhibition contained art known to be sensitive to Beijing authorities, including an installation by Ai Weiwei and a series of photographs of the 1989 Tian’anman Square pro-democracy demonstrations by Liu Heung Shing. However, at the Hong Kong venue, the first part of the exhibition title, Right Is Wrong: M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art, was dropped and the programming and catalog edited to limit politically subversive messaging (Qin 2015). Pi Li (quoted in Qin 2015), curator of the exhibition, reflected,“The problem in Hong Kong is not censorship. . . .The problem in Hong Kong is self-censorship.” Speaking of the environment for artistic expression in Hong Kong, former Director of M+ Lars Nittve (quoted in Qin 2015) adds, ominously, “Politics are real here. . . . It has real consequences and you have to take it very seriously.” Kacey Wong asserts that the small number of cases of institutional self-censorship in Hong Kong museums that have been made public is endemic of a much larger trend of curators removing works they anticipate might anger Beijing. He predicts that, in future, Hong Kong artists who push the boundaries will have to go underground (Tsui 2017). Clearly, given the eroding environment for freedom of artistic expression, developing a “craftsmanship” of resistance is more important than ever.

The “craftsmanship” of resistance Indeed, practitioners facing diverse conditions of self-censorship – in China, Hong Kong, the UK and around the world – have devised a wealth of clever strategies and tactics that demonstrate a clear sense of agency. As China Informant 1 (2016) states, “If you take responsibility for self-censorship, you can win some freedom from censorship.” This notion of agency serves as a corrective to the perpetrator–victim duality that has dominated censorship discourse in the arts. As Hong Kong Informant 2 (2016) remarks, practitioners in mainland China have developed a “craftsmanship” of resistance that Hongkongers find increasingly relevant and adapt for their own purposes. The goal across cultures is not to eradicate self-censorship – which is neither realistic nor desired – but, rather, to accept

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that curating involves a delicate dance between resisting and exercising self-censorship. UK Informant 1 (2015) remarks: On the one hand, there is a positive aspect to navigating self-censorship, to taking control and being able to manipulate the conditions in which this censorship is taking place, but, at the same time, the necessity for self-censorship is a testament to certain socio-political conditions that we have to work within and that we cannot deny. Making ethically informed decisions in navigating the pressures of self-censorship is central to the curator’s brief.

Lobbing the ping-pong ball at the edge of your opponent’s side of the table – or – “be water, my friend” In mainland China and, increasingly, in Hong Kong, where pressures are exerted primarily by political and business interests, the pervasiveness of censorship makes it fruitless to discern between methods employed to resist censorship and self-censorship. “It’s all about creativity,” China Informant 3 (2016) declares. Sometimes, this work involves appropriating the tactics of stealth modeled by the censor. “I know how to do things quietly. The cultural revolution taught us to do this. . . . We know how to live in difficult situations,” China Informant 7 (2016b) reflects. There are many distinct pathways to negotiating self-censorship but a common refrain in both China and Hong Kong is to test and shift the boundaries whenever possible. Daniel (2015) explains what he learned from Chinese colleagues while an independent curator in Shenzhen: If you know that a certain act will get you censored, there’s not much you achieve by attempting and failing to carry out that act because that’s already a known.What’s much more interesting is to work on the limits, on the border areas. In Chinese the common term used to describe this is cabianqiu – pushing the boundaries – and it originates in the game of ping pong. Cabianqiu represents the idea of strategically lobbing the ball at the edge of the opponent’s side of the table so that it is impossible for them to make a successful returning shot (Esherick 2014). The metaphor makes clear, however, the limitations of the strategy; a player can only push the boundaries so far or the ball will land beyond the table and they will lose the point – or the game. In fact, gamesmanship characterizes much of the work of maintaining curatorial integrity in China. For example, China Informant 3 (2015) describes trying to stay one step ahead of internet censors as a “cat and mouse game.” At the same time, it is critical to acknowledge the risks to safety of oneself and others when pushing the boundaries of artistic expression “to the edge of the ping pong table” and to maintain one’s own ethical boundaries in the process. Daniel (2015) asks, “At what point does the testing of boundaries put you in the line of fire where the potential fallout moves from censorship to repression? That’s a really dangerous game.” Hongkongers have their own distinct metaphors to describe how they push boundaries. Among the most popular is “Be water, my friend,” words the late Hong Kong martial artist

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and film star Bruce Lee (n.d.) first spoke in a US television series but which became among his most definitive pronouncements, “water can flow . . . water can crash . . . be water, my friend.” Shaped by Daoist philosophy, in which water connotes both power and flexibility, Lee’s words have come to be understood as expressing the need to constantly vary one’s approach, gaining strength through unpredictability. Hong Kong’s pro-democracy advocates, including those negotiating the pressures of censorship and self-censorship, have used Lee’s words to inform their tactics (Higgins 2019; Li and Ives 2019). At the time of writing, Hongkongers are still able to pursue their artistic and curatorial goals in ways that are more direct than those of their mainland peers but the situation is increasingly precarious.

Negotiating censorship and self-censorship in China and Hong Kong Practitioners in China and Hong Kong have developed a diverse toolkit of strategies and tactics to resist censorship and self-censorship. Among the most fundamental of these in China and, increasingly, also in Hong Kong, is limiting exposure to sensitive times and places. Chinabased independent curator Rebecca Catching (2012: 234, 244) reports, for instance, that she avoids scheduling events during important days in the CPC calendar when authorities are on alert to avoid controversy; simultaneously, she plans important shows to open at Chinese New Year when officials may be distracted or on vacation. In the context of journalism in China, Wang (2012) recounts that sensitive stories are held back during moments of political strain and published later when the tension dissipates. Tsai (2013), also referring to the Chinese media context, explains that journalists take advantage of the time between when an incident breaks out and when the government decides to censor it. Artists and curators also use such methods. In Hong Kong, Add Oil’s blatant disregard of the sensitivities of timing was undoubtedly a factor in the removal of Countdown Machine. Practitioners keen to successfully navigate the pressures of censorship and self-censorship often strategize to situate venues and projects in locations not under the radar of authorities. In China, this might include second- and third-tier cities or overlooked neighborhoods in first-tier cities (Salmenkari 2004: 246). Catching (2012: 246) notes that it is important to choose locations away from government or military buildings. In Hong Kong, while Kacey Wong’s placement of I Have No Enemies in a remote undisclosed coastal setting references the scattering of Liu Xiaobo’s ashes, it also helps secure the longevity of the sculpture, potentially even after 2047, and until its erosion is complete. In China, when the approval process presents daunting barriers, museum staff frequently subvert the mechanisms of bureaucracy. For example, when unable to obtain a license through the usual procedures, curators might buy or rent a license on the open market or operate as a commercial entity (China Informant 3 2015). Sometimes, large museums can have such complex bureaucracies that a practitioner can carve out a pocket for creative practice that is less regulated than others within the matrix of power (Hong Kong Informant 1 2015). And, as Steinfeld (2016) reports, curators fearing that works in an exhibition may be censored will frequently present an alternative version of the show to authorities inspecting it. Artists and curators may also revert to alternative platforms that limit the public-facing exposure of projects – so are less likely to attract the attention of authorities. Artists’ collectives associated with private museums provide a space for discourse outside of the more regulated

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realm of art academies (China Informant 4 2015). And novel types of small-scale institutions tend to fall off the censors’ radar. The non-profit Video Bureau, funded by artist Chen Tong, provides an alternative platform to collect and research video art (TimeOut Beijing 2017; Grogan 2018), a medium often censored when included in museum exhibitions. Because Video Bureau has capacity for only a few people at a time to use its resources, it is not a priority for officials. To avoid flagging up potentially controversial themes, videos are cataloged by artist and title only, not by subject. Within contemporary art museums, curators sometimes carve out secret gallery spaces in staff offices or cupboards where boundary-pushing projects are shared only with trusted individuals (Catching 2012: 241; Steinfeld 2016). Alternatively, practitioners may exhibit these projects in the domestic sphere such as the home of an expatriate or an apartment rented exclusively for that purpose (Salmenkari 2004: 245, 249). Or they will collaborate with colleagues overseas to show the project in a pop-up exhibition internationally, as was done by Oscar Ho with archival material from the Umbrella Movement (Brown University Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and Chinese University Hong Kong 2016). Of course, practitioners today rely most on the digital sphere for alternative platforms to share and discuss contentious work and ideas. While, in China, internet surveillance becomes ever more aggressive, the coded language deployed to evade the censors grows increasingly clever. This includes euphemisms, memes and homophones which are quickly invented and then replaced as their meaning is detected (Janser 2011: 245; China Informant 3 2015). Wordplay occurs outside of the digital domain as well. Practitioners avoid contentious keywords. For instance, in his writing on anarchism, artist Ou Ning uses the transliteration an na qi, rather than the Chinese or English term (see Chapter 6). Add Oil’s original title and interpretation for Countdown Machine also reflect this strategy. And when interpreting art with potentially sensitive content, artists and curators will use abstract jargon to make the object seem benign (Salmenkari 2004: 247; Catching 2012: 248); Ellen Pau (2016) reports that she slips politically oriented works into Hong Kong exhibitions by writing elusive curatorial statements. In addition, when working under high-ranking individuals at state museums, practitioners carve out space for autonomy by using verbal and body language signaling humility and predictability. Explaining that mainland colleagues mentored her in these tactics when she worked in a large Beijing museum, Hong Kong Informant 1 (2015) explains, “This makes them [senior staff] feel they can trust you and that they have the upper hand.” Strategic alliances are all-important in building resilience. Leaderless horizontal networks of individuals that share the same values have proven effective as they spread responsibility among the group while offering mutual support and the pooling of resources (Salmenkari 2004: 240–241; Hong Kong Informant 4 2015). Diversifying the circle of people one can turn to, including with international colleagues and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is also vital (Hong Kong Informant 4 2015). Having financial independence is hugely helpful as well (Salmenkari 2004: 247; China Informant 6 2015). Most contemporary art museums in China are privately supported through an individual sponsor, typically a banking or real estate group, which provides scope for experimentation. However, these museums are undergoing increased government scrutiny (China Informant 2 2016) and the lack of diversity in their income streams places them in a precarious situation (Movius 2017). Refusing funding from sources that can curtail one’s autonomy is equally important. Increasingly, Hong Kong practitioners are rejecting funding from Chinese corporate sponsors (Hong Kong Informant 7 2015).

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Concerning publicity, in China, practitioners will commonly avoid the media whenever there is potential for controversy as this can trigger attention from the authorities (Catching 2012: 235). As China Informant 6 (2015) reports, contemporary art circles often operate as a kind of underworld (jianghu). The time, location and program of events are distributed at the last minute through personal channels (Salmenkari 2004: 247; Hong Kong Informant 8 2016) and many programs are “closed door” events that enable participants to speak freely (China Informant 1 2016). To date, the press in Hong Kong remains independent but the city’s main newspaper, The South China Morning News, is owned by Alibaba (Chow 2015), the Chinese technology giant, and, at the time of writing, the media is being targeted in pro-democracy demonstrations (Sataline 2019). Clearly, while empowering, the craftsmanship of resisting censorship and self-censorship in China and Hong Kong limits engagement and impact. China Informant 3 (2015) acknowledges the momentary conditions in which one is able to experience freedom of artistic expression as “freedom in a cage.” China Informant 6 (2015) is also circumspect, stating, “We can only do something in micro-political circumstances. . . . Massive mobilization is impossible.” However, for many practitioners, resilience means accepting a different, longer term perception of time. That different perception can lead to sacrificing one artist in an exhibition who might be on a blacklist so that the larger project can take place (Daniel 2015). It can also mean that, when one artist in an exhibition is censored, the institution cancels the whole show so as not to put the other artists involved under the spotlight (China Informant 2 2018). Some curators will nonetheless find ways to make visible the act of removal so that it is noted and can shape future strategies. Such was the case in the 2017 Song Dong retrospective at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai; several video screens, left blank after the works installed there were censored, read “This video has been removed for nontechnical reasons.” China Informant 6 (2015) speaks eloquently about the hard ethical choices to be made: I think continuity is more essential than the glory of dying to be a hero. In the context of China, dying as a hero doesn’t have any impact. They [state authorities] have every means to suffocate you. . . . Broken jades are meaningless. We would rather remain as an intact tile. And while practitioners based in neoliberal societies do not assume the same level of risk as their colleagues in China and Hong Kong, the choices we all face in negotiating the pressures of self-censorship can be equally complex.

Conclusion Reflecting on the pressures of censorship and self-censorship that Hong Kong artists and curators have encountered during the evolving 2019 pro-democracy protests, Hong Kong sound and installation artist Sampson Young (quoted in McMahon 2019) asserts: The events in the last couple of months have taught us all, I think, the importance of being vigilant – to resist as a community but also to self-reflect as individual artists to ensure that our imagination remains unhindered under these increasingly difficult

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circumstances, that we don’t ask for permission to be human, that we are passionately polemical but also wise, [and] that we never apologize for being complex. Together, the stories recounted in this chapter define what it means to be vigilant – to recognize the pressures of self-censorship – and to resist – to negotiate these pressures – in selfreflective ways.The craftsmanship of such work lies in deploying strategies and tactics that are both polemical and wise. This craftsmanship, whether framed through the concept of ping pong, martial arts or something else entirely, is fundamental to the curator’s remit.

Acknowledgments Research for this paper was generously funded by the British Academy. I am also grateful to the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at Chinese University Hong Kong for hosting the research network meetings that inform the chapter. Oscar Ho kindly introduced me to many of the Hong Kong and China informants, helped organize the research network and interviews in Hong Kong and also conducted one of the interviews. Richard Sandell, Ceciel Brouwer and Vivian Ting provided insightful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Jen Bergevin, Ceciel Brouwer, Jodi Kwok Sze yin, Silver Lee, Lu Sipei, Zhu Xueer, Zhang Zheng, Zhu Mohan and Cheung Chui Yu contributed invaluable research assistance.

Note 1 When referring to informants, I use the descriptors China, Hong Kong and the UK not to instrumentalize their identities but, rather, to make clear the connections between the location where these participants are based and the insights and experiences that they share. I use the terms mainland China and China interchangeably to refer to the Chinese mainland under direct jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, not including the special administrative areas of Hong Kong and Macau.

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Brown University Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and Chinese University Hong Kong (2016) “The Umbrella Movement.” Online. www.brown.edu/academics/public-humanities/ events/umbrella-movement-youth-activism Bruce, K. (2017) “Comment, ‘Crossing Borders, Building Trust’ Symposium,” School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. 16 June. Bukantas, A. (2015) Interview with the Author. 14 April. Bunning, K. (2017) “Comment, ‘Crossing Borders, Building Trust’ Symposium,” School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. 16 June. Cameron, F. and Kelly, L. (eds.) (2010) Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Carnegie, E. (2006) “ ‘It Wasn’t All Bad’: Representations of Working-Class Cultures Within Social History Museums and Their Impacts on Audiences,” Museum and Society, 4(2): 69–83. Online. journals. le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/79/94 Catching, R. (2012) “The New Face of Censorship: State Control of the Visual Arts in Shanghai, 2008– 2011,” Journal of Visual Art Practice, 11(2): 231–249. Chan, N.K.M., Nachman, L. and Mok, C.W.J. (2019) “How Fears of ‘Mainlandization’ Fuel Hong Kong’s Mass Protests,” The Washington Post. 3 July. Online. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/07/03/ how-fears-mainlandization-fuel-hong-kongs-mass-protests/ Cheung, K. (2016) “Video: Artists Programme Huge ‘2047 Countdown’ on ICC During China Official’s Visit,” Hong Kong Free Press. 18 May. Online. www.hongkongfp.com/2016/05/18/ hong-kong-artists-programme-huge-2047-countdown-on-icc-building-during-zhang-dejiang/ China Informant 1 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and SelfCensorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. China Informant 2 (2015) Interview with the Author. 20 September. China Informant 2 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and SelfCensorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. China Informant 2 (2018) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and SelfCensorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 20 January. China Informant 3 (2015) Interview with the Author. 19 September. China Informant 3 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and SelfCensorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. China Informant 4 (2015) Interview with the Author. 20 September. China Informant 5 (2017) Interview with the Author. 17 November. China Informant 6 (2015) Interview with Oscar Ho. 19 November. China Informant 7 (2016a) “Censorship in Chinese Museums and Galleries,” Lecture, Cultural Management Programme, Chinese University Hong Kong. 9 December. China Informant 7 (2016b) Interview with the Author. 9 December. Chow, C. (2015) “Alibaba Buys ‘South China Morning Post’ Group’s Media Business, Pledges to Uphold Editorial Independence and Remove Paywall,” South China Morning Post. 11 December. Online. www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1890060/alibaba-buys-south-china-morningpost-groups-media-business Chow, V. (2016) “Hong Kong Wants to Remain a Global Arts Hub While Censoring Political Art,” Quartz. 24 May. Online. qz.com/691105/hong-kong-wants-to-remain-a-global-arts-hub-whilecensoring-political-art/ Coetzee, J.M. (1996) Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Daniel, M. (2015) Interview with the Author. 14 April. Dubin, S. (1994) Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Civil Actions, London and New York: Routledge. Dubin, S. (1999) Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation! New York and London: New York University.

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Economy, E. (2018) “The Great Firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s Internet Shutdown,” The Guardian. 29 July. Online. www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firewall-of-china-xi-jinpingsinternet-shutdown Ejinsight (2015) “Oldest HK Museum Accused on Censorship Over Political Exhibit,” Ejinsight. 10 February. Online. www.ejinsight.com/20150210-oldest-hk-museum-accused-of-censorship-overpolitical-exhibit/ Esherick, J.W. (2014) “On Dealing with Chinese Censors,” ChinaFile. 14 October. Online. www.china file.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/dealing-chinese-censors Farrington, J. (2013) “Taking the Offensive: Defending Artistic Freedom of Expression in the UK,” Index on Censorship. May. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/takingtheoffensive/ Favre, J. (2019) “Hong Kong: Why the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ Model Is on Its Last Legs,” The Conversation. 19 June. Online. theconversation.com/hong-kong-why-the-one-country-twosystems-model-is-on-its-last-legs-118960 Fleming, D. (2016) “A Sense of Justice: Museums as Human Rights Actors,” The International Council of Museums Magazine, 68(1): 8–9. Freedom House (2019) “Freedom in the World: China.” Online. freedomhouse.org/report/freedomworld/2019/china Galvan, B. (2018) “Artistic Freedom in Hong Kong: Self-Censorship, Culture of Fear Growing, Creatives Say,” South China Morning Post. 28 November. Online. www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/ article/2175157/artistic-freedom-hong-kong-self-censorship-culture-fear Gan, N. (2017) “Artist Behind Daring Tribute to Late Dissident Liu Xiaobo Out of Contact in China,” South China Morning Post. 16 December. Online. www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/ article/2124573/artists-daring-tribute-late-dissident-liu-xiaobo-goes Grogan, B. (2018) “Interview: Guangzhou’s Own Chen Tong of Video Bureau,” That’s Mag Beijing. 23 February. Online. www.thatsmags.com/beijing/post/22437/interview-guangzhou-s-own-chentong-of-video-bureau Guthrie, A. (2016) “Artist Kacey Wong Combines Individual Initiative with Political Sympathies,” Hong Kong Free Press. 31 October. Online. www.hongkongfp.com/2016/10/31/artist-kaceywong-combines-individual-initiative-with-political-sympathies/ Hartman, A. (2015) A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Heal, S. (2015) Interview with the Author. 14 April. Hernández, J. (2017) “Chinese Citizens Evade Internet Censors to Remember Liu Xiaobo,” The New York Times. 14 July. Online. www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/world/asia/china-liu-xiaobo-censor ship-internet.html Higgins, A. (2019) “ ‘Retake Hong Kong’: A Movement, a Slogan and an Identity Crisis,” The New York Times. 14 August. Online. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/world/asia/hong-kong-protestsidentity-china-edward-leung.html Ho, O.H.K. (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and SelfCensorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Holquist, M. (1994) “Introduction – Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship,” PMLA, 109(1): 14–25. Homburg, C. and Ripelle, C. (eds.) (2019) Gauguin Portraits, Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada. Hong Kong Informant 1 (2015) Interview with the Author. 19 September. Hong Kong Informant 2 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Hong Kong Informant 3 (2015) Interview with the Author. 18 September. Hong Kong Informant 4 (2015) Interview with the Author. 18 September.

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Hong Kong Informant 5 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Hong Kong Informant 6 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Hong Kong Informant 7 (2015) Interview with the Author. 21 September. Hong Kong Informant 8 (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Index on Censorship and Vivarta (2015) “Art & the Law: Guides to the Law on Free Expression and the Arts in England and Wales.” Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/campaigns/artistic-freedom/ art-and-the-law/ International Council of Museums (2017) “ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums.” Online. icom. museum/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/ICOM-code-En-web.pdf Janes, R.R. (2015) “The End of Neutrality: A Modest Manifesto,” Informal Learning Review, 135: 3–8. Janes, R.R. and Sandell, R. (eds.) (2019) Museum Activism, Museum Meanings Series, London: Routledge. Janser, D. (2011) “The Net of Love Cannot be Blocked.” In Stahel, U. and Janser, D. (eds.) Ai Weiwei: Interlacing, Göttingen: Steidl, pp. 240–248. Jones, J. (2019) “Gauguin Portraits Review – A Buttoned Up, Nervous and Nude Light Cop-Out of a Show,” The Guardian. 3 October. Online. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/oct/03/ gauguin-portraits-review-national-gallery-censorship-prudery-exhibition Judkis, M. (2011) “Ai Weiwei’s Tax Battle: Performance Art or ‘Ransom’?” The Washington Post. 17 November. Online. www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/ai-weiweis-tax-battle-perfor mance-art-or-ransom/2011/11/17/gIQAaVDsUN_blog.html Kong, T. (2018) “Censorship in Hong Kong Since the Umbrella Movement.” Online. medium.com/@ KongTsungGan/censorship-in-hong-kong-since-the-umbrella-movement-an-overview-8024fd ad68fc Lai, C. (2016) “Asia Society Hong Kong Cancels Screening of Umbrella Protest Film Amid Political Concerns,” Hong Kong Free Press. 13 November. Online. www.hongkongfp.com/2016/11/13/ asia-society-hong-kong-cancels-screening-umbrella-protest-film-amid-political-concerns/ Lam, O. (2019) “Political Cartoonist Baiucao Abruptly Cancelled His Hong Kong Exhibition – And then Went Silent,” Global Voices. 6 November. Online. globalvoices.org/2018/11/06/politicalcartoonist-badiucao-abruptly-cancelled-his-hong-kong-exhibition-and-then-went-silent/ Lee, B. (n.d.) “Bruce Lee Be as Water My Friend,” YouTube. Online. www.youtube.com/watch?v= cJMwBwFj5nQ Lee, C.K. and Sing, M. (eds.) (2019) Take Back our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, Ithaca, NY: ILR Press. Lehrer, E., Milton, C. and Patterson, M. (eds.) (2011) Curating Difficult Knowledge, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Levy, E. (2011) “Bioart and Nanoart in a Museum Context: Terms of Engagement.” In Marstine, J. (ed.) Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum, London: Routledge, pp. 445–463. Li, K. and Ives, M. (2019) “Fueling the Hong Kong Protests: A World of Pop Culture Memes,” The New York Times. 2 August. Online. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/world/asia/hong-kong-protestsmemes.html?searchResultPosition=3&module=inline Li, O. (2015) Interview with the Author. 18 September. Lim, L. (2017) “Censorship and the Politics of Art in Hong Kong,” Dissent. 4 July. Online. www.dissent magazine.org/blog/freedom-expression-attack-hong-kong Liu, X. (2009) “I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement,” Nobel Lecture in Absentia, The Nobel Prize. 23 December. Online. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2010/xiaobo/lecture/

32  Janet Marstine

MacKinnon, R. (2011) “Liberation Technology: China’s ‘Networked Authoritarianism’,” Journal of Democracy, 22(2): 32–46. Macuga, G. (2015) Interview with the Author. 13 April. Man, P. (2016) “Only Numbers,” ArtAsiaPacific, p. 101. Online. artasiapacific.com/Magazine/101/ OnlyNumbers Mannering, L. (2018) “Disappearing Act: What Happened to the Art from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement?” Hong Kong Free Press. 29 September. Online. www.hongkongfp.com/2018/09/29/ disappearing-act-happened-art-hong-kongs-umbrella-movement/ Mao, Z. (1942) “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,Vol. 3, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Online. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selectedworks/volume-3/mswv3_08.htm Marstine, J. (2011) “The Contingent Nature of the New Museum Ethics.” In Marstine, J. (ed.) Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum, London: Routledge, pp. 3–25. McClean, D. (2016) “Commentary. Art and the Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework and its Impact on Artistic Freedom of Expression,” Index on Censorship. 16 February. Online. www.indexoncensorship. org/art-law-commentary-daniel-mcclean-testing-artistic-freedom-in-uk-courts/ McMahon, K. (2019) “ ‘The Importance of Being Vigilant’: Hong Kong Artists Speak to Turmoil at Home,” Art News. 4 September. Online. www.artnews.com/2019/09/04/hong-kong-artists-speakto-turmoil/ Meyer, R. (2002) Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, Ideologies of Desire Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mintcheva, S. (2012) “Scare Tactics,” Index on Censorship, 4: 167–176. Mintcheva, S. (2016) “Introduction: Self-Policing and Self-Censorship,” Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83(1): 207–210. Moore, N. (2013) “Censorship Is,” Australian Humanities Review, 54. Online. australianhumanitiesreview. org/2013/05/01/censorship-is/ Movius, L. (2017) “Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Sold to Chinese Investors,” The Art Newspaper. 10 October. Online. www.theartnewspaper.com/news/ullens-center-for-contemporary-art-soldto-chinese-investors Movius, L. (2019) “Self-Censorship on the Rise as Hong Kong Grows Closer to China,” The Art Newspaper. 27 March. Online. www.theartnewspaper.com/news/censorship-fears-increase-as-hong-konggrows-closer-to-china Müller, B. (2004) “Censorship and Cultural Regulation: Mapping the Territory.” In Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age: Critical Studies, Vol. 22, Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–32. Online. brill. com/view/book/edcoll/9789401200950/B9789401200950-s001.xml Muñoz-Alonso, L. (2015) “MACBA Director Bartomeu Marí Sacks Curators and Resigns Following Sodomy Sculpture Scandal,” Artnet. 23 March. Online. news.artnet.com/exhibitions/macbadirector-bartomeu-mari-resigns-280692 Museums Association (2015) “Code of Ethics for Museums.” Online. www.museumsassociation.org/ download?id=1155827 National Coalition Against Censorship (2019) “Guidelines for State Arts Agencies, Museums, University Galleries and Performance Spaces.” Online. ncac.org/resource/guidelines-for-state-arts-agenciesmuseums-university-galleries-and-performance-spaces/ Organizing Committee of the Chinese Civilization History Theme Art Project (2016) “Introduction.” National Museum of China. Online. en.chnmuseum.cn/Portals/0/web/exhibition/exhibitions/ 161120Chines-Epic/en.html Oxford English Dictionary (2018) Add Oil, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online. public.oed.com/ appeals/add-oil-expressing-encouragement/ Palmer, A.W. (2018) “The Case of Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers,” The New York Times. 3 April. Online. www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/magazine/the-case-of-hong-kongs-missing-booksellers.html

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Pau, E. (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Pau, E. and Ha Thuc, C. (2016) “Joint Statement.” Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Online. www.hkadc.org.hk/?p=14364&lang=en Pearlman, E. (2016) “1,588-Foot-Tall Artwork Lights up a Political Inferno in Hong Kong,” Hyperallergic. 1 June. Online. hyperallergic.com/301716/1588-foot-tall-artwork-lights-up-a-politicalinferno-in-hong-kong/ People’s Republic of China (1997) “The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.” Online. www.basiclaw.gov.hk/en/basiclawtext/images/basiclaw_ full_text_en.pdf Phillips, T., Haas, B. and Wang, Z. (2017) “China’s Ocean Burial of Liu Xiaobo Backfires as Activists Stage Sea Protests,” The Guardian. 19 July. Online. www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/19/ chinas-ocean-burial-of-liu-xiaobo-backfires-as-activists-stage-sea-protests Pollack, B. (2015) “The State of Hong Kong’s Art Scene,” Art News. 6 January. Online. www.artnews. com/2015/01/06/art-during-hong-kong-umbrella-movement/ Qin, A. (2015) “In Hong Kong, Fears for an Art Museum,” The New York Times. 25 December. Online. www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/arts/international/in-hong-kong-fears-for-an-art-museum.html Qin, A. (2016) “Sinosphere: A Subversive Message in Hong Kong Goes up in Lights,” The New York Times. 18 May. Online. www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/world/asia/hong-kong-2047-countdownicc.html Ramzy, A. (2014) “Xi Jinping Calls for Artists to Spread ‘Chinese Values’,” The New York Times. 16 October. Online. sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/xi-jinping-calls-for-artists-to-spreadchinese-values/?auth=login-email Renfrew, M. (2017) Uncharted Territory: Culture and Commerce in Hong Kong’s Art World, Melbourne: Penguin Australia. Salmenkari, T. (2004) “Implementing and Avoiding Control: Contemporary Art and the Chinese State,” China: An International Journal, 2(2): 235–261. Sanchez-Kozyreva, C. (2016) “ ‘It’s All Fear Circulating’: Interpreting a Towering Artwork’s Removal in Hong Kong,” Hyperallergic. 6 June. Online. hyperallergic.com/303427/its-all-fear-circulatinginterpreting-a-towering-artworks-removal-in-hong-kong/ Sandell, R. (2017) Museums, Moralities and Human Rights, Museum Meanings Series, London and New York: Routledge. Sataline, S. (2019) “Hong Kong’s Worsening Press Climate,” The Atlantic. 11 October. Online. www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/10/hong-kong-police-are-targeting-press/599815/ Shahid, R. (2013) “Report of the Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights: The Right to Freedom of Expression and Creativity,” Human Rights Council 23rd Session, United Nations General Assembly. 14 March. Online. digitallibrary.un.org/record/755488?ln=en#record-files-collapse-header Silbergeld, J. (1997) “Art Censorship in Socialist China: A Do-It-Yourself System.” In Childs, E. (ed.) Suspended License: Studies in Art and Censorship from the Renaissance to the Present, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, pp. 310–345. Simon, S. (2017) “Remembering Liu Xiaobo, Who Fought for Human Rights in China,” Weekend Edition. National Public Radio. 15 July. Online. www.npr.org/2017/07/15/537311241/rememberingliu-xiaobo-who-fought-for-human-rights-in-china?t=1571146725001 Steel, P. (2005) “Protesters Target the Natural History Museum’s Diamonds,” Museums Journal, 105(8): 7. Online. www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/15554 Steel, P. (2017) “Eric Gill Exhibition to Confront Child Sex Abuse,” Museums Journal. 12 April. Online. www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/12042017-ditchling-museum-exhibitionto-confront-eric-gill-child-sex-abuse Steinfeld, J. (2016) “Art Attack: Ai Weiwei and Other Artists Have Increased the Popularity of Chinese Art, but Censorship has Followed,” Index on Censorship, 45(3): 12–16.

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Sui, C. (2017) “Liu Xiaobo: Censored by China, Supporters Take to Social Media,” BBC News. 19 July. Online. www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-40656483 TimeOut Beijing (2017) “Gallery Visit: Video Bureau.” 10 January. Online. www.timeoutbeijing.com/ features/Art/156163/Gallery-visit-Video-Bureau.html Tsai, S. (2013) “Qu Mei, Qi Meng Yu Fu Quan: Zhong Guo Xin Mei Ti Zuo Wei Ling Lei Chuan Bo de Xing Dong Yu Ying Xiang Tan Xi” (“Disenchantment, Enlightenment, and Empowerment: Activism and Social Influence of New Media as Alternative Communication in China”), Xin Wen Xue Yan Jiu (Mass Communication Research), 116: 127–172. Tsui, E. (2017) “How Has Art Fared Under China’s Rule? The Scene Is Thriving but Some Artists See – or Fear – Censorship,” South China Morning Post. 20 June. Online. www.scmp.com/culture/ arts-entertainment/article/2099102/how-has-art-fared-hong-kong-under-chinas-rule-scene UK Informant 1 (2015) Interview with the Author. 15 April. UK Informant 2 (2015) Interview with the Author. 14 April. Uttam, P. (2019) “What’s at Stake for Hong Kong’s Art Scene in the Extradition Law Protests,” Artsy. 2 July. Online. www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-stake-hong-kongs-art-scene-extradition-lawprotests Voon, C. (2015) “Three Resign from International Museum Committee Board, Demand New Leadership,” Hyperallergic. 12 November. Online. https://hyperallergic.com/252613/three-resign-from-internationalmuseum-committee-board-demand-new-leadership/ Wallis, B., Weems, M. and Yenawine, P. (eds.) (1999) Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, New York: New York University Press. Walsh,V. (2008) “Tate Britain: Curating Britishness and Cultural Diversity,” Tate Papers, 2: 1–18. Online. www2.tate.org.uk/tate-encounters/edition-2/TateEncounters2_VictoriaWalsh.pdf Wang, Y.L. (2012) “Xun Fu vs. Kang Ju: Zhong Guo Zheng Zhi Quan Li Kong Zhi Xia de Xin Wen Zhuan ye Kang Zheng Ce Lue” (“Taming vs. Resistance: The Resistance Strategies of Media Professionalism for Chinese Government Political Power”), Xin Wen Xue Yan Jiu (Mass Communication Research), 110: 43–83. What Next? (2016) “Meeting Ethical and Reputational Challenges: Guidance.” Online. www.what nextculture.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Meeting-Ethical-and-Reputational-ChallengesGuidance.pdf Wilding, F. (2006) “Art Is Not Bioterrorism: The Criminalization of Critical Cultural and Intellectual Production.” In Byrd, C. and Richmond, S. (eds.) Potentially Harmful: The Art of American Censorship, Atlanta: Georgia State University, pp. 102–109. Wong, K. (2017a) “I Have No Enemies by Kacey Wong,” YouTube. 20 September. Online. www.youtube. com/watch?v=9MVS_X9rxQo Wong, K. (2017b) “I Have No Enemies.” Kacey Wong. Online. www.kaceywong.com/i-have-no-enemies Wong, K. (2019) “Everything.” Kacey Wong. Online. www.kaceywong.com/new-blog Wong, S. (2016) “Comment, ‘One Country Two Systems: Negotiating Censorship and Self-Censorship in Hong Kong and Guangdong Exhibition Spaces’,” Research Network Meeting, Chinese University Hong Kong. 10 December. Wong, S. and Lam, J. (2015) “Artists Statement [untitled].” In Lee, M. and Levy, A. (eds.) Add Oil Machine, Slought. 10 December. Online. slought.org/resources/add_oil_machine Woodhouse, A. and Lui, N. (2019) “China’s ‘Artful Dissident’ Beats Censors with Viral Cartoon,” Financial Times. 13 July. Online. www.ft.com/content/250d7ed2-a488-11e9-974c-ad1c6ab5efd1 Wu, H. (1997) “The Hong Kong Clock: Public Time-Telling and Political Time/Space,” Public Culture, 9(3): 329–354. Yang,Y. (n.d.) “Countdown Machine,” Institute for Public Art, Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University. Online. www.instituteforpublicart.org/case-studies/countdown-machine/ Yau, W. (2013) “To Speak of Chinese Performance Art at a Crossroads: Easier Said than Done,” Cheung, S. (trans.), LEAP, p. 21. 16 July. Online. www.leapleapleap.com/2013/07/to-speak-of-chineseperformance-art-at-a-crossroads-easier-said-than-done/

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Yu, E. (2016) “The Daring Message Hidden on Hong Kong’s Tallest Skyscraper,” CNN Travel. 18 May. Online. edition.cnn.com/travel/article/hong-kong-international-commerce-center-hidden-message/ index.html Zhong, R., Li, K. and Cheung, E. (2019) “As Major Hong Kong Companies Fall in Line, Some Workers Push Back,” The New York Times. 23 August. Online. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/world/asia/ hong-kong-protests-accountants.html Zuo, M. (2019) “China has Opened Thousands of New Museums but Who Wants Them?” South China Morning Post. 20 January. Online. www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2182876/ china-ordered-thousands-new-museums-they-were-built-exhibits-and

2 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING Policing of controversial art in the UK Julia Farrington

On the night of 23 September 2014, Inspector Nick Brandon of the British Transport Police (BTP) arrived with a cohort of approximately 50 officers at The Vaults, a performance space in converted railway arches and tunnels underneath London’s Waterloo Station (Plate 2). He had come in response to a call for assistance from two BTP colleagues who were concerned that a planned demonstration was getting beyond their control. Organized by “Boycott the Human Zoo,” the demonstrators were a coalition of anti-racism activists, trade union members, artists, arts organization staff and community groups calling for the withdrawal of Exhibit B, a show by South African artist Brett Bailey, produced by the Barbican and opening that night at The Vaults (Farrington 2015). The show was intended to critique through appropriation the dark European history of objectifying African peoples by putting individuals on display in ethnographic exhibitions. The Barbican’s publicity material described Exhibit B as “a human installation that charts the colonial histories of various European countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when scientists formulated pseudo-scientific racial theories that continue to warp perceptions with horrific consequences” (quoted in Farrington 2015). Brandon approached Sara Myers, who had instigated the Boycott, to find out what was going on. It was clear to Myers that Brandon had heard nothing about the show and was unaware of a deeply polarized debate that had been building around it in the media. Myers told him that the Boycott wanted the show to be withdrawn and, that if it wasn’t, the picket line would return every night of the five-night run (Farrington 2015). Brandon responded that the BTP didn’t have the resources to police this every day; he made his priorities clear by telling Myers, “We need to be out fighting crime. This is much ado about nothing, and we haven’t got the resources to police it” (quoted in Farrington 2015). Brandon advised the manager of The Vaults to cancel the opening night’s show and all subsequent performances. The senior management at the Barbican followed police advice (Farrington 2015). Ten years earlier, a similar scenario had led to the cancellation of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s 2004 play Behzti (Dishonour) at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. After ten days of peaceful demonstrations by members of the Sikh community outside the theater, a small group of protesters turned violent and threw bricks at the building. They also issued death threats to

Policing of controversial art in the UK  37

Kaur Bhatti. The police claimed that they were no longer able to guarantee the safety of the theater and advised the theater director to cancel the show (Farrington and Lehrer 2010a). This advice was followed. These two incidents are part of a small but significant number of cases in which artwork has been removed or performances canceled by an arts institution on the advice of the police. They include One Day, Penny Woolcock’s street-cast fictional film about Birmingham gangs, which Birmingham cinemas refused to screen in 2009 because police advised that showing it would threaten public order (Birds Eye View 2009); The City, a hip-hop opera by a Jerusalembased company, part funded by the Israeli government, canceled by the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe Festival when noisy protests of both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel campaigners threatened to disrupt other shows in nearby venues; and Isis Threaten Sylvania, a satirical artwork removed on the advice of the police because the curators couldn’t pay the £36,000 police required to guarantee the security of the gallery (Armitstead and Jones 2015).1 The common thread connecting these cases was not the question of police capacity but of police priority. I call this the “much ado about nothing” syndrome – in which the police give little weight or importance to supporting provocative artistic expression when it is causing, or risks causing, protest. Brandon’s succinct statement to Myers captures four imperatives within contemporary policing that appear to guide arts-related incidents. First, the police have more important things to do (“fighting crime”); second, a demonstration relating to an artwork does not have to be taken seriously (“much ado about nothing”); third, the police are limited in what they are able to do (“they haven’t got the resources”); and, finally, as the use of the word “it” suggests (“we haven’t got the resources to police it”), the police are unwilling to get involved in the complex interplay of conflicting and competing rights represented by the protest outside The Vaults. These rights include: artists’ rights to freedom of expression to create provocative art; the right to peaceful protest against expression that one finds abhorrent; and the cultural rights of the audience to freely access the full range of artistic and cultural expression (Shaheed 2013). Defending these rights is, in fact, a central part of core policing duties, as I will demonstrate, and yet is dismissed lightly in the cases I examine. The works that appear to be most vulnerable to the “much ado about nothing” syndrome are either created by artists of color and/or address the subjects of race or religion. The evidence I put forward in this article suggests that the police would rather suppress artwork exploring race and religion than risk provocation of communities that experience high levels of inequality and tension in relations with the police. Theater maker Javaad Alipoor (quoted in Farrington 2018) put forward his analysis of the racialization of risk in UK culture, “We lionize risks that are about white people and white canon and white artists; but where risks are attached to black, color, Muslim [sic] they are too difficult or too hard to take.”This racialization of risk makes artworks exploring the tensions and divisions within and between communities and ideologies vulnerable to censorship, foreclosing important debate and further marginalizing diversity of voices.

Policing responsibilities The police have multiple and what can be seen as conflicting responsibilities.Their core operational duties include “protecting life and property, preserving order, preventing the commission of offences, bringing offenders to justice” and the additional duties “that are prescribed

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under legislation and common law,” including community cohesion duties (National Policing Improvement Agency n.d.). Crucially, as with all public authorities, the police are governed by The Human Rights Act (United Kingdom 1998),2 which embeds the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in British Law. Freedom of expression, including speech that is provocative, is protected under Part 1, Article 10, of the ECHR. As explained by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (2015), this protection “extends to the expression of views that may shock, disturb or offend the deeply-held beliefs of others.” As Sir Stephen Sedley, former Court of Appeal Judge (quoted in Index on Censorship and Vivarta 2015a), declared: “Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.” The “Core Principles of Policing,” developed by the College of Policing and guiding all policing planning and action, are underpinned by the obligations written into the Human Rights Act. The obligation to support provocative freedom of expression is written in the strongest possible terms. The Principles state that the police must support lawful expression when it is threatened by the “potentially unlawful action” of a third party in response to the expression, “Action cannot be taken against individuals on the basis that they are acting in a manner the likely consequence of which would be to provoke violence in others” (College of Policing 2018).The Principles also stress that every alternative avenue to taking action against individuals has to be explored,“Where – and only where – there is reasonable belief that there are no other means whatsoever” (my italics) can the lawful exercise of rights by an “innocent” party be restricted by the police (College of Policing 2018). This is an intervention of the last resort, or so-called “test of necessity, which can only be justified in truly extreme and exceptional circumstances” (College of Policing 2018). And, yet, the circumstances in which Exhibit B, Behzti (Dishonour) and the other aforementioned artworks were canceled or removed on the advice of the police could not be described as “truly extreme and exceptional.” Instead, a pattern emerges in which the police “advise” the removal of provocative work in order to dispel or even, as I discuss below, to avoid the potential of protest arising, falling short of action of “last resort.” Freedom of expression is a fundamental, but not an absolute, right because it “carries with it duties and responsibilities” (Equality and Human Rights Commission 2015). This places limitations on that right, as described in Part 2 of Article 10 of the ECHR (2015): Freedom of expression can be limited “in the interests of national security or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, to protect health or morals” and the list goes on. Each of these limitations – whether relating to counterterrorism, public order, child protection, obscene publications or other issues – is justified by a legal framework. As a result, policing is a delicate balancing act in which an officer in charge must exercise his/her professional judgment to weigh up competing concerns. In that balancing act, provocative artistic expression does not appear to be a priority; the police would seem to be more interested in enforcing the limitations on such expression. As social media has made protests easier to mobilize and intensified the urge to silence opinion that we find abhorrent; as heightened, racialized security concerns and austerity measures influence police decision-making; and as police intervention is likely to expedite the removal of provocative work, it is more important than ever for curators and arts organizations to assert their rights when challenged and to be confident in communicating with the police. From a free speech perspective, the concern is that provocative work may appear to bring so many burdensome responsibilities that the curator self-censors, choosing less contentious work when programming.

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In this chapter, I will examine the “much ado about nothing” approach of the UK police within the context of their obligations to protect freedom of expression, as expressed in the Core Principles of Policing, which are underpinned by Human Rights principles (College of Policing 2018), to illuminate policing roles and attitudes and the rights and responsibilities at play when arts organizations show provocative content. I will begin by examining two recent cases in which police intervention over protests led to the cancellation of a show or removal of artwork: Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B (canceled by the Barbican September 2014) and the anonymous artist “Mimsy’s” Isis Threaten Sylvania (removed by the Mall Galleries from the Passion for Freedom exhibition September 2015). I will then look at the successful strategies that saw through Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s Behud (Beyond Belief), which premiered at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in 2010; the play went ahead without incident after police intervention threatened to derail the production (Farrington and Lehrer 2010a). My analysis of these cases aims to provide insight into policing decision-making, policy, behavior and attitudes in relation to the arts; in addition, by offering guidance on how to exercise their rights and responsibilities, it attempts to support curators to withstand the pressure toward self-censorship that police intervention can apply and to emphasize what we stand to lose as a society if the police remain unchallenged. Considering these issues can help curators to gain confidence and to interact more effectively with the police, so as to avoid risk-averse preemptive cancellations. It can also advance the kind of policing that the arts sector both wants and needs. Constructive dialogue toward mutual understanding between police and curators has the potential to allay fears that lead to self-censorship and the unsettling process of calculating whether an institution can afford artistic freedom.

Exhibit B Exhibit B interrogates deep-seated racial tensions and inequalities that exist in post-colonial Western society. The installation links historical racist attitudes toward enslaved individuals to contemporary racism toward refugees through a series of tableaux vivants; these tableaux recreated the horrendous nineteenth-century practice of fashioning “human zoos” which put African people on display as curiosities to confirm and deepen the prejudices of European audiences (Farrington 2015). Bailey’s show, which had been staged without incident at the Edinburgh Festival a month previously, generated fierce debate when the London production was announced in the media. Images from the show, depicting the darkest excesses of inhumanity inflicted on enslaved individuals in colonial times, went viral. “Boycott the Human Zoo” was formed in response and a petition calling for its withdrawal, signed by 22,000 people, was presented to the Barbican board. Far from being “much ado about nothing,” the protest at The Vaults concerned urgent and timely issues of race and representation and who has a voice in UK culture. It was clear that, from Inspector Brandon’s point of view, it was imperative that the demonstration was dispersed as quickly as possible. The police had not taken into account indications in the media that public opinion was so deeply divided over the artwork. Repeated attempts by the Barbican to convey their concerns were largely ignored and the planning for and handling of the picket indicate that the police made it a low priority. Only two officers were allocated to police the picket on the opening night; inadequate police resources at the venue made escalation more likely (Farrington 2015). After the situation intensified, Inspector Brandon arrived with 50 reinforcements, dogs and

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helicopters. Kieran Vanstone, the venue manager of The Vaults, recounted that when Inspector Brandon issued his “advice” to close the show, five police officers stood over Vanstone while he wrote a letter agreeing to the Boycott demand to withdraw the show for the five-night run (Farrington 2015). The police officers told him that if he didn’t do as advised, he could risk triggering riots such as those that erupted in 2011 in cities across the UK following the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot and killed by police in London (BBC 2011).Vanstone (quoted in Farrington 2015) recalled that he was “definitely influenced by the amount of fear that had been put into me. . . . [T]he police used me to make that decision to get the protesters to disperse.” Although the police exerted considerable pressure, they adhered to the word “advice” in describing their actions. As Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Thomas (quoted in Farrington 2015) of the British Transport Police later explained: Of course, this was “police advice” and the final decision (as it always is) to continue or cancel an event lies with the event organizer. On 23rd September the event organizer appears to have decided to cancel the event that night and on all subsequent nights, based upon the advice of Inspector Brandon. The word “advice” in this context is misleading and disingenuous, given the pressure placed on Vanstone. “Advice” may sound like an option but, as the Barbican’s Head of Communications Lorna Gemmell (quoted in Farrington 2015) stated, the senior team was asking the next day how any arts organization can “take the decision to go against police advice in the scenario where there is actual risk to public safety.”3 The police offer was a Hobson’s Choice as no viable alternative to closure for the entire run was put forward. Exhibit B and the Boycott that opposed it had opened up serious and very public debate about racism, representation, authorship and who speaks for whom in contemporary culture. By “advising” closure, the debate was diverted onto apportioning blame for the cancellation and the rights and wrongs of censorship. The demonstrators welcomed the result: “Boycott the Human Zoo’s” spokesperson Myers (quoted in Farrington 2019a) hailed the cancellation as a landmark victory in anti-racism activism at a time when “the black community was campaigning against so many things – deaths in police custody, acts of racism – and there never seemed to be any victory.” For others, however, such as cast member Stella Odumlami (quoted in Farrington 2019a), closing down the performances was a devastating act that highlighted the lack “of space and opportunity to have these conversations [about] . . . what the West did in Africa as a form of genocide.” Whichever view you take over this intensely divisive piece, the police clearly fell short of the “test of last resort,” as lawyer Hugo Leith (2017) remarked, by “immediately moving to shut down” for its whole run an arts project that was wholly legal “because it is causing them [the police] extra work.” Exhibit B met with a very different set of policing priorities when it went to Paris two months after the London cancellation. Here, too, police handling of provocative art was inadequate and deeply troubling. Again, the show attracted angry demonstrations outside the venue. This time, however, a large cohort of police was in attendance, armed in full riot gear to ensure that audiences could access the performance unimpeded by the group of a hundred or so protesters. Diane Morgan, then director of NitroBeat, who had cast the show in London, reported on her experience witnessing the scene in Paris. With “blood of black protestors on the pavements,” the context for performing Exhibit B had shifted completely. “A piece that

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I supported as exposing historical and current racism had become an opportunity for racist practices and increased fear of all black people, because some had exercised their right to protest” (Morgan 2018). In London, the artist’s rights were of secondary importance, whereas in Paris, they were of primary importance. And, yet, both responses failed to achieve the necessary balance between the competing rights of the artists, the audience and the protestors. The debate in the UK continued after the cancellation of the show at The Vaults in London but the focus had shifted from whether or not the project was racist to who was responsible for censoring it.The Barbican was labeled a censor by some for capitulating to the police “advice” (Farrington 2015), while others laid blame for the closure on “mob rule” (Rahman 2014). My dissatisfaction with both of those positions led me to investigate the role that police had played in determining the outcome and to find that they were as responsible as any other party in censoring this work. Louise Jeffries, who was Head of Arts at the Barbican when Exhibit B was staged, reports that the cancellation of the project strongly impacted the organization, prompting a shift in their approach to the police. “I feel we’d question this kind of decision-making more now, with the work we’ve done since the closure making us much better informed on the legal framework around freedom of expression,” Jeffries (quoted in Farrington 2019a) remarks. This shift acknowledges the need to take a robust and informed stance in negotiating with the police.

Isis Threaten Sylvania – putting a price on freedom of expression Composed of seven tableaux featuring “Sylvanian Families” toy collectibles – anthropomorphic woodland animal figurines and accouterments – enacting ISIS attacks on innocent victims, Mimsy’s satirical Isis Threaten Sylvania (Plate 3) celebrated free speech, as did the other works in the 2015 Passion for Freedom exhibition at London’s Mall Gallery. The exhibition curators had contacted the police well in advance of the exhibition opening, asking them if they would be willing to provide security for their special guest Bonya Roy, wife of the murdered Bangladeshi-American blogger and writer Avijit Roy, so that she could present awards within the exhibition space.The police responded that Roy could not attend because of security concerns (Kolek 2018). In addition, they asked the curators to give them access to the proposed work in the exhibition. Unaware of their rights in this regard, and wanting to cooperate with the police, the curators obliged and shared the exhibition list with the police officer. The officer singled out Mimsy’s installation as “potentially inflammatory” (Armitstead and Jones 2015) and advised its removal, based on what they called “serious” yet undisclosed concerns (Farrington 2019b). Worried that Mimsy might be in danger, the curators asked for details about these “serious” concerns but no more information was given. The police officer’s “advice” to the Mall Gallery was that Passion for Freedom, the organization which had hired the gallery and developed the project, should either pay £36,000 to the police to secure the venue for the five days of the exhibition or remove Isis Threaten Sylvania (Farrington 2019c). Disturbing as it was, the police price tag on freedom of expression clearly conveyed the direction of policing politically or socially challenging art in the UK: only those able to pay for policing can present challenging work and expect police protection. The context for this “advice” did not meet the “truly extreme and exceptional circumstances” required before action can be taken against an individual exercising their

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legal rights: the piece had already been shown publicly4 (and would be shown subsequently without incident) and was singled out merely because it was considered “potentially inflammatory” (Armitstead and Jones 2015), based on uncorroborated concerns. I suggest, therefore, that the case epitomizes the “much ado about nothing” syndrome: the police officer failed to see that removing an artist’s work is effectively taking action against the artist, so preventing them from exercising their legal rights (College of Policing 2018). This failure means that the artist is not protected by obligations laid out in the police guiding principles. As with Exhibit B, the police officer forced a choice, this time between prohibitive charges for police services or removing the work. Because this is all delivered under the soft-sounding aegis of “advice,” it can appear to be other than what it is: a clear example of de facto censorship, a power that has not, theoretically, existed in the UK since the Theatres Act of 1968 (United Kingdom Parliament 1968) abolished the Lord Chamberlain’s role as theater censor. This act of censorship was also possible because the curators in this case were not able to push back; they were hiring the gallery and a clause in their contract allowed the gallery to remove work (Kolek 2018). The director of the Mall Gallery endorsed the police’s “advice” (Kolek 2018).5 Agnieszka Kolek, co-curator of the exhibition and co-founder of the Passion for Freedom organization that, since 2010, has organized annually an exhibition celebrating free speech, including work by artists facing censorship, was deeply disturbed by the police attitude. In February 2015, Kolek had herself survived a terrorist attack in Copenhagen, targeting the panel discussion “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Speech” in which she was a speaker, alongside controversial Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks. The panel was organized by the Lars Vilks Committee with full support of the police (Farrington 2019b). Comparing the approaches of Danish and British police, Kolek (quoted in Farrington 2019b) stated, “In Copenhagen there was no question that the discussion should go ahead” but seven months later, in London, British Police “wanted to place blame on the festival or its artists for causing problems, rather than protecting the space for art.” Given that the attack in Copenhagen resulted in two fatalities, it is important to consider, when making this comparison, whether or not the London police officer’s action to remove this piece was proportionate. This leads to the highly contested and relevant debate about the appropriate balance between security and liberty – a topic beyond the remit of this essay. But suffice it to say that Mimsy’s depiction of mice dressed up as members of ISIS, which had been exhibited previously without incident, is a very far cry indeed from Vilks’s drawing of Mohammed as a dog that earned him notoriety after its publication in 2007, leading to a terrorist attack on the artist in 2010, since when he has lived with 24-hour police protection (Carty 2015). I would argue that the British police took an excessively overcautious approach by “advising” removal of work because it had the potential to be inflammatory, based on unspecified threats. To place the bar so low risks silencing vital expression about contemporary society; letting this pass unchallenged in the name of security risks normalizing this kind of unofficial censorship. In the end, the Passion for Freedom organizers were forced to remove the work because they did not have the funds to pay the police. To make visible this act of censorship, the team distributed 5,000 cards to gallery visitors printed with an image of Mimsy’s work and the label “Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate art”), referring to the Nazi term for modern art that was not in the service of the Nazi propaganda machine. Neither the police nor the gallery took any

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further action. One year later, British television network Channel 4 held a pop-up exhibition of Isis Threaten Sylvania in East London without incident (Farrington 2019c). The de facto censorship of Mimsy’s installation by the police has threatened the foundations of the Passion for Freedom annual program. Since then, as Kolek (quoted in Farrington 2019b) remarks, the curators feel that they “cannot guarantee artists that they will be able to exhibit/perform during a festival talking about freedom.” As the curatorial team was preparing for the 2018 exhibition, Kolek admitted to having lost faith in the police commitment to uphold rights in the UK. Unsure of how the police might react to any provocative work in the forthcoming show, she said that she and her collaborators were treating it as a kind of test. “Let’s see if this is still a democratic country or is it just on paper?” Kolek (quoted in Farrington 2019b) declared. Budget cuts are clearly a real issue for UK police and may have influenced the requirement to pay for policing. According to figures from the Institute for Government (2018), there was an 18% fall in police officer strength between 2010 and 2018,6 at the same time as “the nature of demand on the police is changing,” taking on more “non-crime” work such as dealing with people in mental health crises. However, the issue of charging for police services arose as early as 2010, during the production of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behud (Beyond Belief), before this wave of fiscal austerity measures came into effect.

The premier production of Behud – putting the artist first Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti wrote her 2010 play Behud (Beyond Belief) in response to the cancellation six years earlier of her show Behzti (Dishonour), which was a profoundly disturbing experience for her. As described by Jo Glanville (2010), former editor of Index on Censorship magazine, Behud is a searing satire of artistic freedom of expression in the UK: Everyone in Behud is operating from a position of self-interest: the politician who seeks re-election, the artistic director of the theatre who wants to promote his career (“A real riot outside the stage door! You don’t get much more fucking cutting edge than that,” the protesters who want to dictate the contents of the play to the playwright and the playwright herself who refuses to compromise. Behud (Beyond Belief) premiered at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, a city which, like neighboring Birmingham where Behzti had been staged, has a large Sikh population. Given the severity of the threats to Kaur Bhatti’s life from members of the Sikh community during and after the Behzti controversy, the production of Behud (Beyond Belief) six years later was treated as a potential public order incident from the start. The Belgrade Theatre management informed the Coventry police in advance that they were producing the play.The London Metropolitan police responded by setting up a high-level advisory group to assess the credibility of possible threats to Kaur Bhatt posed by the new production and to formulate a risk assessment. Meanwhile, the Coventry police consulted with the local Sikh community and, as Hamish Glen (quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010a), Director of the Belgrade Theatre, describes, “undertook to keep an eye on the world to see if anything was rumbling and what, if anything, might kick off.” On the strength of their risk assessment, the police demanded that the Belgrade pay a fee of £10,000 per night for the two-week run of the play to cover policing costs. Glen replied that it was a fiscal impossibility for a studio theater

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production to pay this amount, making it tantamount to censorship. The police responded by lowering the fee to £5,000 and got the same response from Glen. In the end, the fee was waived and the play was performed without incident (Farrington and Lehrer 2010a). In an interview with Detective Inspector Winch, the officer in charge of the relationship with the theater, I asked about the issue of payment. I was particularly interested in the differences in approach and attitude between policing a theatrical event and a political event. Winch (quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010b) expressed a common misapprehension that the theater, unlike a political party, is a “profit-making private enterprise”; he compared a play to a football match and so considered it “entirely fair” that if a theater needs to “use public resources to enable their business interests to go ahead [they should be] charged for the privilege.”Winch was clearly unaware that many theaters, including the Belgrade, are notfor-profit charities and so are directly comparable to political parties and not at all to football clubs. Theaters promote and facilitate artistic expression, just as political parties promote and facilitate political expression. Both have to raise funds and, therefore, to follow DI Winch’s argument, when being assessed by the police, should be treated equally. When pushed on this point, Winch (quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010b) skirted the issue and responded that “in the end it is a question of professional judgement, based on threat and risk around events.” In regard to payment, the police justified waiving the fee on the ground that the risk with this play was initially high but “the threat really did recede as we did the work” (Winch quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010b). Subsequently, the police requested a copy of the script on behalf of the Sikh organizations with which they were liaising but Glen initially resisted; he explained that he was comfortable discussing “the territory” of the play in broad terms but was not willing to enter into any kind of editorial discussion about what was permitted and what should be excluded within the piece. Glen (quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010a) defended his choice to produce this play by asserting that the theater had great respect for the writer and considered the work “an urgent play that needed to be put on . . . that somehow we hoped would even put to rest that disturbance,” referring to the protests around Behzti. Shortly before Behud opened, Glen (quoted in Farrington and Lehrer 2010a) agreed to release a final version of the script – which had gone through changes right up to the end – believing that this was “an acceptable compromise that would be a demonstration of good faith toward the various organizations with whom they were working.” However, as Glen recounts, the theater insisted on limiting access to this script to only a few select individuals – the deputy chief executive of the local authority and, from the police, the civil contingencies officer and the community liaison officer responsible for the relationship with the Sikh community (Farrington and Lehrer 2010a). Shortly after the script was released, rumors began to spread that protests would erupt. Much in the same way that the police “advised” the removal of Isis Threaten Sylvania, the police asked the theater to pull the play – because of potential protest. As Kaur Bhatti writes, the “fear that . . . something may happen . . . was enough to use as a reason to suppress art” (Kaur Bhatti 2018). The theater refused the request and the play proceeded without incident. Glen held his ground throughout his negotiations with the police; his clarity about his rights and responsibilities and insistence on maintaining his curatorial autonomy ensured the play went ahead successfully. But not all curators have this level of knowledge and confidence. This is not surprising because there is no teaching of rights and legal frameworks in tertiary arts institutions. The Index on Censorship (2013) conference “Taking the Offensive,” which

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examined the causes of pervasive self-censorship in the arts in the UK, revealed that the fear of prosecution, lack of knowledge of rights and laws and lack of confidence in handling communications with the police all contributed to self-censorship. These findings led Index to develop a range of resources, discussed in the following section, to address the problem.

Art and the law – talking to the police In 2017, in my capacity as Associate Arts Producer for Index on Censorship responsible for the UK arts program, I took the six cases of police intervention identified above to Assistant Chief Constable Rachel Swann, National Police Lead on Public Protest. She was shocked by the inadequate policing they revealed, specifically the failure to take the artists’ fundamental rights into consideration. She was equally shocked that the arts sector had not challenged this “advice” (Swann 2017). Swann responded by providing a senior police trainer, Philip Birchenall, Curriculum Designer for the Public Order and Public Safety team, College of Policing, to consult and co-present on “Risks, Rights, Reputations – Challenging a Risk Averse Culture,” Index on Censorship’s training program for senior arts managers and trustees.7 In his presentation, Birchenall (2018) emphasized that if the curator anticipates that a work may be divisive, it is best practice to inform the police well in advance to discuss the nature of the work, the type of issues it raises and the public interest of the work; in turn, the police can explain what they need in order to best support the arts organization. Planning ahead helps to prevent the calling in of police on an emergency basis when urgencies can, as we have seen, result in hasty foreclosure, because decisions are made under pressure. Birchenall also recommended that leadership forge relationships so that the senior executive of the arts organization meets with the Police Commander of the Operational Planning team; “balancing the human rights component of the police’s obligation is complex. . . [and] only the senior officers are trained at this level,” Birchenall (2018) stated. Birchenall (2018) also explained that the police may seek prior access to the artwork (script or imagery) to generate a clear understanding of the project and “so inform how the Police Commander responds to protest or complaints the work may generate.” This last point is key. As Hamish Glen demonstrated in his response to police requests for the script of Behud during the rehearsal period, open communication with the police, while maintaining the autonomy of the arts organization, is vital to a successful outcome in the UK context. In response to our experience supporting organizations, artists and curators who have been pressured by the police to remove or cancel work, Index on Censorship has developed a suite of resources in support of artistic freedom in the UK.8 Chief among these are a set of toolkits titled “Art and the Law”9 which provide bespoke guidance for artists, curators and arts management on the legal framework impacting on artistic freedom of expression (Index on Censorship and Vivarta 2015a). The guidance aims to enhance understanding of the rights and responsibilities of both police and curators; protect artistic freedom; and manage risks associated with producing work on highly sensitive subjects. The Public Order toolkit has been adopted successfully for training for Public Order and Public Safety Commanders at the College of Policing since 2016 (McNeilly 2016). The toolkits give advice on how to make the case that supporting the production of controversial artwork is in the “public interest” (Index on Censorship and Vivarta 2015a). The test of public interest carries considerable weight in law, and the “Art and the Law” guidance argues that the police need to take full account of this in regard to the artist’s rights to create

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boundary pushing work, the curator’s rights to present it and the public’s right to view it. The guidance also challenges perceptions of the assumed power of police in free expression matters. Differentiating between “advice” and legally binding action, the guidance states that an arts venue “is not obliged to remove an artwork because the police have merely advised it to do so (rather than seizing the work)” and warns that “the police may be taking an overly conservative approach and their interpretation of the law may be wrong” (Index on Censorship and Vivarta 2015b). The guidance also recognizes that the mere presence of the police in a gallery or theater can be intimidating and underscores that a lack of confidence on the part of the curator or director may lead them to remove artwork voluntarily.The guides stress that the police are not final arbiters of the law and that their claims can be challenged through judicial review. They also urge anyone in doubt to get legal advice.

New policing guidance – still falling short of fully protecting artistic freedom In July 2018, the National Police Chiefs’ Council for England and Wales published a policy on public events, “Operational Advice Document on Event Policing,” which sets out to clarify the roles and responsibilities of the police and the organizer. The policy aims to achieve a consistent response across all 43 police forces in England and Wales concerning if and when it is appropriate to police public events as part of their core duty and what services should be contracted out to private security firms. Using the phrase “legal opinion suggests” to justify its position, the policy states that the responsibility for public safety rests with the organizers of an event or the owners of the land where an event is taking place; the police have no duties to control crowds “except where there are imminent or likely threats to life” (National Police Chiefs Council 2018). Once again, the scarcity of resources appears to be the underlying issue.While, in the past, the police service may have taken a leading, unpaid role in facilitating public events at the request of the organizer, “acting for what they believed to be the public good,” police must now adopt “a more focused approach confining police action to those issues which are part of our core responsibilities and where there is legal authority” (National Police Chiefs Council 2018). This last statement fails to acknowledge that a curator would be justified in expecting the police to support the presentation of artwork as part of the police’s “core responsibilities” if this presentation provoked unlawful behavior in a third party (College of Policing 2018). The onus therefore continues to fall on curators to draw attention to this oversight if the situation arises and challenge the “much ado about nothing” syndrome.

Conclusion Open, robust and, at times, uncomfortable debate, including protest, is essential to a vibrant and healthy society and artwork that opens up debate that is in the public interest. The right to freedom of expression in the arts in the UK today, however, is overlaid by current political considerations: the double imperatives of austerity measures and heightened security. To illustrate the shift in attitude and available resources, we can look back 30 years to 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses; Rushdie spent over a decade in hiding under police protection at a cost of an estimated £1 million per year (Womack 2000).The security landscape has since shifted; incidents of violence in the recent past and, in particular, since the Charlie Hebdo act of terror, have escalated

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concerns about violent responses to challenging work and have also raised the level of risk associated with expression relating to race and religion.Thus, as mentioned above, the London police rejected the request from Passion for Freedom organizers for only one night of security for Bonya Roy to attend and present awards at the opening of their 2015 exhibition. Despite the lack of police protection, Roy safely attended and announced the awards (Kolek 2018). The tensions exposed in works that are perceived to carry increased risk emanate from society’s most pressing problems – not, as some might like to suggest, from the artists themselves. The 2017 cancellation by the National Youth Theatre of its own production of Homegrown, written by Omar El-Khairy and directed by Nadia Latif, is an egregious example of self-censorship that provides a case in point.10 Homegrown looked at radicalization amongst young Muslims and aimed to generate intelligent discussion around an issue that, as Latif (quoted in Farrington 2019d) states, “has hysteria attached.” Suppressing the art doesn’t make the problem that inspires it go away. Police intervention that relies on coercion to suppress art is de facto censorship and, as National Police Lead on Protest Rachel Swann has acknowledged, should be challenged in the public interest. Left unchallenged, the police may well continue to push to remove provocative work as a labor-saving and economical tactic in resource-strapped times. Heightened racialized security concerns bring additional constraints to free expression, especially among artists from minority communities and perceived “troublemakers” with critical, dissenting and inconvenient narratives; an important lesson from the history of censorship revealed that “when the principle of free speech is abandoned, those who already face oppression are hurt most” (Index on Censorship 2019b). While civil society organizations like Index on Censorship have an important supporting role to play in this arena, the primary responsibility for championing artistic freedom of expression rightly falls with the arts institutions that collect, produce and exhibit artwork. Kaur Bhatti (2018) speaks from experience when she states that “when the work is threatened, power over it is in the hands of the [arts] institution.” In 2004, with Behzti, and, again, in 2010, with Behud, she could only stand by and watch as the theater’s senior management grappled with the police to determine if they had it in their power to protect her work. Being ready and able to enter into confident and informed dialogue with police chiefs, to build a shared understanding of the public interest in provocative art and to demonstrate how artistic freedom of expression must be protected under core policing responsibilities, rather than dismissed as “much ado about nothing,” are all important steps in building a more robust relationship with the police and avoiding the kinds of censorship and self-censorship featured in this essay. As Kaur Bhatti (2018) notes: “Art’s function, after all, is not to maintain the status quo but to change the world. And some people are never going to want that to happen. Let’s remember, if the art is stopped, my silence is your silence too.”

Notes 1 Other documented cases include: Isis Threaten Sylvania – “Mimsy” (Mall Galleries, London, 2015); Exhibit B – Brett Bailey (The Vaults Waterloo, produced by the Barbican, London, 2014); The City – Incubator Theatre Company (Edinburgh Festival, 2014); A Fool for Love – Derrick Santini (Scream Gallery, London, 2012); Behzti – Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti (Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, 2004); One Day (dir. Penny Woolcock, 2009). 2 The Human Rights Act 1998 sets out the fundamental rights and freedoms to which everyone in the UK is entitled. It incorporates the rights set out in the European Convention on Human

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Rights (ECHR) into domestic British law. The Human Rights Act came into force in the UK in October 2000. 3 The police did instigate criminal investigations into the use of weapons by a small group of protesters but no charges were brought due to the lack of evidence. 4 The work had been exhibited earlier in 2015 at the ART15 global art fair, Royal College of Art, London. 5 Several attempts by the author to speak to the gallery director yielded no response. 6 While the size of the entire police workforce fell by 18% between 2010 and 2018, numbers of other police staff declined more than those of police officers; for instance, over the same period, the number of police community support officers fell by 40% and civilian staff by 21%. 7 Birchenall presented at two of the five training sessions before being taken off the program due to other duties. 8 Index on Censorship (2019a) offers resources, advice and access to consultation with professionals through its Arts Censorship Support Service.This brings together case studies, analysis and guidance and also offers pro-bono services of legal and communications support for artists and organizations experiencing censorship. 9 The Art and the Law guidebooks cover five areas of criminal law – counterterrorism, child protection, public order, obscene publications and race and religious hatred – with bespoke guidance for artists and arts organizations. In addition, they contain a section on the rights and responsibilities of the curator and the police when artistic expression is contested. 10 The play was cancelled two weeks before it was due to open. The theatre cited that the work involved artistic risk, which brought with it a double responsibility “to the work, of course, but especially to safeguard our members” (Farrington 2019d).

Bibliography Armitstead, C. and Jones, J. (2015) “Artwork Showing Sylvanian Families Terrorised by Isis Banned from Free Speech Exhibition,” The Guardian. 26 September. Online. www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2015/sep/26/sylvanian-families-isis-freedom-of-expression-exhibition BBC (2011) “England Riots: Maps and Timeline.” 15 August. Online. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14436499 Birchenall, P. (2018) “Police Perspective,” Presentation for Training Program Risks, Rights, Reputations, South Bank Centre, London. 25 April. Birds Eye View (2009) “1 Day by Penny Woolcock- Banned by Birmingham Police.” 4 November. Online. www.birds-eye-view.co.uk/penny-woolcocks-1-day-banned-by-birmingham-police/ Carty, P. (2015) “Copenhagen Shooting: Who Is the Swedish Cartoonist Lars Vilks,” International Business Times. 15 February. Online. www.ibtimes.co.uk/copenhagen-shooting-who-swedishcartoonist-lars-vilks-1488000 College of Policing (last modified 2018) “Police Action (section 2.8.2),” Public Order: Core Principles and Legislation. Online. www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/public-order/core-principlesand-legislation/#police-action Equality and Human Rights Commission (2015) “Article 10: Freedom of Expression.” Online. www. equalityhumanrights.com/en/human-rights-act/article-10-freedom-expression Farrington, J. (2015) “Case Study: Policing the Picket of ‘Exhibit B’,” Index on Censorship. 21 July. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2015/07/case-study-exhibit-b/ Farrington, J. (2018) “Case Study: ‘The Believers Are but Brothers’ Bucks the Trend,” Index on Censorship. 18 January. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2018/01/brothers-believers-bucks-trend/ Farrington, J. (2019a) “Case Study: Brett Bailey/‘Exhibit B’,” Index on Censorship. 15 May. Online. www. indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/brett-bailey-exhibit-b/ Farrington, J. (2019b) “Artistic Freedom: Passion for Freedom: ‘There Is Always Someone Who Wants to Take Freedom Away’,” Index on Censorship. 11 October. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/ 2018/10/passion-for-freedom-there-is-always-someone-who-wants-to-take-freedom-away/ Farrington, J. (2019c) “Case Study: Mimsy/‘Isis Threaten Sylvania’,” Index on Censorship. 15 May. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/mimsy-isis-threaten-sylvania/

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Farrington, J. (2019d) “Case Study: Omar El-Khairy and Nadia Latif/‘Homegrown’,” Index on Censorship. 15 May. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/omar-el-khairy-and-nadia-latif-homegrown/ Farrington, J. and Lehrer, N. (2010a) “Anatomy of a Drama.” In Farrington, J. and Lehrer, N. (eds.) Beyond Belief: Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order – A Case Study, London: Index on Censorship. Online. www.scribd.com/document/59790846/Beyond-Belief Farrington, J. and Lehrer, N. (2010b) “Walking the Thin Blue Line.” In Farrington, J. and Lehrer, N. (eds.) Beyond Belief: Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order – A Case Study, London: Index on Censorship. Online. www.scribd.com/document/59790846/Beyond-Belief Glanville, J. (2010) “The Play’s the Thing.” In Farrington, J. and Lehrer, N. (eds.) Beyond Belief: Theatre, Freedom of Expression and Public Order – A Case Study, London: Index on Censorship. Online. www. indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Beyond-Belief-Index-On-Censorship.pdf Index on Censorship (2013) “Taking the Offensive – Defending Artistic Freedom of Expression in the UK.” Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2013/05/conference-report-taking-offensivedefending-artistic-freedom-expression-uk/ Index on Censorship (2019a) “Arts Censorship Support Service.” Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/ arts-censorship-support-service/ Index on Censorship (2019b) “Free Speech Is for Me.” Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/freespeech-is-for-me/ Index on Censorship and Vivarta (2015a) “Art & the Law: Guides to the Law on Free Expression and the Arts in England and Wales.” Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/campaigns/artistic-freedom/ art-and-the-law/ Index on Censorship and Vivarta (2015b) “Counter Terrorism.” In Art and the Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework Impacting on Artistic Freedom of Expression, London: Index on Censorship. Online. www. indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Counter-Terrorism_210715.pdf Index on Censorship and Vivarta (2015c) “Public Order.” In Art and the Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework Impacting on Artistic Freedom of Expression, London: Index on Censorship. Online. www. indexoncensorship.org/2015/07/art-law-public-order/ Institute for Government (2018) “Performance Tracker: Police.” Online. www.instituteforgovernment. org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-2018/police Kaur Bhatti, G. (2018) “Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti: Freedom of Expression Must be at the Core of Artistic Institutions,” Index on Censorship. 19 June. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2018/06/ gurpreet-kaur-bhatti-freedom-of-expression-must-be-at-the-core-of-artistic-institutions/ Kolek, A. (2018) Interview with the Author. 3 July. Leith, H. (2017) Interview with the Author. 10 May. McNeilly, N. (2016) Meeting with the Author. 26 May. Morgan, D. (2018) Email to the Author. 20 August. National Police Chiefs Council (2018) “Event Policing – NPCC Operational Advice Document.” Online. library.college.police.uk/docs/npcc/NPCC-event-policing-2018.pdf National Policing Improvement Agency (n.d.) “Cohesion Guide: Citizen Focus and Neighborhood Policing Programme.” Online. library.college.police.uk/docs/npia/CohesionGuide.pdf Passion for Freedom (2019) Online. www.passionforfreedom.art/ Radio Free Europe (2010) “US Woman Accused in Terrorist Plot.” 10 March. Online. www.rferl.org/a/ US_Woman_Accused_In_Terrorist_Plot/1979185.html Rahman, A. (2014) “Mob Rule Stole My Right to See Slavery Art Show,” The Daily Mail. 29 September. Online. www.pressreader.com/ Shaheed, F. (2013) “Report of the Special Rapporteur in the Field of Cultural Rights, Farida Shaheed: The Right to Artistic Freedom and Creativity,” Human Rights Council, 23rd Session, United Nations General Assembly. 14 March. Online. digitallibrary.un.org/record/755488?ln=en Swann, R. (2017) Interview with the Author. 11 May. United Kingdom Parliament (1968) “1968 Theatres Act.” Online. www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/ 1968/54

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United Kingdom Parliament (1998) “Human Rights Act 1998.” 9 November. Online. www.legislation. gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/contents Vanstone, K. (2015) Interview with the Author. 20 April. Womack, S. (2000) “Rushdie Does Not Need Police Guard Say Asian Peers,” The Telegraph. 30 October. Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1372442/Rushdie-does-not-need-police-guard-sayAsian-peers.html

3 CURATING CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL ART IN DOHA, QATAR Anticipated “conversations,” undesirable controversies and state self-censorship Serena Iervolino

Over the last decade or so, a few small, dynamic and enormously wealthy Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), have proactively sought to fill the vacuum created by the decline of “traditional powers” in the wider Middle East, including Egypt, Syria and Iraq (Kamrava 2013: 13). The economic dynamism, diplomatic activism and aggressive branding strategies of these emergent sheikdoms have shifted the regional balance of power to the southern shores of the Arabian Gulf, moving the centers of economic, diplomatic and, increasingly, cultural power from Cairo, Beirut and Damascus to cities such as Abu Dhabi and Doha. A tiny state located on the southern shores of the Arabian Gulf, Qatar has rapidly achieved a previously unimaginable influence, affirming itself as “one of the region’s richest, most recognizable, and highly influential states” (Kamrava 2013: 3) and a global player, including in the cultural industries. It has strategically invested wealth derived from its oil and natural gas in high-profile cultural initiatives, including international festivals and prestigious sporting events, such as the Ajyal Youth Film Festival and Qatar 2020 FIFA World Cup. Pivotal to these efforts to transform Qatar into a regional hub for arts and culture is the creation of world-class museums and art galleries. These include the Museum of Islamic Art (henceforth MIA) and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (hereafter Mathaf), inaugurated in 2008 and 2010, respectively; and the National Museum of Qatar, which opened to the public in 2019 under the auspices of Qatar Museums (QM), the state-funded organization that oversees Qatar’s museums, public art and cultural heritage (Mirgani 2017), as well as the country’s main cultural policymaking body. Qatar has grabbed headlines for its unprecedented spending in acquiring renowned works of modern and contemporary Western art (Elkamel 2011; Cascone 2015), ambitious programs of monumental public art installations (Foster 2014) and lavish temporary exhibitions presenting the work of leading contemporary global artists, including Adel Abdessemed and Damien Hirst. If such initiatives have attracted scholarly attention (Erskine-Loftus 2013; Downey 2016; Exell and Wakefield 2016; Golfomitsou 2016; Mirgani 2018), critical discussions of their politics remain conspicuous through their absence.

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This chapter examines the tensions implicit in Qatar’s investments in global art by focusing on the controversies that surrounded the display of three artworks: Abdessemed’s video Printemps (Spring) (2013) and statue Coup de Tête (Headbutt) (2011–2012) and Hirst’s installation The Miraculous Journey (2005–2013), all unveiled in October 2013. Printemps was displayed in the exhibition L’âge d’or (The Golden Age) at Mathaf (6 October 2013 to 5 January 2014), while Coup de Tête and The Miraculous Journey were installed in Doha’s public spaces. Addressing themes and/or using artistic forms in conflict with local sensibilities and moralities, these artworks were met with outrage by conservative members of Qatari society, creating controversy. Two of the three works were hurriedly removed or concealed from public view soon after their installation – events subtlety alluded to by some commentators as acts of censorship (Haxall 2017: 45). But on whom did the criticism concentrate? And who was ostensibly being protected through these acts of censorship and why? In this chapter, I examine the forms that public acrimony toward those pieces took and, importantly, how the acrimony was managed and contained through “editing” these works out of Qatar’s cultural canvas. I begin by introducing the unique sociopolitical context of Qatar and its museum ecosystem. I then focus on the artworks that evoked outrage, seeking to offer a nuanced reading of the public outcry. I locate the controversies and their handling within the Qatari cultural policy context and offer an analysis of curatorial decision-making and power relationships in a conservative, authoritarian and rentier Gulf state such as Qatar.1 My analysis focuses on the microlevel, bringing attention to the actors explicitly or implicitly involved in the controversies. While the artworks and associated controversies were reported in the media and a few academic publications (Kelly 2016; Gray 2017; Mounajjed 2017), critical questions about these curatorial decisions and their later “editing” have not as yet been explored. The chapter proposes an unprecedented examination of the politics of curating what I label “alien” contemporary art and its ethical challenges in a conservative and autocratic state such as Qatar. It argues that the events are neither to be interpreted as acts of state censorship or curatorial self-censorship nor as thoughtful but belated considerations of conservative Qatari society and its ideas of moralities. They should be understood, I maintain, as atypical forms of state self-censorship of itself, in which state-driven cultural institutions review their cultural policies and silence reforming plans in order to shield the royal family’s political power. As the chapter shows, state-led cultural institutions suppressed their reformist art programs – strongly embraced by powerful members of the royal family – to pacify the most conservative elements of Qatari society and retain their political support. The chapter builds on my knowledge of Qatar’s museum sector acquired during threeyears of participant observation. Between 2014 and 2017, I lectured at UCL Qatar, University College London’s satellite campus in Doha, directing its Museum and Gallery Practice MA program and collaborating with Qatar’s museum sector. My relocation to London in September 2017 – a detached position from which I now write – provided me with the necessary distance to critically examine the sensitive topic this chapter tackles. The largest part of the empirical material derives from an analysis of curatorial and scholarly publications and online materials, including Arabic-language Twitter posts – published by members of the public – whose English translations appear in the chapter. I also conducted ten semi-structured interviews2 with former QM staff members working with modern and contemporary art,3 an art curator formerly attached to other Doha-based arts organizations, a Qatar-born artist and a Qatar-born journalist. All the interviewees agreed to take part anonymously. Drawing

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on this wide-ranging data set, the chapter presents an analysis of the politics of curating with relevance beyond Qatar; the idiosyncrasies I point to resonate with those noticeable in other autocratic Gulf countries investing in “alien” global art and Western-derived arts organizations.

The context: Qatar’s cultural policymaking and contemporary art investments Qatar’s political system and social structure Qatar is an absolute monarchy, headed by the Emir of Qatar, currently Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, who exercises absolute power, acting as both head of state and of government. The ruler’s legitimacy is ensured by tribal lineage, as the right to rule is hereditary, passed on through the Emir’s male branch of the ruling Al Thani family (Kamrava 2013). Since “Father Emir” (Sheikh Hamad) took power in 1994, the state of Qatar has achieved a remarkable level of internal stability and elite cohesion (Kamrava 2013: 106–107), which has remained unchallenged since Sheikh Tamim’s succession to the throne in 2013. The internal political consolidation of the Al Thani rule had already been achieved by Sheikh Hamad through creating parallel state – or parastate – institutions, often operating alongside preexisting institutions, and led by and staffed with Al Thanis and their local and international allies (Kamrava 2013: 106–107; Hertog 2017: 7). In the field of culture, QM was created in 2005 as a “soft-power enclave,” operating in parallel with the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage (Hertog 2017: 15). The Al Thanis’ right to rule is virtually uncontested and has intensified because the Saudiled blockade of Qatar began in June 2017 (Adams 2018), when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt abruptly severed their diplomatic relationships with Qatar over allegations of the country’s support for Islamist groups. Rather than destabilizing the ruling family, the blockade has, in fact, reinforced their power and prompted a cult of personality of the Emir; it has strengthened social cohesion, prompting Qatari citizens (and expats) to come together and express their unconditional loyalty to the royal family (Hassan 2018). As of 2019, Qatar has an estimated population of 2.74 million (World Population Review 2019), of which Qatari nationals represent just over 10% of the total (Snoj 2017).The country imports an exceptionally large foreign workforce to exploit its oil and gas resources and create and sustain world-class infrastructures. The total population has grown seven-fold since the mid-1980s (De Bel-Air 2014: 4), creating a remarkable demographic imbalance perceived by some Qataris as a cultural threat (Al-Kuwārī 2012). Within this system, Qataris are considered “the privileged citizen elite” (Fromherz 2012: 2), to whom the state ensures resources, employment, land allotments, free education and health care and other material benefits, including no taxation.The state and its citizens are tied by an unwritten, wealth-for-acquiescence “social contract”; citizens exchange material benefits for political acquiescence, leaving the realm of politics to their “benefactors” (Gengler 2013: 6–8). With a material stake in the preservation of the current system of governance, Qatari citizens have an interest in preserving the ruler’s political legitimacy and maintaining political stability. They do not ordinarily exercise pressure for representation and political accountability (Kamrava 2013: 68), showing a modest willingness to challenge the state and their rulers on social and cultural matters only (Gengler 2013: 18). Oppositional talk or “chatter,” focusing

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on cultural or religious matters, is moderate and primarily expressed in cyberspace, where the Emir or other members of the ruling family are rarely directly criticized, however (Kamrava 2013: 16).The ruling family’s stringent control (effectively a monopoly) of all state institutions guarantees their close control of domestic and foreign policymaking areas, including culture. Decision-making resides in the hands of a very small group of elite policymakers in the Emir’s inner circle, who are responsible for developing all policies driving the country’s transformation (Kamrava 2013: 118). Decisions are implemented by an army of functionaries comprised of members of the Al Thani and other powerful Qatari families, newly emerging elites, highly skilled Doha-based (typically Western) expatriate functionaries and highly paid international consultants (in the museum sector, often closely tied to the art market).

Qatar’s elite (cultural) policymaking Since her appointment as Chairperson of QM in 2006, Qatar’s cultural sector has been led by one of these elite policymakers, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani (hereafter Sheikha Al Mayassa but listed in the bibliography as A.M. Al Thani). She is sister of the current Emir and daughter of the former ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and his influential second wife and consort Sheikha Moza bint Nasser. Typically, close female relatives of the ruler lead the cultural and educational sectors of Gulf states. These “policy entrepreneurs” – as Sakr (2017: 49) labels them – invest their time, resources and reputations to spearhead policies they back, achieve “personal aggrandizement” (ibid.: 49) and enhance their (inter)national reputation. Only a decade or so ago, Qatar would hardly have been associated with the field of contemporary art. State investment in art collections began in the 1990s with acquisitions carried out by two cousins of then-Emir Sheikh Hamad: Sheikh Saud bin Muhammad bin Ali Al Thani and his brother Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani (Kluijver 2013: 122). Since Sheikha Al Mayassa has assumed the helm of the cultural sector, QM has invested in prominent contemporary global artists. Aside from Adel Abdessemed and Damien Hirst, other major global figures include Takeshi Murakami, Louise Bourgeois, Shirin Neshat, Marc Quinn, Luc Tuymans and Ai Weiwei. Qatar’s investments in contemporary global art have received some scholarly attention (e.g. Adam 2014). A few commentators have addressed artworks by leading global artists, including those I examine below (Kelly 2016; Murray 2016). Mounajjed (2017: 93–95) briefly addresses the controversies surrounding Abdessemed’s Coup de tête and Hirst’s The Miraculous Journey, without unpacking how QM responded to the public outcry. Long-hidden issues associated with state patronage, freedom of expression and censorship have been rarely considered (Downey 2016; Mirgani 2017). Demerdash (2017) draws attention to defamation laws written into the penal codes of GCC countries, forbidding anyone to spread news and produce creative work that could be deemed as defamation or slander addressed at the government and its ruling regime. Since 2014, a subtle shift in Qatar’s cultural policies has been registered with priority given to initiatives supporting the local art scene and promoting emerging and established Arab and Qatari artists – through small exhibitions at Mathaf and the Fire Station’s artist-in-residence program and, more recently, through art commissions at the new National Museum of Qatar (National Museum of Qatar 2019). Gray (2017: 72) interprets this shift as part of the state’s reorientation of policy priorities, following Qatar’s successful World Cup 2020 bid, toward

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the sport sector – a policy area of interest to the current Emir. Arguably, this shift was also triggered by criticisms revolving around the transplanting of global (Western) culture – and its contemporary art icons – into Doha’s cultural landscape, particularly in late 2013: an especially prolific year of concerted contemporary art investments. Nonetheless, Sheikha Al Mayassa is determined to “make Doha into an important place for contemporary art” (Al Thani 2012: 114); this is underlined by what she describes as QM’s commitment “to the invention of new formats and modes of producing and realizing exhibitions of contemporary art by today’s most influential artists” (ibid.: 114). However, the major challenge associated with a strongly top-down and highly personalistic cultural policy flirting with the West is how local audiences will receive that policy. Commentators have expressed reservations about the extent to which local communities share decision-makers’ ambition to embrace modernity through employing a Western-oriented cultural policy (e.g. Bouchenaki and Kreps 2016: xviii), particularly through (Western-style) art museums (Atkinson 2011; Batty 2012; Exell 2016a: 27, 2016b, 2016c). Robust published audience research investigating local audiences’ (dis)engagement with Qatar’s art museums is rare (e.g., Kennedy et al. 2016) and non-existent around contemporary art.Yet, the challenges that Qatar’s cultural leaders confront in enthusing Qatari citizens over Sheikha Al Mayassa’s vision for contemporary art are palpable. Nonetheless, Sheikha Al Mayassa (Al Thani 2012: 114) has repeatedly presented Qatar’s state-led cultural initiatives – including those involving contemporary leading global artists – as a means to facilitate intercultural dialogue. She claims: Art is very powerful because it has no boundaries and you don’t need to belong to any country and social class. It brings people from all walks of life together to talk about ideas. There is no limit to it. (Al Thani 2016) The public outcry over the three artworks discussed here calls into question the power of art to facilitate “dialogue” locally, between people of different backgrounds, class or lifestyles living in Qatar.The reality behind Sheikha Al Mayassa’s celebratory rhetoric is more complex than she and her inner circle are willing or able to acknowledge.

Transplants: “brave” global art in unfamiliar, new lands In October 2013, Mathaf opened to the public L’âge d’or, the first solo exhibition in the Gulf of the Paris- and New York-based Algerian multimedia artist Adel Abdessemed, guest curated by Italian Pier Luigi Tazzi. Abdessemed has the reputation of a provocateur, “acclaimed by an international cultural elite yet criticized for his sensationalism – and loathed by animal-rights activists for his unabashed use of live creatures in his work” (Milliard 2013). QM must have been aware of the controversies that had surrounded Abdessemed’s work elsewhere, prompting the cancellation or shutdown of his solo shows (e.g., Don’t Trust Me, San Francisco Art Institute, 2008) and the removal of his artworks from exhibitions in the United States and Europe (Povolendo 2009). In fact, before the opening of L’âge d’or, Artforum described it as an exhibition in which viewers would be confronted with representations of violence (Wilson-Goldie 2013: 202). The decision to bring Abdessemed’s work to Doha was, therefore, audacious and perhaps also incautious.

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Launched during a sophisticated opening attended by influential figures in the art world, including prominent art curator and Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries Hans Ulbrich Obrist and Iraqi-born painter Dia Al-Azzawi, L’âge d’or (Mathaf 2013) was the first exhibition to open at Mathaf after the appointment of its new director, Abdellah Karroum (“Mathaf: Arab Museum” 2013). Two of Abdessemed’s works provoked strong reactions: the video Printemps (2013) and the statue Coup de tête (2011–2012), which had already caused a stir elsewhere (Povolendo 2009; Haxall 2017). An attempt to denounce violence inflicted on animals through seemingly inflicting such violence, Abdessemed’s Printemps is an HD video projection depicting a line of living chickens hung up by their feet against a concrete wall and writhing in pain as fire engulfs them. Lasting about 19 seconds (Tazzi and Mengoni 2013), the video is projected on three walls in a dark room and shown in a loop, so that the birds appear to be “endlessly burning” (Interviewee 3 2018). Audio of the panicking birds intensifies the impact. However, the chickens had been treated with a protective flammable gel used in cinema, and the video was shot with the support of special effects technicians (Samson 2018). Art critics defended the video by stressing that the birds were not harmed by the flames (Richard 2018) – disregarding any distress that the birds may have experienced. In L’âge d’or, the installation included no warning or interpretative panel of explanation. A former Mathaf staff member known here as Interviewee 3 (2018) recognized that this could cause distress to some visitors: “You know the galleries are very open, so you just walk in and then you see the work, and suddenly you’re in this room full of burning chickens with sound and everything.” The 5-meter bronze statue of Coup de tête portrays a notorious event in the history of football, when French footballer Zinedine Zidane headbutted the chest of Italian player Marco Matarazzi during the 2006 FIFA World Cup final. The incident shocked the world of football and marked the end of Zidane’s fully decorated career with an infamous finale. In fact, Abdessemed saw the incident as a humanizing “moment of weakness” and as a countercelebration to monumental statues commemorating heroes, gods and moments of glory (Haxall 2017: 45). Unveiled in 2012 in front of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, to accompany their exhibition Adel Abdessemed: Je suis innocent (Adel Abdessemed: I am innocent), Coup de tête attracted criticism and prompted demands for its removal (“Au Qatar, La Statue” 2013). Some considered it offensive for portraying a negative representation of football and sportsmanship and potentially corrupting French youth – a position strongly upheld by the National Association of French Football Districts (Haxall 2017: 45). Bought by QM for an undisclosed sum (“QMA Installs” 2013), Coup de tête was prominently displayed on Doha’s Corniche (Figure 3.1), the city’s waterfront promenade, and assigned star status. L’âge d’or curator Tazzi characterized the piece as “more three-dimensional icon than a sculpture” (2013: 24); Sheikha Al-Mayassa likewise described it as “iconic” and emphasized that the work was not just part of the exhibition but “installed permanently” (Al Thani 2013: 9). She elucidated how the public art installation contributed to Qatar’s cultural policy, in the process revealing her own personal ambition for the sector: Exhibitions and public art initiatives like these are central to the ambitions of the Qatar Museums Authority4 and to Qatar’s long-term investments in culture and education, expanding the possibilities of dialogue through art, now and for future generations. (ibid.: 9)

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FIGURE 3.1 Adel Abdessemed, Coup

de Tête (Headbutt), 2011–2012, as installed at the Corniche of Doha. Qatar, 4 October 2013.

Source: © Str/​EPA/​Shutterstock Epa03895867.

The then-head of QM Public Art Department, Jean Paul Engelen, one of Sheikha Al Mayassa’s trusted lieutenants with strong links to the art market, voiced QM’s expectations of the piece’s popularity, “Yes, we expect a lot of people to want to take photos with it, and of it. It’s an impressive piece” (“QMA Installs” 2013). Four days after the installation of Coup de tête, Damien Hirst’s monumental public sculpture The Miraculous Journey (Plate 4), another global artwork commissioned by QM, was unveiled in Doha, causing a further “artistic mini-crisis” (Wasserman 2017: 49). The installation, by an artist long recognized as the “enfant terrible of British art” (Clark 2013), was one more thorny investment for a conservative country with an emergent museum sector and underdeveloped audience. Reportedly costing $20 million (Paris 2013), the installation takes the form of 14 monumental bronzes narrating, in the words of QM, “the gestation of foetus inside a uterus, from conception to birth [and] ends with a statue of a 46-foot-tall anatomically correct baby boy” (Qatar Museums 2018). It encompasses what The Economist recognized as likely “the first penis on public display” in Qatar (“Damien Hirst in Doha” 2013). The work was fittingly installed outside the Sidra Medical and Research Centre, dedicated to women and children, which was then under construction, and facing Al Luqta Street, a major highway. The unveiling ceremony was spectacular. Having been concealed within 14 giant balloons, the statues were revealed during the VIP launch, as each balloon, lit by purple light, opened into a giant flower while accompanied by the amplified sound of a beating heart (Vogel 2013). QM publicly acknowledged the daring nature of the work, stating that the piece “is a particularly

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audacious commission, and one that will stimulate debate at home and abroad for years to come” (Qatar Museums 2018). Media pundits, QM and Hirst himself recognized that the installation would be groundbreaking (e.g. Jones 2013; Vogel and Osipova 2013). The New York Times characterized the work as taking Qatar’s official acceptance of Western art to a new level (Vogel 2013). Miguel Blanco, then QM Director of Strategic Cultural Relations, claimed, “The QMA is very well aware of the cultural sensitivities in Qatar, but we are not imposing any limits on the artist and the way he wants to display his work” (“QMA: No Limits” 2013). Hirst credited Sheikha Al Mayassa with having the courage to break cultural boundaries: “. . . it’s the first naked sculpture in the Middle East. . . . It’s very brave of Sheikha Mayassa to go with the whole thing” (Hirst cited in Scott 2013a). Sheikha Al Mayassa sought to minimize potential controversy by contextualizing the work within the local culture, stating, “To have something like this is less daring than having a lot of nudity.There is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth. It is not against our culture or our religion,” adding, “Whether the public likes it or not . . . it’s important to have an ongoing conversation” (A.M. Al Thani cited in Vogel 2013).

The reception of contemporary “alien” artworks: examining the local discourse Printemps, Coup de tête and The Miraculous Journey indeed sparked vigorous conversation but much of it was negative. They did not stimulate QM’s anticipated, desirable “dialogue” but rather became the subject of intense debate articulated on social media platforms. My analysis of Twitter comments reveals that such criticism was voiced primarily by three types of Qatari citizens – well-known public figures with an active Twitter presence, nationals whose identity could be easily verified and users who portrayed themselves as Qataris (through usernames such as “Qatari Aisha”) but whose identities cannot be confirmed.

Printemps: disrespecting Islamic values/disregarding animal rights Soon after the opening of L’âge d’or, public outcry emerged against Printemps; critics denounced what they viewed to be a lack of respect for Islamic values and disregard for animal rights (Murray 2016: 215). Much of the criticism linked the animal cruelty of the video with “un-Islamic” behavior and principles (Khatri 2013). This sentiment was vividly captured in a cartoon by a Qatari national, published on Twitter, depicting four burning chickens named Law, Manners, Humanity and Islamic Value (Murray 2016: 125; Al-Tamimi 2014: 89); the cartoon became so intimately associated with the controversy that it was possibly viewed by more people than had visited the exhibition. Some incensed Twitter users called for an apology by Sheikha Al Mayassa; as one tweet declared, “As Qataris we will not accept anything less than an apology from the head of the museums authority and her deputy from the effect of this exhibition on our conservative society” (Owaida 2013). Others called for censorship and for those (expatriates) in charge to lose their jobs (with Qatari officials being protected). The Avaaz online petition titled “Stop Adel Abdessemed’s Exhibition in Mathaf ” (Aisha n.d.) and a Facebook page called “Stop Adel

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Abdessemed and Mathaf ’s Animal Cruelty,” both launched by an individual who selfidentified as “a Qatari national concerned about animal rights,” demanded the cancellation of the exhibition and the firing of the “responsible directors” (Murray 2016: 125). The Facebook page received 575 user “likes.” The online petition (still active at the time of writing and which, as of April 2019, has received 15,312 signatures) – to be delivered to Sheikha Al Mayassa – identifies two expatriates, senior managers at QM as the “responsible directors,” the then Executive Director and Acting CEO Edward Dolman and Mathaf Director Abdellah Karroum. The unambiguous identification of two expatriates as the responsible decision-makers is perplexing when considering QM’s clear top-down operations and the wider Qatari context, in which it is understood that “state institutions become the personal fiefdoms of ruling family members” (Kamrava 2013: 121). In fact, QM expatriate staff highlight the pervasive involvement of QM chairperson Sheikha Al Mayassa in virtually every high-profile project, including L’âge d’or (Interviewee 2 2018; Interviewee 3 2018). While Dolman and Karroum were both QM senior managers, decisions regarding Mathaf ’s exhibition program would have required the direct involvement of both Sheikha Al Mayassa and her closest advisors (Interviewee 3 2018), as well as Mathaf ’s founder and original collector, Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani, who remains actively involved in the museum’s activities, as claimed by another former Mathaf employee referred to here as Interviewee 2 (2018). The former employee explains: “If it wasn’t on a day-to-day basis in terms of curatorial direction or advice, those two figures played an important role in the curating processes of the museum” and also refers to influential international advisors who informed curatorial decisions, including Nada Shabout. Both Interviewees 2 (2018) and 3 (2018) claim that the involvement of Sheikha Al Mayassa and Sheik Hassan would go as far as approving the exhibition’s final object list and walking through the gallery before the opening, when artworks deemed inappropriate could still be removed. Furthermore, having taken up his position only about five months before the show opened, Karroum could not have been one of the decision-makers responsible for Abdessemed’s selection (Interviewee 3 2018). Why, then, was public disagreement with state-driven cultural programs expressed through attacking two expatriates? In fact, it is no novelty for expatriates working in Qatar to pay a high price when things “go wrong,” including in the cultural industries (Sakr and Steemers 2017: 111). Real decision-makers are seldom held accountable, and expatriates are often blamed (even by high profile policymakers) for domestic policies devised by the government (Fromherz 2012: 10). The record is ambiguous in regard to Mathaf ’s response to critique of Printemps. According to Khatri (2013), Mathaf attempted to defend its position on social media by emphasizing that the technique used to set the chickens on fire was not painful.The museum tweeted a photo of Abdessemed lighting himself on fire for a photographic portrait, Je suis innocent (I am innocent) (2012), after having applied the same flammable gel to himself as he had to the chickens.While the tweet still exists, the photo is no longer accessible. Having been shared simultaneously on Facebook and Twitter, the Facebook post was subsequently retracted. When the controversy emerged, the museum seemed also to have temporarily turned off the work. Doha News reported a tweet published by a visitor on 12 October 2013 (since deleted), claiming that the video had been removed from the exhibition due to “technical difficulties” (Sharif cited in Khatri 2013).

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A former Doha-based journalist also claims that they inspected the exhibition to find the projection turned off (Interviewee 10 2018). Murray maintains that Mathaf installed a swinging door with advance notification of content (2016: 125), a change that Interviewee 3 (2018) and another former Mathaf employee, Interviewee 7 (2018), confirm. A third former Mathaf staff member, Interviewee 4 (2018), instead remembers the installation of a curtain, while Interviewee 2 (2018) did not recall either but, when probed, ascribed this to the length of time since the events had occurred.

Coup de tête: idolatry, irrelevance or a clever marketing approach As with Printemps, critics of Coup de tête also found the sculpture un-Islamic but, in this case, for idolatry – or the depiction of humans and animals prohibited in certain interpretations of Islam (AFP 2013; Billot 2013; “Qatar: Citizens Protest Zidane” 2013; Rajgopal 2013) – though this taboo is considered outdated by progressive, reformist Qatari nationals (“Art Debate” 2013: 1). The discourse that trended on two Arabic hashtags – #‫تمثال_زيدان_بالكورنيش‬ (Zidane’sStatueOnTheCorniche) and #‫( تمثال_زيدان_في_قطر‬Zidane’sStatueInQatar) – effectively captures the spirit of condemnation. “Congratulations for having new idols” (cited in AFP 2013), tweeted one critic, while another lamented that the statue would harm Qatari youth, who do not “differentiate between the right and the wrong, or the haram (prohibited) and the halal (permissible)” (cited in AFP 2013). Critics also saw Abdessemed’s sculpture as an example of bad sportsmanship (Murray 2016: 125) and thus misaligned with Qatari values (Courrier International 2013).Typical of these sentiments is the tweet “Who is this Zidane, to be honored with this statue? And what did he do for Qatar? Is it right that anyone who deserves to be honored should be honored against our religion and our creed?” (cited in “Qatar: Citizens Protest Zidane” 2013). Several Twitter users invoked the intervention of religious authorities in the matter, with one calling for a fatwa (a formal religious edict or interpretation). “We want a legitimate fatwa from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs against this statue! Because statues are not allowed in Islam, and Zidane’s action was unethical” (cited in “Qatar: Citizens Protest Zidane” 2013). Others disagreed, pointing to the coexistence of divergent interpretations of Islam, even among Qatari nationals, and disagreements between progressive (often elite) and conservative elements of Qatari society. For example, a prominent Qatari psychologist, Moza Al Malki, maintained that Coup de tête was not haram, quoting a fatwa issued on 7 June 2010 by Sheikh Ahmed Al Tayeb, the mufti (Muslim legal expert) of Al Azhar in Cairo, an internationally respected Sunni Islamic body.The fatwa asserts, “As we do not worship the statues and sculptures anymore, making and buying and selling them are not forbidden in Islam” (“Art Debate” 2013: 1). Another critic asserted that religious principles must always trump other interests (Al Hajri 2013a) and insisted that Coup de tete inflicts injury on the wider society, thus demanding a public duty to speak out (Al Hajri 2013b). Other Twitter users instead championed the statue as a clever marketing tool. A member of the Al Rumaihi family, a Qatari family known for its open-minded and intellectual outlook, claimed, “#Zidane’sStatueOnTheCorniche was a smart move to support hosting the World Cup . . . an international legacy in the history of football” (Rumaihi 2013). A tweet from a user whose identity is not verifiable seconded this view, “#Zidane’sStatueOnTheCorniche Definitely, the European and global newspapers are talking about the statue, which is publicizing Qatar’s name globally in the field of sports” (Jassimrj 2013a).

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Tellingly, as with Printemps, critics assigned responsibility for what they saw as an inappropriate choice in artworks to “foreign experts,” emphasizing their conviction that the country’s leaders could have not autonomously decided to purchase Coup de tête. For example, one tweet declared, “An incident the history of football wants to forget . . . then an artist comes to design it . . . a foreign expert suggests to buy it, so it stays in front of our eyes forever. #Zidane’sStatueOnTheCorniche” (Alsada 2013). Also, as with Printemps, censorship was exercised. Having been installed (supposedly permanently) on 3 October 2013 on Doha’s promenade, Coup de tête was removed two weeks later and taken to Mathaf, purportedly to “join it with the rest of Adel’s work,” as reportedly claimed by QM Chief Marketing Officer Kimberly French, possibly for permanent display outside the Mathaf building (Scott 2013b). The statue was never again exhibited, possibly disappearing into QM storage. Interviewees 3 and 7 keenly stressed that the QM Public Art department, led by Sheikha Al Mayassa’s close advisor, Jean Paul Engelen, was responsible for the installation and removal of this work, and not Mathaf, but that, nevertheless, public perception held Mathaf accountable. Mathaf ’s extraneousness to Coup de tête might seem odd, particularly considering the work’s prominent place in the catalog of L’âge d’or. The ownership of Coup de tête, or lack thereof, exemplifies QM’s problematic decision-making structure and idiosyncratic chain of command, where curatorial decisions are concentrated in a few hands at the very top of the organization, and rarely those of the curators. The removal was celebrated by many, including a well-known Qatari academic, Hend Al Muftah,Vice President of Administration and Finance at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, who tweeted: “We are used to constructive criticism in #Qatar and used to hearing our voice even if it is not in line with our leaders. #Thanks to everyone who contributed to the removal of #Zidane’sStatueOnTheCorniche. This is Qatar” (Al Muftah 2013).

The Miraculous Journey: Western corruption and the evils of globalization Objections to Hirst’s The Miraculous Journey were covered primarily within local media and not widely reported internationally. Qatari newspaper The Peninsula devoted the front cover of its 12 October 2013 issue to the installation as reflective of “changing cultural trends in Qatar” (Rivera 2013: 2). A large photograph of the baby boy was included but the angle of the shot concealed its genitalia. Critics took to Twitter to articulate their dissent. One user, for instance, called for a diaper to cover the newborn (Al Hajrii 2013a) and even attested that the imagery so shocked them, it almost caused a car crash (Al Hajrii 2013b). This diaper tweet sparked an animated discussion. Responding to this tweet, some users likened the fetus to a jinn (a supernatural being) or macabre specter (Boujassom 2013). Others, linking the Abdessemed and Hirst commissions, bemoaned Western influence on Qatari culture. “What is going on? Our streets will become European in a year [and] filled with statues?,” asked one (HayaUP 2013). Still others condemned those they held responsible for the Hirst commission and, using the language of prayer, asked for more appropriate guidance, for instance, “May God guide our leaders, surround them with righteous advisors, guide us and keep us away from the evils of globalization” (AlThani 2013). This tweet, like the critique emerging from Abdessemed’s work, blames outsiders, rather than the Qatari ruling elite, for what they see as poor decision-making.

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While stressing that Qatari leaders “are not dictators,” another user asked, “but who has their ears?” (Al Hajrii 2013c). Like Abdessemed’s work, Hirst’s was also removed from view. Only a few weeks after its grandiose unveiling, The Miraculous Journey was covered with tarpaulins (Wasserman 2017: 49). The work remained partially or (almost) fully concealed for five years. Although the installation stood just across the road from my office, during my time at UCL Qatar I never saw the work in its entirety, as it was always covered by white tarpaulins (Plate 5) or, later, fully obscured by gigantic, purpose-built wooden fencing. QM asserted that the covering of the piece was temporary and served as a conservation mechanism, protecting the artwork against dust and dirt from ongoing construction at the Sidra site. However, others speculate that the covering represents censorship in response to faith-based social media criticism (Kelly 2016: 235–236). Urban myths around the work abounded, including that it was to have a second unveiling at the hospital’s Opening Day (Wasserman 2017: 49). In May 2018, one of my interviewees shared that Sheikha Al Mayassa’s most recent directive was to clean and uncover the installation as soon as possible (Interviewee 1 2018). In September 2018, workers began to dismantle the wooden fencing and the installation gradually resurfaced (Figure 3.2) – if without much fanfare. Only time will tell if The Miraculous Journey will remain permanently accessible to the public gaze. Five years after its first unveiling, in post-blockade times Qatari society seems ready to embrace this “alien” artwork.

Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, Doha, Qatar, photographed fully unveiled in August 2019.

FIGURE 3.2 Damien

Source: © Suzi Mirgani.

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The question that arises is whether the permanent or (possibly) temporary “editing” out of The Miraculous Journey and of the two other “alien” artworks by Abdessemed can be understood as instances of state censorship, as some have implied (Haxall 2017: 45), as curatorial self-censorship, or as a different form of self-censorship entirely, as I argue below.

The politics of curatorial afterthoughts The realities of censorship in Qatar Art market expert Georgina Adam contends that censorship is alive and well in Qatar; she declares that “Whilst Sheikha Al Mayassa seems determined to change the traditional mindset in the country, ‘cultural sensitivities’ mean that there is censorship” (2014: 150). Adam points to the omission of significant but culturally insensitive artworks in Murakami’s traveling solo show Ego, including his Miss K02, during its Qatar iteration at the Al Riwaq gallery. Similar omissions were made and acknowledged by the curator of Hirst’s solo exhibition, Relics, also at Al Riwaq (Clark 2013). But do those omissions represent acts of censorship or self-censorship? As this volume demonstrates, acts of censorship take place, in one form or another, in every society (Desmond 2011: 93), in liberal democracies as well as totalitarian dictatorships (Baltussen and Davis 2015: 2), particularly when artists create work that challenges political authorities, offends moral or religious sensibilities or upsets business interests. Such acts are typically carried out by secular or religious authorities with the power to enact punitive measures in order to preserve an accepted moral and/or political order (Demerdash 2017: 29) or to preserve cultural values and economic interests. State censorship refers to the legal mechanisms through which a government – or a ruler in an authoritarian state – condemns, prevents and prohibits free speech and artistic expression (Shishkova 2017). Curatorial selfcensorship instead refers to curators’ decision to silence – out of fear of sanction – artistic expressions that challenge cultural or moral sensitivities, or political or business interests of governmental (or other) authorities. In curatorial initiatives such as Hirst’s and Abdessemed’s installations, the coercive nature of state censorship and the self-coercive nature of curatorial or artistic self-censorship are both absent. Clearly, in Qatar, explicit and tacit limits are imposed on controversial artworks addressing religious, political or sexual themes (Mirgani 2017: 7), which both global and local artists (must) abide by when displaying their work as part of state-funded arts programs. Artworks that critique culture and traditions, as well as those addressing “human rights, censorship, sexuality, gender, religion, and politics,” (Downey 2010: 14) are also taboo, as elucidated by Sheikha Al Mayassa (Al Thani 2016). In fact, when bringing their work to Qatar for a lavishly funded exhibition or making new work for public art commissions, leading global artists such as Abdessemed and Hirst enter a contractual agreement with the local royal elites in which the rights and responsibilities of both parties are set out, as explained by Interviewee 1 (2018). These artists seemingly recognize the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that QM offers them, increasingly unavailable in the West due to funding cuts, through sponsoring their large-scale projects (Hossenally 2012; Scott 2013a). Limitations imposed on their freedom of expression, if any, do not appear to concern these “star artists,” who appear to accept such restrictions as part of the deal (Interviewee 1 2018). Typically, contractual agreements with leading international artists exclude problematic and culturally insensitive artworks, unless the royal elites

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want to include them, as in the cases of The Miraculous Journey and Coup de tête. Hence, the freedom of expression of globally recognized artists such as Abdessemed and Hirst is not limited through suppression but rather selectively purchased in legally binding contracts. When explaining how QM handles commissions with international artists whose oeuvre includes controversial and culturally insensitive work, Interviewee 1 (2018) stated, “It’s understood that if she [the artist] proposes controversial work we can’t show it . . . So, if she wants the commission, we need to create something that’s going to be suitable and well received.” In this context, wittingly or not, guest or QM curators and other museum professionals entrusted with the responsibility of significant curatorial projects involving international artists effectively act as “agents” of Qatar’s elite cultural policymakers.Their curatorial independence may be constrained by the necessity to ensure that the wishes of their elite contractors/ employers – involved in the making of curatorial decisions either personally or through a representative – are implemented.

Shaping Qatari hearts and minds The “erasures” of the works by Abdessemed and Hirst are not instances of state censorship or artistic or curatorial self-censorship. The decisions about the acquisition and display of these “alien” artworks were not taken independently by a (state-funded) curatorial body and then censored by a state authority. Rather, it was the same state-led (or royal-led) body to first challenge the moral order, through displaying or commissioning these artworks and then later suppressing them in response to public acrimony. As my Twitter analysis indicates, it was primarily “ordinary” (non-elite and more conservative) components of Qatari society who lamented that the artworks challenged the moral order – a position disputed by progressive Qataris such as Qatari psychologist Moza Al Malki. But why would a state-led museum authority, chaired by a powerful member of the royal Al Thani family, remove or conceal these artworks, which had come at considerable financial cost? In addressing these questions, it is vital to see how QM operations epitomize the cultural policy archetype of the so-called “engineer” state, typical of totalitarian regimes. In the engineer state, all artistic enterprises and means of artistic production are state owned and operated (Chartrand and McCaughey 1989: 51–53). Artists’ creative energies are subsidized, if aligned with, and supporting, the attainment of official political goals. The three “alien” artworks examined here are not simply aligned with, but closely embody, the cultural development agenda of Qatar and, more specifically, of its leading cultural commissar, Sheikha Al Mayassa. They exemplify the state’s efforts to comply with Western-defined, international “liberal” norms and tastes and emphasize the country’s progressivism internationally (Hertog 2017: 4–5). They can be also interpreted as integral to the state’s attempts to engineer a new Qatari society by implementing, as Kamrava (2013: 142) explains, social engineering projects and creating futuristic public spaces. Through these commissions of iconic global art by leading international artists, Qatar’s ruling family is attempting to support the development of Qatari society through inviting ordinary Qataris to engage with aesthetics, perspectives and issues emerging from the Western world. Focusing on the field of education in the UAE, Jones (2015: 24–25) suggests that Emirati autocrats’ investments in Western-style educational programs seeking to “shape citizens’ hearts and minds” are rooted in the ruling elites’ “emotional investment in certain stylized ideas of

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the West,” primarily developed during their experiences studying there. Through these experiences, according to Jones, they commonly adopt a belief that Western-style liberal culture “can be detached from its democratic moorings and reconstructed in their own-societies” (ibid.: 25). This interpretation reflects Sheikha Al Mayassa’s own experience studying in the United States and may explain her attempt to embed a liberal culture expurgated of politics in Qatari society. Problematically, top-down reformist agendas of this type assume that “ordinary people . . . do not have the necessary intelligence, skills, and experience to fully grasp the superior logic that underlies the high modernist project. But they will buy into it once they see its impressive results at work” (Kamrava 2013: 154). The art controversies I discussed above indicate that many “ordinary” (that is, non-elite and more conservative) Qataris did not buy into the state’s top-down contemporary art programs, even after – or possibly because of – seeing the commissions.Yet, cyberspace criticism was seldom addressed directly to Sheikha Al Mayassa, as we have seen, but at those considered to be the outsiders. The “editing out” of the “alien” artworks is not a benevolent response to public criticism or an act of curatorial or artist self-censorship. Neither is it QM’s delayed recognition of the commissions’ irrelevance to Qatari culture, as lamented by Qatari columnist Faisal Al Marzouqi (Rivera 2013: 2). Instead, the “editing out” should be understood as a political maneuver seeking to preserve the existing political order. We are confronted with two occurrences where ideas supported by the state are challenged by “ordinary” Qataris, and artworks are withdrawn from the public sphere to placate discontent. What was challenged was not so much the ideas represented by the works per se but, instead, Qatar’s extremely top-down, elitist cultural policy which embodies the reformist and ultimately authoritarian ideas of the country’s cultural decision-makers. A significant gulf was revealed between the perspectives of elite cultural policymakers and those of “ordinary” Qataris regarding Qatar’s developmental and change agendas. The resolution to take a step back and remove or (temporarily or permanently) conceal state-commissioned, controversial “alien” artworks confronts us with a peculiar form of what I have described as state self-censorship of itself. The removal constitutes a self-preservation strategy through which the ruling Al Thani family and their allies sought to ex post accommodate popular sensibilities, contain citizens’ antagonism and ultimately retain the support of ordinary Qataris, including those holding conservative views. Indeed, “it is only by maintaining the support of all Qataris . . . that the Emir can rule effectively” (Fromherz 2012: 31). In order to retain its popularity and internal stability, the ruling family has to remain responsive to popular sensitivities and demonstrate that it listens to negative sentiments, sometimes even reversing policy maneuvers designed to facilitate sociocultural change and “modernization.”5 In the cultural industries, this may even result in removing global artworks that provoke the popular sensibilities of the most conservative components of Qatari society. Significantly, the only work that survived the outcry was Printemps, exhibited intra moenia at Mathaf. As argued by some Twitter critics, it was precisely the selection of Doha’s public sphere for Coup de tête and The Miraculous Journey, displayed in front of a university (ifajer_216 2013) and a major highway (Nor 2013a), that was unacceptable. One Twitter user expressed his/her wish that The Miraculous Journey be exhibited inside Sidra Hospital, as “in a place of research, there is no problem, but there is no need to be spread it on the streets of Doha” (Nor 2013b).

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Conclusion My discussion of the reception and censorship of Abdessemed’s Printemps and Coup de Tête and Hirst’s The Miraculous Journey brings to the fore the politics of curating contemporary art in an autocratic, Islamic Gulf state. In this context, decision-making power about cultural programs and funding is firmly concentrated in the hands of a very few, extremely powerful, elite cultural policymakers, specifically super-powerful and super-rich members of the ruling family. No fully independent funding body or mechanism – located at arms-length from state authorities and thereby ensuring the autonomy of art programs from political objectives – exists. Controversies surrounding “alien” artworks transplanted to a Gulf state by a state-driven museum body such as QM provide an ambiguous, even paradoxical terrain where tensions around art unfold and the suppression of artworks may take place. While seemingly specific to Qatar, these tensions are tangible in other autocratic (Gulf) states where cultural policies are developed by royal family members and the elites. Elite cultural commissars of state-led museum bodies – with strong ties to Western art establishments – are increasingly investing in Western-derived arts organizations and “alien” works of high art, reflecting their cultural capital, sophisticated “taste” and globalized experiences and connections. Unsurprisingly, these cultural policies do not reflect the interests, tastes and moral perspectives of “ordinary” members of highly stratified Gulf societies, where social stratification is primarily based on affiliation to the royal family (Colton 2011) and, one might add, their taste. In the instances I examine, what ordinary Qataris oppose are the top-down, liberal ideas embodied in artworks supported by Gulf autocrats as part of state efforts to introduce change and foster progress through culture-focused social engineering. The investment in these artworks is a strategy through which Qatar’s ruling family is experimenting with challenging cultural initiatives, employing the country’s natural wealth to “encourage, push and prod traditional Qatar’s tribes towards globalization” (Fromherz 2012: 22). In deciding to remove the artworks, however, QM and its policymakers shied away from the opportunity to engage in constructive dialogue with Qatari citizens and use the public outcry as a learning opportunity, involving audiences in “reflection on community values and discussion on the ethical complexities of exhibiting contemporary art” (Steiner 2011: 405). Such an approach would require a strong level of active engagement of Qatar’s citizens and stakeholders in the cultural sector, which does not exist. Currently, Qatar’s stated objective to facilitate dialogue through its cultural investments remains rhetorical at best. Only through encouraging internal critical debate, approaching citizens as “active participants” (Downey 2010: 13), rather than passive consumers of culture, involving more diverse nationals and local constituencies in decision-making and relinquishing elite power can a more relevant, sustainable and less inflammatory museum apparatus be established in Qatar. As this goal appears far from the current reality, however, at the very least, both expatriate and local staff, guest curators and, more importantly, the real decisionmakers – i.e., the local elites – need to exercise great(er) caution when developing Qatar’s cultural policies and programs. Balancing conservative and liberal views remains an ongoing challenge in contemporary art curation and in other museum programs in Qatar, as in other autocratic Gulf states. The distinctive curatorial and censorship mechanisms in operation in autocratic countries are arduous to decipher, due to the secretive operations of cultural institutions and the stringent confidentiality agreements staff must abide by in fear of losing their position. If

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this chapter sheds some light on art censorship in Gulf countries, many questions remain unanswered. How do local artists navigate censorship apparatuses? To what extent do cultural policymakers bypass censorship altogether – through subtly coercing local artists in the production of acceptable artistic forms and narratives – with funding mechanisms? How do expatriate museum professionals navigate the complex ethical landscape and rationalize their participation in (self)censorship acts? More research is necessary to answer these and other questions.

Notes 1 A rentier state is one whose economy relies on rent of its natural resources to external clients. The creation of national wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small proportion of society, and the government is the principal recipient of the external rent (Beblawi 1987). 2 The interviews were conducted within the project “Curating Contemporary Art in Conservative Societies and Its Ethical Challenges:The Case of Qatar,” funded by King’s College London’s QualityRelated (QR) Funding (2017–2018). 3 All but one QM staff member who agreed to an interview had left QM and Qatar. Current staff either ignored or openly refused my interview requests. 4 QM was known as Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) before undergoing a rebranding in 2014. 5 See Kamrava (2013: 161) for decisions reversed in other areas of domestic policy.

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Kluijver, R. (2013) “Contemporary Art in the Gulf: Context and Perspectives.” Online. gulfartguide.eu/ wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Contemporary-Art-in-the-Gulf-for-print.pdf Mathaf (2013) L’âge d’or Exhibition Opening. OnlineVideo. www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWZ6f-Ujh2U “Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art Presents L’âge D’or by Adel Abdessemed” (2013) Art Kuwait. 2 October. Online. artkuwait.org/2013/10/mathaf-arab-museum-of-modern-art-presents-lage-dorby-adel-abdessemed.html Milliard, C. (2013) “ ‘We Are All at War’: Adel Abdessemed Explores the Dark Side at David Zwirner,” Blouinartinfo. 16 February. Online. www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/867575/we-are-all-at-waradel-abdessemed-explores-the-dark-side-at Mirgani, S. (2017) “Introduction: Art and Cultural Production in the GCC,” Journal of Arabian Studies, 7(1): 1–11. Mirgani, S. (ed.) (2018) Art and Cultural Production in The Gulf Cooperation Council, London: Routledge. Mounajjed, N. (2017) “Reflections on Public Art in the Arabian Peninsula,” Journal of Arabian Studies, 7(1): 84–98. Murray, G. (2016) “Encountering Contemporary Art in Qatar: Critical Conversations at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.” In Exell, K. and Wakefield, S. (eds.) Museums in Arabia:Transnational Practices and Regional Processes, London: Routledge, pp. 177–133. National Museum of Qatar (2019) “Commissioned Film and Art.” Online. nmoq.org.qa/film-and-art Nor (2013a) Tweet. 13 October. Online. twitter.com/Nor__201/status/389337625384845312 Nor (2013b) Tweet. 13 October. Online. twitter.com/Nor__201/status/389340067430285312 Owaida, T. (2013) Tweet. 11 October. Online. twitter.com/TurkiAa1966/status/388743348975960064 Paris, N. (2013) “Qatar: Damien Hirst Exhibition Opens in Doha,” The Telegraph. 10 October. Online. www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Qatar-Damien-Hirst-exhibition-opens-in-Doha/ Povolendo, E. (2009) “Exhibition with Disturbing Videos of Animals Leads to Protests in Italy,” The New York Times. 27 February. Online. www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/arts/design/28anim.html “Qatar: Citizens Protest Zidane Headbutt Statue as Un-Islamic” (2013) ANSAmed, 8 October. Online. www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/generalnews/2013/10/08/Qatar-citizens-protestZidane-headbutt-statue-un-Islamic_9429088.html Qatar Museums (2018) “The Miraculous Journey by Damien Hirst – Wonder and Awe.” Online. www. qm.org.qa/en/project/miraculous-journey-damien-hirst “QMA Installs Five-Meter Zidane ‘Head-Butt’ Statue on Corniche” (2013) Doha News. 3 October. Online. dohanews.co/qma-installs-five-meter-zidane-head-butt-statue-on/ “QMA: No Limits to be Imposed on Upcoming Damien Hirst Exhibition” (2013) Doha News. 15 September. Online. dohanews.co/qma-no-limits-to-be-imposed-on-upcoming-damien-hirst/ Rajgopal, A. (2013) “Adel Abdessemed’s Controversial ‘L’Âge d’or’ in Qatar,” Art Radar. 8 November. Online. artradarjournal.com/2013/11/08/adel-abdessemeds-controversial-lage-dor-in-qatarpicture-feast/ Richard, L. (2018) “Face à la Polémique, L’artiste Adel Abdessemed et le MAC Lyon Décident de Retirer L’œuvre ‘Printemps’” Coinnaissance des Arts. 16 March. Online. www.connaissancedesarts. com/art-contemporain/face-la-polemique-lartiste-adel-abdessemed-et-le-mac-lyon-decident-deretirer-loeuvre-printemps-1190527/ Rivera, R. (2013) “Culturally Progressive Step,” The Peninsula, 12: 2. Rumaihi, H. (2013) Tweet. 4 October. Online. twitter.com/hrumaihi/status/386101087448879104 Sakr, N. (2017) “Forces for Change in Official Arab Policies on Media and Children.” In Sakr, N. and Steemers, J. (eds.) Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World: Childhood, Screen Culture and Education, London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 45–73. Sakr, N. and Steemers, J. (2017) “Rebranding Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel.” In Sakr, N. and Steemers, J. (eds.) Children’s TV and Digital Media in the Arab World: Childhood, Screen Culture and Education, London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 99–121. Samson, A. (2018) “Adel Abdessemed’s Blazing Chickens Withdrawn from Lyon Show,” The Art Newspaper. 15 March. Online. www.theartnewspaper.com/news/abdessemed-s-blazing-chickenswithdrawn-from-lyon-show

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4 NO NAMES, NO TITLES, NO FURTHER EXPLANATIONS Noam Segal

The Gotter case: foundations In 2003, during the exhibition of the Nathan Gottesdiener Prize winner Ahlam Shibli at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMOA), the distinguished curator Ulrich Loock, a prize committee member and exhibition catalog contributor, resigned from his position on the committee. The reason for his resignation after five years of service was made public in a Haaretz newspaper article (Gilerman 2003): in an act of institutional self-censorship, the museum had censored Loock’s essay on Shibli’s work. Shibli’s critically acclaimed photography in this exhibition dealt with the Bedouin tribes living in the Negev desert of Israel. While this is not the place to expand on the politics of their situation, it is enough to say that, while Bedouin tribes try to preserve their unique way of living and environment, the Israeli government has, for many decades, persistently tried to oppress them by denying tribal members basic sanitation, education and architectural infrastructure. Bedouin tribes live under the constant threat of deportation from their lands and suffer from severe discrimination (Rudnitzky 2011; Weizman and Sheikh 2015). In his catalog essay, as shared with Israeli theoretician and art critic Sara Chinski, Loock (quoted in Chinski 2015: 308) originally wrote that “with the Israeli Occupation of the Negev the vast majority of Bedouins fled the country or was forced to leave.” He also claimed that [Bedouins] “are prohibited to build permanent structures, where houses . . . are demolished, where fields are poisoned and families are evicted from their living places on the basis of the Israeli land laws.” Shibli elaborated on the course of events in interviews with Chinski (2015: 308) and Gilerman (2003),1 explaining that the main disagreement with the institution back then revolved around those two passages in Loock’s essay. She disclosed that, although Loock changed some of the phrases in response to the institution’s request, the entire passage about the Israeli occupation of the Negev was cut without further explanation. Additionally, Shibli declared, Loock’s entire curatorial interpretation of her photographs was omitted from the exhibition’s wall texts and catalog.

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The museum’s stand was to interpret the artist’s works as an exotic observation of the Negev residents and their difficulties in adjusting to the modern life provided for them by the Israeli state, rather than a critical reflection pointing out Israel’s discrimination and wrongdoing. The institution also decided to reinterpret Shibli’s nationality not as a Palestinian from Israel (which is the national definition the artist identifies with) but as an Israeli Arab or Bedouin, depending on the publication. The reason for this censorial act, as argued by the TAMOA (Chinski 2015: 309), was that the exhibition was not the place to advance political arguments or to make historical statements – thus inferring that an art museum is neither a “political institution” nor an appropriate context in which to delve into sociological, anthropological, geographical or historical debates. The TAMOA claimed that their mission concerned purely art and aesthetics and that it was apolitical. This unyielding adherence to aesthetics occludes its cultural and political constitutive conditions and foundations. Once an object, whether of speech or material, is considered irrelevant to an aesthetic discourse due to its heterogeneous qualities, it becomes, paradoxically, emphatically marked by its political and social nature. Approximately ten years after the Shibli-Gottesdiener incident, however, the discourse had already shifted and the main players were different. Smaller and newer but geographically peripheral museums in Israel, such as the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art, Petach Tikva Museum and Ein Harod Museum, had become more dominant in setting the tone and many of these institutions were developing approaches and projects that directly challenged the assumption that museums can and should remain politically neutral. I present the Shibli-Gottesdiener self-censorship incident as a precedent to help frame the challenges the Tel Aviv Museum of Art faced in its programming between 2013 and 2015.2 The Shibli case can be understood as a representation of the censorial foundations that have been laid in Israel since the inception of the Israeli state in 1948.3 Four days after the Israeli declaration of independence, a State of Emergency was activated and has never been lifted since. Among other limitations, it enforces severe restrictions on freedom of speech and entitles the head military censor a great deal of latitude (Knesset 2017). Even today, documents regarding war crimes (the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 and Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956) and other military events are censored under the claim of state security (“Hashtakat Haarchion” 2018). In this chapter, I will discuss the alarming rise of self-censorship in the Israeli art field by illuminating the inner mechanisms of specific incidents at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Placing these incidents within the wider context of Israeli political discourse and action, particularly increasing threats of censorship under the successive governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I will show the evolutionary processes of these mechanisms. Moreover, I will demonstrate how hierarchical structures and low risk tolerance within museums can create a culture in which the two parallel strategies of language control and lack of transparency are deployed to maintain the status quo. My goal is not only to identify a trend but also to analyze the evolving language used by institutions to justify and explain their censorial acts and to examine the implications of this risk-averse behavior for civil society. My insights are informed by my own practice. From 2013 to 2015, I was employed by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art as a guest curator to work on two exhibitions. One was a solo show for the acclaimed artist Anri Sala (Segal et al. 2014). The other, which I curated together with

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Dr. Raphael Zagury-Orly, was an archival exhibition showcasing selected writings from the archive of philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, accompanied by contemporary art (Segal and Zagury-Orly 2015). These projects form the case studies on which my analysis is based. The Tel Aviv Museum is no different than other institutions in Israel in regard to the enormous pressures they face to self-censor and I do not wish to assign personal blame to any individual players in the incident. My focus is the institution and, for this reason, I do not use the names of the institution’s officers, as they functioned only to perform their roles as gatekeepers. However, it is important to remember that individuals ultimately make the decisions. As I will show, the institution, led by individuals and subject to intimidation and ongoing threats from the state, chose to reduce and limit intelligibility, in a context where intelligibility is usually what is sought.

Anri Sala: Names in the Doldrums The work of Albanian-born artist Anri Sala is known for its delicate, non-literal poetic nature (Fraser et al. 2011; Fried and Simon 2011; Brantl et al. 2015). Dealing with political situations and social events of collective rupture, his projects manage to capture and delineate harsh human situations without being direct, literal or reductive. His mesmerizing works usually depict experiences of a political nature but in relation to other realms of sensation, reception and emotion. I was keen to explore how his approach would resonate within the Israeli political context. This would be Sala’s first solo show in Israel. Sala and I had a long and productive dialogue regarding all decisions concerning the presentation of his work. We stood together which reassured me in developing the project and negotiating the museum’s demands. Several of the works for Sala’s TAMOA exhibition, No Names No Title (2014–2015), represent his response to the 50-day war, known as the 2014 Israeli-Gaza Conflict or as Operation Protective Edge, which took place during the summer prior to the opening of the show. During this war, the Israel Defense Force destroyed some 20,000 Palestinian homes in Gaza. Approximately 2,139 Palestinians were killed (on the Israeli side, the reported numbers vary drastically), including 490 Palestinian children (Dearden 2014). During the course of events, the human rights organization B’Tselem bought commercial airtime on Israeli public radio and released an audio broadcast of a monotone female voice reading the names and ages of the children killed in Gaza to date. At the time of production, about 150 Palestinian children – and no Israelis – were dead. The broadcast (B’Tselem 2014) was rejected by public radio due to Israeli laws barring the inclusion of political content during commercial airtime. In reaction, B’Tselem filed a petition at the highest court in Israel, arguing that the audio broadcast carried only informational content. On 13 August 2014, the Israeli Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, turned down the petition by stating that the broadcast did include political content and thus fell under the public radio ban. Moreover, the Court declared that it is mandatory to avoid political content in commercial airtime. They claimed that the purpose of the audio cast was not merely informational, but that it intended to influence public opinion. Sala drew upon this incident of censorship in Names in the Doldrums (Plate 6), a new piece made specifically for the show. It was one of Sala’s acoustic works, Doldrums, each of which has a loudspeaker concealed within it and which plays an audio file.The low frequencies arising from the speaker set a drum skin in motion, which in turn activates a set of drumsticks.

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Names in the Doldrums played the censored B’Tselem broadcast at an extremely low volume. It was the first work to “welcome” exhibition visitors as it was installed at the entrance. The exhibition text provided the following information: “This work, titled Names in the Doldrums, 2014, conceals names that have been silenced, and it is the sound of their expression that triggers the drumsticks.” That was the only information provided regarding the piece. In the summer preceding the war, Sala had followed the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and learned about the censored broadcast. Closer to the exhibition print deadline, we discussed the events that took place over the summer; Sala proposed No Names No Title as the exhibition title to mark the act of censorship. To me, the choice felt very much to the point, both because of its political reference and also because we had decided to eschew wall texts throughout the show. This was in keeping with Sala’s Rancièreian approach: he often avoids wall texts and explanatory labels throughout his exhibitions. He sees this process of emancipation as a way of empowering the viewer to have freedom in constructing meaning (Rancière 2009). Thus, the exhibition title seemed organic and to further enhance the artist’s work. The cultural foundations of wartime “silencing” had been laid in 1982, during the first war in Lebanon. In an article published by a leading newspaper, the writer Amiram Nir wrote what was later carved in stone, “Silence, now we shoot.” Nir’s article proclaimed that, in times of battle, there is no right and left, no poor and rich, no religious and secular, that no sectarianism is legitimate in times of survival (Nir 1982). According to Nir’s dictate, the Israeli nation must stand united behind its soldiers, putting aside its differences, particularly as represented through criticism, reflection, judgment and political agenda; all forms of dissent should be muted. Although Israeli political discourse had become quite robust by the early 1980s (in contrast to the first years after the establishment of the state of Israel), Nir’s words were strongly influential and remain so. By 2014, when Sala was conceiving Names in the Doldrums, the climate for critical engagement had deteriorated substantially. The right-wing Netanyahu government was extremely hostile toward Arabs and the political left (including, of course, cultural practitioners, the majority of whom identify with left-wing views). Vitriol directed toward these groups from the right-wing of the Israeli Knesset (its parliament) was amplified by various media platforms (in particular, the widely read conservative free newspaper Israel Today) whose owner, American Sheldon Gary Adelson, publicly opposes the two state solution and was quoted saying that “Palestinians are a made up nation that exists only to destroy Israel” (“Sheldon Adelson” 2014). In this divisive environment, domestic segregation of the Israeli Arab and Palestinian populations became commonplace and Israelis expressing views against the war or the killing of Gaza’s civilians were at risk of becoming total outcasts. Freedom of speech was severely compromised in 2014 and has not recovered since. On the second day of the 2014 Gaza war, with 20 Palestinian casualties reported, Israeli Knesset members who criticized the killings as unnecessary were expelled from parliament for two days (B’Z 2014).4 At the same time, one of Israeli theater’s most important and appreciated actresses, Gila Almagor, received death threats from right-wing groups, after allegedly saying, in response to the revenge killing of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir (Kershner 2015), that she was embarrassed to be an Israeli. Afterward, she asserted that her words were taken out of context (Birenberg 2014). In a nutshell, these were the opening events of a new tradition targeting the Israeli left, one that was encouraged and fueled by Netanyahu’s rightwing government which has gravely and continuously limited free speech in Israel (B’Z

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2014).5 Thus, when our exhibition opened in December 2014, the public atmosphere was very tense. During the installation period, a few days before the exhibition opening, the museum leadership visited our work-in-progress and became acquainted with Sala’s Names in the Doldrums.They listened as the work played the banned B’Tselem recording with the names of the dead Palestinian children. Because the artist wanted to convey the silencing of the recording by Israeli public radio, he had adjusted the volume and the pitch of the sound to produce the necessary impact to trigger the drum skin’s vibrations and the ensuing rat-a-tat of the drumsticks which, in turn, would hush the sound of the audio reciting the names of the children. Therefore, the recording was hardly audible; it was almost impossible to decipher what the speaker was saying. Only the echo of the speaker’s melody resonated across the entrance floor. Sala’s work was not meant as an insult. It represents a critical response to a political event – the suppression and silencing of the radio broadcast of the names of innocent, dead children – by mirroring it and reproducing it in cultural currency. By altering the context of the initial silencing, the work sheds light on the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s decision and the heavy weight of Israeli consensus. It interrogates censorship incisively. There were questions about the inclusion of Names in the Doldrums in the show. There were serious concerns around having right-wing protestors in the exhibition pavilion which would endanger the operation of the show. In light of the events taking place at that time, these concerns were not unfounded. Other museums had suffered from right-wing pressures to censor specific works, although those efforts were concentrated primarily on legal procedures (Libsker 2015). Meanwhile, as he discussed with me in a series of informal curatorial conversations, Sala began to have reservations of his own. While attentive to the museum’s interests, he worried more about how a controversy would likely provoke the media to reduce the work and the show in its entirety to a one-liner about a single object. This was a valid concern, especially within the inflammatory atmosphere of Israeli political discourse. Sala also was sensitive to the rules of hospitality and believed in respecting local conventions; he noted, through a traditional metaphor, that when someone invites him to dinner, he will not “spit on the host’s table.” As he explained to me, he recognized the fact that, as a visitor and an outsider in Israel, he could never fully grasp the issues around the possible acceptance or rejection of his work as he could not read the local undercurrents nor wholly understand local behaviors or codes. Sala also recalled his own experience of having lived under a dictatorial regime until the age of 16. It made him aware that censorship, combined with a lack (or, in the case of Israel, a shrinking) of civil liberties, gradually leads to acts of self-censorship. However, it also made him recognize the fine line between surrendering one’s convictions and deliberately putting people in harm’s way or forcing them to take untenable positions. He was concerned with finding this fine line and the just balance. Would it have been impossible to manage a right-wing protest? Or, as Sala argued, would the primary threat to the exhibition not be a right-wing protest but a radical simplification? I did not see this as impossible to manage or frightening. In fact, Sala and I concurred that the primary threat to the project was not a protesting mob but, rather, a radical simplification of the show through self-censorship. Such simplification would circumscribe its expressive content, strongly contradicting the logic of both the exhibition and the artist’s oeuvre. It was essential to include Names in the Doldrums in the show and also to frame Sala’s work within the current political climate. After a brief discussion, it was agreed to keep Names in

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the Doldrums in the show but not discuss the work in question with the media, audiences or in the catalog, nor to explain the reference to the work in the title of the exhibition. As a result, the piece was transformed into something unmediated, unexplained, mute and, therefore, unreachable and inaccessible. Names in the Doldrums became an empty shell rather than a reflexive critical observation, but for a few occasions during the run of the exhibition when questions regarding the name of the exhibition arose and I explained what it referenced. The show attracted more than 20,000 visitors. By local standards, it was a huge success.

Walter Benjamin: aftermath I worked on the Walter Benjamin project, Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives, with the philosopher Raphael Zagury-Orly and in collaboration with the Walter Benjamin Archive at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, from 2013 to 2015, at the same time that I was developing the Sala project and in the following year when the political climate remained in turmoil under Netanyahu’s leadership. Clashes regarding religious coercion were frequent (as they were before that time and since); there was a violent atmosphere in many Israeli streets. For instance, a spontaneous, religiously motivated public effort emerged to exclude women from the public realm, including in advertisements and in cultural events (Civilian Monitoring for Government Performance 2014; Hason 2018; Kashti 2018a, 2018b)6 and Minister of Culture Miri Regev threatened funding cuts to cultural institutions and arts commissions that presented a narrative not in alignment with the government’s agenda (Mazria-Katz and Zonszein 2018).7 These political pressures and threats of censorship created a challenging environment in which to curate Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives. Born into a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Benjamin developed an extremely complicated relationship to Judaism, in general, and Zionism, in particular. The exhibition probed this relationship as well as Benjamin’s thoughts on the revival of the Hebrew language through his highly reflective and minutely detailed correspondence with German-born philosopher Gershom Scholem, who had emigrated to Palestine under the British Mandate (Segal and Zagury-Orly 2015). Zagury-Orly and I presented over 175 items from the archive, juxtaposed with modern and contemporary art, including works by Uri Aran, Paul Klee, Haim Steinbach, Leonor Antunes and others, which helped to illuminate the far-reaching horizons of Benjaminian thinking. We also invited several artists to propose a newly commissioned work for the show in order to shine a responsive lens onto Benjamin’s outlook. One of these artists was Neta Shira Cohen, a recent graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and whose work we both held in very high esteem. Cohen is an observant Jew; she maintains the religious Mitzvot (or commandments) and works under the religion’s limitations, ideas and conceptions in her exceptional performative practice. Zagury-Orly and I were both drawn to her proposal because we believed it was imperative to have a strong and distinctive voice that could address Benjamin’s Jewish identity, Zionism and exile from a contemporary artistic and spiritual perspective. Cohen developed a thoughtful text-based proposal referencing Benjamin’s private history in a way that would make his letters relevant to current audiences. Benjamin had committed suicide in Portbou, Spain, while fleeing the Nazi invasion of France, and never had a proper Jewish funeral. According to Judaic tradition, it’s a mitzvah (in this context, a good deed) to

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pray for a deceased soul, especially in cases where a proper prayer was not possible at the time of death. The proposed work (Figure 4.1) was based on Benjamin’s initials, where each initial started a specific prayer. Usually, the initials are read in the order of their appearance, next to the Hebrew letters ‫ תנצב”ה‬which appear on all Jewish tombstones. It’s an acrostic form that means, “May his/her soul be bound in the binding of life.” If the work were to be commissioned, the text for the prayer would be published as a booklet to be inserted inside the exhibition catalog – which was a modest publication distributed in the galleries free of charge. The proposed work would have engaged Benjamin’s interest in letters, particularly Hebrew letters, an interest which he shared with his correspondent Scholem and which was brought out in the exhibition (Segal and Zagury-Orly 2015). In Judaism, and particularly the traditions of Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, the formal representation of letters exceeds their communicative function, to emphasize the intentional significance they hold. This intentionality, according to religious belief, diverges from any rational purpose and is motivated by a system of belief according to which each letter is a symbol, full of many inner meanings, from the literal straightforward meaning to deeper spiritual meaning (Scholem 1974; Haralick 2005). The idea behind Cohen’s work was to ask visitors to read the prayer text according to a given set of instructions, so they would become active participants, in either a collective or private way, in a prayer for his soul. To provide context for the prayer, Cohen proposed to include in the booklet a series of religious texts dealing with written and spoken language relevant to Benjamin’s correspondence with Scholem. It was also to have contained an introduction defining the concept of communal prayer and the act of praying so that no visitor would engage in this action without knowledge and consent. Zagury-Orly and I found both the prayer and the printed matter to be a smart and beautiful gesture: a simple textual work that required a relatively low production budget. However, once the work was brought to the institution’s attention, TAMOA cited an unwritten institutional policy prohibiting the exhibition of any works dealing with religion or faith. There were also apprehensions about potential religious protest, as the work might seem offensive to some religious communities.8 These apprehensions were based on concerns stemming from recent controversies at other Israeli museums and galleries.9 However, those controversies largely targeted art that was directly critical of Israeli politics, specifically the Occupation and Arab-Jewish relations; that drew from Holocaust imagery; or that was directly offensive to religious belief. Cohen’s work was, in contrast, a highly respectful piece which seemed to encourage prayer. Did it warrant similar apprehensions? Like the TAMOA leadership, Zagury-Orly and I were concerned by developments around religious politics in Israel. Israel was becoming increasingly fundamentalist, and we began to have doubts about including religious representation in the show; we did not want to support the growth of fundamentalism in public space. At the same time, we were concerned that fears of a religiously motivated action could sabotage the commission of a highly relevant and moving project such as Cohen’s. We also championed the choice of Cohen, a member of a devout religious community, as a means of diversifying the range of artists represented in Israeli museums. In fact, underlying the concerns about the potential for disruption by ultra-orthodox protesters was a much more complex development: the growing role of religious values in public life, including museums. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, there is a lack of experience among museum practitioners in collaborating with Israeli contemporary artists

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Shira Cohen, proposed cover for a prayer text, 2015. Unrealized work for Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives, Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Graphic design by Alona Pnini.

FIGURE 4.1 Neta

Source: Courtesy of Neta Shira Cohen.

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who are devout. Indeed, religious individuals are largely excluded from artistic discourse in Israel. There are a number of reasons for this. The most significant barrier is rooted in Jewish tradition, specifically the well-known biblical verse and commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20: 4–6). Other impediments are practical in nature. Although today one can find an increasing number of religious art centers around Israel, as well as religious art education programs, spiritually observant artists meet difficulties in penetrating the mainstream art scene because they do not necessarily share the same Western art history background as secular practitioners; moreover, the concerns and values of spiritually observant artists often differ from those of their non-religious contemporaries (Bar Hama 2008; Lifshitz 2019). Contemporary religious artists are thus excluded from exhibiting at Israeli museums and galleries for the same reasons that artists from other minority groups are often excluded. Zagury-Orly and I recognized that Cohen’s proposed work offered options for religious practice and modes of being that were neither coercive nor dogmatic and which did not simply adhere to the political alliance between some forms of Zionism and Judaism. It was empowering and respectful of the religious communities involved without offending other groups in the process; moreover, the work did not profess violence nor did it serve any particular ideological agenda or specific set of beliefs. It did entail a religious ritual, but this component was only one part of a more comprehensive installation and, through the informed consent components of Cohen’s booklet, audiences would have the agency to determine if and how they wanted to participate in this ritual. We also understood the value of Cohen’s project as a framing device for the archival material at the core of the exhibition. One of the main points of disagreement between Scholem and Benjamin revolved around the definition of Judaism and how it can coexist with Zionism; while Scholem in 1923 established in Palestine under the British Mandate a movement calling for a territorial settlement with the local population and a bi-national state based on equality and constitutional order, Benjamin was reluctant to emigrate and instead adopted nomadism as a way of living in accordance with Jewish tradition (Segal and Zagury-Orly 2015). Cohen’s proposed work offered an inclusive Jewish perspective for all inhabitants of this land, without any disrespect for orthodox Jews and without excluding non-Jewish residents; it settled Scholem and Benjamin’s argument by providing a gesture of coexistence. In thinking through why it was important to commission Cohen’s project, we drew on the work of Chinski who has written extensively about the whiteness and homogeneity of the Israeli art field. As Chinski (2015: 326–330) explains, this exclusiveness stems from the history of the Ashkenazi (from Northern and Eastern Europe) secular pioneers who built the state of Israel and the following generations who established the canon of Israeli art history. Religious, Arabic and Sephardic or Mizrahi (from the Middle East and North Africa) groups were excluded from this process, mainly because they did not participate in the early days of Israeli nation-building and were subject to state-led institutionalized discrimination and racism (Deri 2017). Commissioning for the exhibition the work of a Sephardic woman artist who observes the Jewish mitzvot would have made a powerful statement about the value of inclusion in Israeli museums. Eventually, the Museum opted not to commission Cohen’s proposed project.The work was excluded primarily because it represented a perception of the world that drastically differed from what is usually presented in a museum. The decision missed an opportunity to establish a much-needed pathway to engagement in the Israeli art world for diverse communities.

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Conclusion As a freelance curator working in Israel and with progressive political orientation, I encounter tensions and conflicts over political content on a routine basis. The small margin between a healthy, fruitful public debate and one that is censored is becoming increasingly precarious. Museums engage in self-censorship to avoid censorship from external sources, creating a troubling veil of secrecy over these acts. The invisibility of self-censorship makes it hard to identify and challenge. In Israel today, the atmosphere of increasing public fear, punctuated by high-profile incidents of censorship, is having a far-reaching impact on the nation’s public institutions, including museums, theaters, film foundations and festivals. Evidence of religious coercion as an escalating phenomenon can be found in a new Hebrew word that has emerged to convey this process: hadata, meaning the forced act of becoming more religious.10 With the exception of Holocaust imagery, censorship in Israel is not, however, necessarily connected to religion; it stems primarily from political considerations and alleged issues of security. In the censorship case involving Ahlam Shibli’s work, administrators insisted on the Museum’s purely aesthetic purposes and claimed that it was outside their mandate to deal with historical, political or social claims. Such strictly aesthetic arguments posit the viewer as someone without the necessary information to “read” the work of art and the curator as a person who is gifted with the knowledge to “speak for” the piece. In the Shibli example, even when the artist claimed that the institutional interpretation of her work and identity was incorrect, the Museum still chose to follow its own agenda. Aestheticism in this and other cases potentially conceals, implements and preserves the reigning systems of power, knowledge and belief. The case involving Anri Sala represents the normalization of the aesthetic position in its amplified mode: the museum becomes the judge of both aesthetic matters and the political sphere. Here, the institution attempted to control not only the interpretation of the work but also its wider circulation. According to this logic, the institution, as sole agent, holds the “right” information to “read” a work of art and exercises the authority to adjust and regulate the presentation and circulation of the work. The case involving Neta Shira Cohen and the Walter Benjamin Archive fuses the logic of the two others. As with the Shibli exhibition, the Museum fell back on the aesthetic argument of political neutrality; and, like with Sala’s Names in the Doldrums, the decision was justified by anticipatory fears of offending right-wing protestors. The rhetoric in all three cases has the same goal: to control the political reception of the work. However, there is another dangerous component to the rhetoric deployed in the Cohen case. Security concerns grant a radical legitimacy to suppression and thus the total freedom to censor. As a result, fear of violence can easily be used to discriminate against works that may be controversial for a wide variety of reasons. In light of the recent turmoil of Israeli politics and culture, the imposition of different kinds of self-censorship in the supposedly free artistic domain reveals an unsettling and deeply troubling picture. If, in 2003, the reason for self-censorship was verbalized and explained by the players involved, in 2014–2015 it was not publicly communicated and therefore was not subject to public reflection or debate. This development goes hand in hand with the political climate of silencing. Censoring acts, even if undertaken, supposedly, for the benefit of art, are always problematic in their relationship to state control and propaganda. Nevertheless, they may also be

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justified as historical corrections or as protective measures to prevent harming the feelings of diverse communities. But here’s the rub: Israeli dynamics are distinctive.The acts recounted in this chapter did not come about in an effort to protect the rights of oppressed communities. On the contrary, they came to serve the majority, those in power, meaning the conservative ideology. Paradoxically, in the process, they excluded the voices of marginalized communities, wholesale, from the public sphere. This kind of self-censorship leads not to a diverse, progressive society but, rather, to one homogeneous public sphere with very limited freedom of speech.

Notes 1 The Chinski article and its critical reflections regarding the Shibli case (the Gotter case) serve as an anchor for this text. 2 This is not to suggest that the Shibli case was the first case of censorship at the museum. In 1983, under previous management, a catalog was censored due to the inclusion of the colors of the Palestinian: red, green, black and white. After the artist David Reeb described his act as a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian artists, his catalog was banned and never printed. 3 A detailed list of artworks silenced, censored or banned in Israel was gathered in 1998 by curator Ami Steinitz. The list identified more than 58 works that had been banned under diverse pretenses and circumstances, and in a range of contexts. 4 Over the next two days, other Israeli parliament members were banned from criticizing the war, and one leading journalist asked the spokesman for the Israeli Defense Force to publicly deliver inaccurate information about the war, under the assumption that telling the truth might harm Israeli war goals. In doing so, that same journalist, Ben Caspit, was in fact performing the first public act of self-censorship related to this war. 5 Anti-war demonstrators were physically and verbally attacked and sometimes sexually harassed and the police often failed to intervene to stop the violence. Israeli left-wing journalists received repeated death threats, some even needing personal bodyguards. Foreign publications were censored, among them The New York Times. This toxic environment permeated the private and public sectors, including businesses, hospitals, universities, sports teams and public offices which limited the freedom of speech of their employees and fired those who breeched these protocols. 6 Images of women were removed from advertisements on public transportation and in state campaigns and women themselves were prohibited from singing in national celebrations and from spontaneously sitting in undesignated seats in public buses. In some cities, women who did not wear religious attire or who were not well-covered were violently attacked. 7 Thus far, this threat has been realized only when institutions present Arab–Palestinian narratives or support Arab–Palestinian artistic endeavors. Regev’s threat was eventually invalidated for violating the law. Nevertheless, it is important to consider the ongoing pressures and ongoing threats faced by museums. 8 It is important to note, however, that religious groups in Israel are not all vulnerable minorities. Due to the structure of the Israeli parliament and voting system, Jewish religious groups hold disproportionate electoral power and enjoy increasing budgets. Moreover, the Israeli state is, first and foremost, Jewish, and many affairs of the state and society are subjugated to Jewish law (Knesset 1948). 9 For instance, around the same time that the Benjamin exhibition was under development, a video work shown at Sapir Academic College included images of artist Gil Yefman wearing a Jewish prayer shawl as underwear. The work was considered highly offensive in the eyes of the religious community in Israel and the artist received online public death threats. However, the College decided to leave the work in the show, confining it to a designated space with a warning placed at the entrance. The artist, who is not a member of the religious community, expressed his regrets for disrespecting the community (Littman 2015). 10 Hadata became an official Hebrew word, recognized by the Academy of the Hebrew Tongue, in 2017, although the academy states it initially appeared in 1992 and was brought to the academy in 2006 (Academy of the Hebrew Tongue 2017).

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Bibliography Academy of the Hebrew Tongue (2017) “Hadata.” 7 October. Online. hebrew-academy.org.il/2017/07 /10/%D7%94%D7%93%D7%AA%D7%94/ Anderman, N. (2015) “Sarat Hatarbut Regev Bohenet Shlilat Takzivim Mecinetheque Tel Aviv Biglal Festival Sirtey Nakbah” (“The Minister of Culture Examines Budget Cuts for the Tel Aviv Cinematheque Due to Nakbah Film Festival”), Haaretz, 29 November. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/ cinema/1.2787638 Ashkenazi, Y. (2015) “Misrad Hatarbut Makpi Zmanit Et Hatmiha Betheatron El Midan” (“The Minister of Culture Temporary Shuts Down Support at El Midan Theater”), Haaretz. 16 June. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/theater/1.2661590 Ashkenazi,Y. (2017) “Israel Weighs Cutting Funding to Jaffa Theatre Over Alleged Incitement,” Haaretz. 6 September. Online. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-weighs-cutting-funding-to-jaffa-theatreover-alleged-incitement-1.5448776 Avital, T. (2016) “Kama Ola Jadat Lamedina” (“How Much Religion Costs the State”), The Marker. 12 April. Online. www.themarker.com/magazine/MAGAZINE-1.2910489 Bar Hama, A. (2008) “Vegam mize All Taniach Yadcha” (“From This, Too, Do Not Let Go”), Maarav. 10 October. Online. www.maarav.org.il/archive/classes/PUItemd5a2.html?lang=HEB&id=1211 Birenberg,Y. (2014) “Ani Mitbayeshet Lehiyot Israelit” (“I’m Ashamed to Be an Israeli”), Yediot Aaharonot. 9 July. Online. cdn.the7eye.org.il/uploads/2014/08/gila-almagor-24hours-972014.jpg Brantl, S., Dander, P., Sala, A. and Szendy, P. (2015) Anri Sala: The Present Moment, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. B’Tselem (2014)“Layeladim B’azaYesh Shemot:Hatashdir Shetzunzar”(“Gaza Kids Have Names:The Censored Ad”). Online. www.btselem.org/hebrew/gaza_strip/20140723_children_in_gaza_have_names B’Z, I. (2014) “Haslama” (“Escalation”), The 7 Eye. 4 August. Online. www.the7eye.org.il/119773 Chinski, S. (2015) Kingdom of the Meek: The Social Grammar of the Israeli Art Field, Bnei Brak: HaKibbutz Hameuchad. Civilian Monitoring for Government Performance (2014) “Meniaat Hadart Nashim Bamerhav Haziburi” (“Preventing Woman’s Exclusion in Public Space”). Online. www.ceci.org.il/%D7%9E% D7%A0%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%AAD7%A0%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%97%D7%91-%D7% 94%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99 Dearden, L. (2014) “Israel-Gaza Conflict: 50-Day War by Numbers,” The Independent. 27 August. Online. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gaza-conflict-50-day-war-by-num bers-9693310.html Deri, D. (dir.) (2017) The Ancestral Sin, D.D. Productions. Exodus 20:4–6, Holy Bible: King James Version. Fraser, M., Fried, M., Parreno, P., Rama, E., Steinweg, M.,Veliaj, E. and Sala, A. (2011) Anri Sala, Montreal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Fried, M. and Simon, J. (2011) Anri Sala: Serpentine Gallery, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Gilerman, D. (2003) “No Politics, Please,” Haaretz. 30 April. Online. www.haaretz.com/israel-news/ culture/1.4720409 Haralick, R. (2005) Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, New York: Roman & Littlefield. “Hashtakat Haarchion” (“The Silence of the Archive”) (2018) Haaretz. 17 January. Online. www.haaretz. co.il/opinions/editorial-articles/1.5744402 Hason, N. (2018) “Almoni Roken Maayan Be’ezor Yerushlaim, Al Reka Nisayon Lehadir Nashim Merahaza Bamakom” (“John Doe Emptied a Pond in Jerusalem in Order to Exclude Woman from Bathing There”), Haaretz. 16 July. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium-1.6280032 Kashti, O. (2018a) “Kenisot Nifradot Vetakanonei Zeniut: Bemusdot Academim Marhivim Et Hahafrada Hamigdarit” (“Different Entrance and Modesty Regulations: In Academic Institutions Gender Segregation Is Extended”), Haaretz. 26 July. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium1.6316261

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Kashti, O. (2018b) “Mehir Hahafrada Bekurs Lenehiga Monaat: Teviat Pizuim Al Afflaya” (“The Cost of Exclusion in Preventive Driving: Lawsuit on Basis of Discrimination”), Haaretz. 7 September. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/.premium-1.6462832 Kershner, I. (2015) “Two Jewish Teenagers Found Guilty of Murdering Palestinian, 16,” The New York Times. 30 November. Online. www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/world/middleeast/muhammad-abukhdeir-teenagers-convicted-murder.html Knesset (1948) “Proclamation of Independence.” Online. www.knesset.gov.il/docs/eng/megilat_eng.htm Knesset (2017) “Declaring a State of Emergency.” Online. www.knesset.gov.il/lexicon/eng/Declaring StateEmergency_eng.htm Libsker, A. (2015) “Ele Hapanim Shel Hazenzor Hatarbuti Hahadash” (“This Is the Face of the New Cultural Censor”), Calcalist. 18 June. Online. www.calcalist.co.il/local/articles/0,7340,L-3662066,00.html Lifshitz, Y. (2019) “Haomanut Ein La Dabar I’m Ha’dat” (“Art Has Nothing to Do with Religion”), Ztarich Eyun, Chashiva Ve’hagutYehudit. 24 January. Online. iyun.org.il/article/cohen-the-field-of-art/ art-has-nothing-to-do-with-religion/ Littman, S. (2015) “Avoda Shel Gil Yefman Bataarucha ‘Kocha shel Hamila’ Meoreret Mehuma” (“A Work by Gil Yefman in the ‘Power of a Word’ Provokes Controversy”), Haaretz. 18 January. Online. www.haaretz.co.il/gallery/art/1.2542149 Mazria-Katz, M. and Zonszein, M. (2018) “Israel’s War on Culture,” New York Review of Books. 22 March. Online. www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/22/israels-war-on-culture/ Nir, A. (1982) “Sheket Yorim” (“Silence, We Are Shooting”), Yediot Aharonot. 8 June. Rancière, J. (2009) The Emancipated Spectator, Reprint Edition, London:Verso. Rudnitzky, A. (2011) “Hahevra Habedudit Banegev” (“The Bedouin Society in the Negev”), Abraham Fund Initiative. Online. www.abrahamfund.org/webfiles/fck/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%A7%20 6%D7%91%20-%20%D7%94%D7%97%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%94%20%D7%94%D7%91%D7%9 3%D7%95%D7%90%D7%99%D7%AA%20%D7%AA%D7%90%D7%91%D7%AA.pdf Scholem, G. (1974) Kabbalah, Jerusalem: Keter. Segal, N., Szendy, P. and Sala, A. (2014) Anri Sala: Belie Shemot Belie Coteret (No Names, No Title),Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Segal, N. and Zagury-Orly, R. (2015) Walter Benjamin: Archion Galut (Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives),Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. “Sheldon Adelson: Palestinians Are Made-Up Nation That Exists Only to Destroy Israel” (2014) Haaretz. 9 July. Online. www.haaretz.com/jewish/adelson-palestinians-are-made-up-nation-1.5326500 Weizman, E. and Sheikh, F. (2015) The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Gottingen: Steidl.

5 LADY DISRUPTED Self-censorship and the processes of feminist curating in South Africa Candice Allison

Six months before it was due to close, after heated controversy, almost half of the works in Our Lady, an exhibition held at Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG), were removed. Produced through a partnership between ISANG and The New Church Museum (TNCM), a private institution collecting and exhibiting contemporary South African and African art, Our Lady (November 2016 to June 2017) intended to “explore and reflect on the evolving canon of artistic representations of women spanning more than 170 years of image making” (Falken 2016). As a curator at TNCM at the time, I co-curated the exhibition, along with my colleague and Director of TNCM Kirsty Cockerill and with Andrea Lewis from ISANG. The exhibition encompassed works employing diverse strategies of portraying the female subject, drawn from the permanent collections of both institutions. It ranged from historical art by predominantly male, European and white South African artists depicting idealized, mythologized, sexualized or otherwise objectified images of women revealing unequal gender relationships to contemporary works by male and female, black and white, South African and African artists which reference this traditional imagery in the process of reclaiming, rejecting or reconstituting notions and attitudes around powerful female capacity. We saw the project as an opportunity to challenge masculinism, sexism and Western centrism. As Maura Reilly (2018: 224) warns, the efficacy of curatorial activism is dependent on self-interrogation and, for me, self-reflective practice remains a work in progress. Reilly (ibid.: 216) urges holding accountable those perpetuating discriminatory practices and criticizing curatorial misconduct “to the point where it becomes acknowledged as unacceptable.” The challenge Reilly proposes to curators is, instead of reinstalling permanent collections, to reconfigure hegemonic narratives, and “offer new perspectives on old stories.” It was our curatorial intention to do precisely that and disrupt ISANG’s collection with contemporary works from TNCM’s collection in an effort to highlight and challenge patriarchal representations of women in art. Yet the exhibition was in turn criticized and disrupted by advocacy groups, artists and the public who felt that we were – in spite of all efforts – perpetuating discriminatory practices through our curatorial choices.

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In art critic Mary Corigall’s (2016) estimate, Our Lady had some weaknesses, such as what she perceived to be ineffective messaging of the irony we intended in the title, but her assessment is largely constructive; she acknowledges the exhibition as representative of the move away from what she calls “simplistically conceived . . . paternalistic ‘women themed’ exhibitions as government-funded initiatives designed to show how men were doing something to change gender inequalities” and which, she remarks, often turned out to be “disempowering” for women. Corrigall (2016) also asserts the value of projects such as Our Lady, given the dearth of state support for women artists and curators in South Africa; she cites as an example how, in 2009, then Arts and Culture Minister Lulu Xingwana undermined both a woman artist and woman curator by demanding the removal of Zanele Muholi’s photographs of lesbian couples from Bongi Bengu’s Innovative Women: Ten Contemporary Black Women Artists, an exhibition sponsored by Xingwana’s own department. Corrigall’s commentary stands out from the torrent of negative reviews that the show received, condemning it for diverse reasons but most particularly because of our inclusion of a work by the artist Zwelethu Mthethwa which, according to critics, silenced the voices and erased the lives of black women (Abrams 2016; Africa News Agency 2016; Artthrob 2016; Davis 2017; Gamedze 2017; Rossouw 2016a; Steinhauer 2016; Van Niekerk 2017). It was not the content of the work, a photograph of a nameless black South African woman with a wooden chest given to her by her family when she got married, that was the initial cause of the controversy. What was controversial was the personality of the artist: Mthethwa had been charged in 2014 with the murder of Nokuphila Kumalo, a black woman believed to be a sex worker, and at the time of the exhibition launch, was standing trial. He was convicted in March 2017 before the exhibition’s close. As a South African curator who identifies as white, female, cis-het, middle class and feminist, I recognize that I have a particular responsibility to engage in reflexive, self-critical and responsive curatorial practice, what Corbett and Miller (2006: 18), referring to the blind spots produced by privilege, characterize as “continued monitoring and adjusting of the practitioner’s behavior in light of its effects.” In this spirit, I will consider the grievances lodged against Our Lady within the framework of curatorial decision-making that gave shape to the project. I will discuss the processes behind this decision-making and our reluctance to share our curatorial values, agenda and complex ethical deliberations with our publics. I will examine this reluctance within the wider context of discussions about censorship arising from the great societal reckoning around race and gender in South Africa, and foregrounded, at the time we were curating the exhibition, by student protests spreading across the country. I will argue that our reluctance constitutes an all-too-common mode of self-censorship that resulted in an environment of suspicion, miscommunication and misunderstanding within the context of the contested domain of feminist and intersectional curatorial practice in South Africa.This self-censorship ultimately led to the unraveling of the exhibition, including the removal of works and the dissolving of the partnership between ISANG and TNCM. I will ask how a more transparent approach to our work might have enhanced opportunities for constructive discourse of the kind that Corrigall’s review attempts to foster, and for the project to thrive. Terry Smith (2012: 17) observes that “[F]or a profession driven by the desire to communicate with art’s publics, its enabling dialogue is surprisingly inner-directed”; he asks, “[W]hy is the substance of curatorial thinking so rarely articulated?” Indeed, Our Lady represents a missed opportunity in a collaborative curatorial process for opening up to the public the uncertainties

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and flaws of the curatorial concept, along with our many discussions, disagreements, reservations and questions. It would be easy to blame our caution on the constraints of the institutional partnership between ISANG and TNCM, which included a non-disclosure agreement and deferred all public relations, marketing and communications to ISANG but that would be too simple. This chapter is a direct response to Smith’s (2012: 179) provocation that “it is rare for curators to reflect, in a sustained way, in print, on their professional practice” perpetuating “the view that the exhibition is the statement, one that speaks for itself.” By reflecting on the actions that ultimately led to the dismantling of Our Lady, I hope to contribute to a curatorial discourse that acknowledges error and the open sharing of insight into difficult professional experiences.

The contested politics of representation and the pressures of censorship in post-apartheid South Africa An emerging critical discourse Discussing the idea of “museums as contested sites,” Steven Dubin describes how museums provide important spaces where society can project internal concepts of identity as outward displays of a tangible, idealized image of itself. Concepts that disrupt or challenge this idealized view of a society’s values and principles are typically rejected, and representing these concepts risks confrontation with – and censorship from – those who are invested in keeping those idealized views intact (Dubin 1999: 3). Ultimately, Dubin interprets these struggles as displays of power that embody both action and reaction: losing power and gaining it, exercising power and resisting it (ibid.: 3–4). Speaking to a post-apartheid South African experience, Brenda Atkinson (1999: 16) conveys a similar sentiment, where: Artists, critics, and curators can no longer assume an unchallenged and definitive authority. . . . As constellations of power shift, constructions of “self ” and “other” are remapped – not only in terms of race, class, ethnicity and gender, but equally in terms of the local and the international, and in light of the ominous expansion of global capital. Twenty years later, these “constellations of power” and constructions of identity are still shifting in South Africa. In recent years, the desire for accelerated change has become evident in contemporary museums as their audiences continue to diversify and hold them accountable. The difficulty lies in finding balance between defending and asserting change as pluralistic constituencies, propelled by rapidly fluctuating social, political and intellectual trends, choose to reject or champion particular artworks or exhibitions at a given moment (Dubin 1999: 3–4). While there is a need to challenge the institutions that define art and culture in South Africa to better reflect the society in which they exist, the mishandling of high-profile controversies could ultimately set a dangerous precedent where reactive publics have the power to reconfigure any exhibition they object to.This was the case of Our Lady, which demonstrated that when an institution is unprepared and lacks clear guidelines for dealing with controversy, it can open the door for artists, advocacy groups and private collectors to influence the exhibition and removal of work by a public institution and shut down dialogue at times when it is needed most (Hodes 2017).

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The discourse of representation in South Africa in the past 25 years has moved fluidly across the boundaries of museum and heritage institutions, often playing out in spaces beyond the museum itself. Setting the tone of this discourse in the early years was a hugely impactful article by Okwui Enwezor (1997), highly critical of white representations of the black body. In his article, Enwezor derided the 1996 exhibition Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture, curated by Pippa Skotnes and held at the South African National Gallery, as a “paternalistic framing” of “Bushman”1 history from a position of power that attempts to normalize the role of white historians or artists as interlocutors of “black desire.” He also problematized works by white South African artists for continuing to “other” the black body, singling out Candice Breitz’ Rainbow Series (1994–1997) for projecting the artist’s whiteness onto, and, by extension, silencing, black female subjects (Oguibe 1997: 34–36). Objections to white representations of black experiences were also raised in a frequently cited essay by Olu Oguibe (1997) which accused Breitz of perpetuating tropes of “hateful” and “colonial” violence. This critique, though painful to some, has been ultimately liberating, sparking museums and art institutions in post-apartheid South Africa to make slow yet steady progress toward diversity, equality and inclusion. Complex, ever-shifting sensitivities around identity, injustices and power, however, have created huge challenges for South African curators; intermittent acts and threats of censorship have produced an environment of caution.

Social protests and the destruction of art In recent years, new issues in the politics of representation, new acts of censorship and new pressures to self-censor have arisen from the student movements collectively known as “Fallism” (Ahmed 2019), including #Rhodesmustfall (#RMF), #Feesmustfall and #Patriarchymustfall. The first two of these are committed to the project of decolonizing institutional spaces, histories and knowledge production. Originating as a 2015 protest demanding the removal of a bronze statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) commemorating Cecil Rhodes, champion of British imperialism and Prime Minister of the Cape Colony 1890–1896, #RMF quickly developed into a wider movement pressing for the decolonization of education. As a protest against unequal housing access for black students escalated, #RMF activists burned more than 20 artworks. While most of the artworks destroyed were portraits of historical white figures connected to the university described by students as “colonial artefacts,” a portrait of anti-apartheid activist Molly Blackburn and five anti-apartheid focused paintings by Keresemose Richard Baholo were also burnt (“Black Artist Supports Students” 2016). The tension over the university’s artworks dates back to 2015 when student representatives identified 19 works they deemed controversial. The destruction led to intense discussions about activism, institutional redress and when censorship might be an ethical good. It culminated in the removal or covering up of more than 75 artworks from the UCT collection identified as at risk or problematic by UCT’s Works of Art Committee (established in 2015 to address student concerns about art displayed on campuses and in student residencies) (Pertsovsky 2017). In response, the South African Institute of Race Relations, a research and policy organization, criticized the Fallist movement for eroding freedom of speech across South African universities by promoting what the Institute called aggressive and violent “intolerance of alternative points of view” (Gon 2018). This sentiment was echoed by the prominent South

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African photographer David Goldblatt, who openly criticized UCT management for failing to protect freedom of expression and, in protest, relocated his photographic archive from UCT to Yale University (Scher 2017). In contrast, Jay Pather (2017), who directs the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at UCT and served as Chair of the Works of Art Committee that selected which objects to remove or cover, criticized such objections as “sensational generalisations” symptomatic of “the knee-jerk response to any transformative action.” Defending the mandate of the Works of Art Committee, Pather likened its self-censorship to the curatorial decision-making made on a routine basis. Meanwhile, splits within the student protest movement gave rise to a range of feminist interventions. At UCT a group of black, queer, trans women strategized around claiming increasingly contested space within #RMF (Matandela 2015); and the UCT Trans Collective disrupted and vandalized works (including a photograph by David Goldblatt) in a photographic exhibition jointly curated by #RMF and the Centre for African Studies as a gesture of resisting what they perceived as the erasure of black trans bodies from official narratives of the #RMF movement. While arguments on both sides are nuanced and complex, and some of the interventions staged by the Fallists have been illuminating, those that have resulted in the indiscriminate destruction of works of art have created an atmosphere which has propelled many curators to prioritize the mitigation of risk in the work that they do. Freedom of expression is enshrined in South Africa’s constitution, which includes freedom of the press, sharing and receiving information or ideas, academic freedom, and freedom of artistic creativity (South African Constitution 1996). Yet, in a society which is still as unequal and divided as South Africa, such freedoms have the potential to create further divisions. What is urgently required is an ethics code or guidelines beyond those of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) to provide specific guidance for South African museums and curators on navigating the politics of representation and free speech/censorship issues, post-apartheid.

Curating “Injurious” artworks Zwelethu Mthethwa’s Untitled (Hope Chest series) It became obvious during our selection of artworks for Our Lady that there was a racial and gender bias in both the ISANG and TNCM collections, a fact we could have raised and shared with the public in creative, tongue-in-cheek ways – but we held back. The exhibition was recognized by Sean O’Toole (2016) for its “activist ambition.” However, it was not our curatorial intention to claim the authority of intersectional discourse. We discussed early on that, as three white curators, we could not presume to speak on behalf of black women or the LGBTQI+ community and that attempting to make overt statements about the experiences of either would appear clumsy and contrived. Rather, we agreed that intersectionality should be addressed through a public program of performances, lectures and panel discussions. As curators of an exhibition critiquing historical representations of the female form, we should have been more assertive in our criticism. Corrigall (2016) made interesting suggestions for how we could have done this, taking a more “unconventional approach,” with “gaps on the wall to mark out absences, faults and issues in the archive, live performance elements to engage directly and respond to artworks and additional texts, discussions.”

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One of the key decisions we faced was whether and how to show ”injurious artworks” – that is, imagery with the power to offend or hurt (Zecchini 2014). Zwelethu Mthethwa’s Untitled (Hope Chest series) (2012) became a flashpoint for heated discussions around the ethical boundaries of curating potentially injurious artworks, first, among the curatorial team, and, after Our Lady opened, among artists, critics and the wider public. Some of the questions my co-curators and I debated, stemming from Mthethwa’s murder trial and (later) conviction, which have since been raised by diverse stakeholders, include: should the personal lives of artists be divorced from their artworks? Can we separate what is happening within the “frame” of an artwork from what is happening outside of the “frame”? Who – community groups, activists, artists, the general public, the media – should be consulted in resolving complex curatorial decisions? Do curators, museums and galleries have an ethical obligation to refrain from including works by artists who have committed or been accused of committing a crime? Do curators, museums and galleries have an ethical obligation to include information on an artist’s criminal history or legal status on label captions? Untitled (2012) by Mthethwa forms part of a photographic series entitled Hope Chest. The series explores the relationship between women and the chest a young bride traditionally receives as the final wedding present from her family before she marries. Inside are the woman’s most prized possessions which she takes with her to her new home. In the particular image we selected, the image is shot in a rural setting in front of a small, brown (most likely mud covered), thatch roofed house. In the foreground, the ornate chest has been placed in front of the house.The chest’s owner leans, half sitting, against the chest. She wears a blue dress and red headdress and holds a smart black purse in front of her body. We made the curatorial decision to include the work because we found compelling the dichotomy in the image between the erasure of the woman’s identity and the personal, individual contents of her Hope Chest. We grouped the photograph with four other works, three by white men and one by a white woman, which also reduced representations of the female figure to nothing more than objects for visual consumption. It was our belief that the juxtaposition would signal the extent of female namelessness within the art historical canon – among artists both male and female, black and white. Thus, the curatorial intention was not to celebrate Mthethwa’s work as asserted by the South African Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) but, rather, to position it critically – we deemed the image to be problematic in its rendering of the female subject. The caption for the work interpreted it as such, stating, “[H]is unnamed subjects read as a typological series, suggestive of an anthropological approach to documenting the ‘other’.” Medical historian and public scholar Rebecca Hodes (2017) defended our approach and our decision to include Mthethwa’s photograph: [C]ontrary to public understanding, Our Lady was not only an exhibition about the portrayal of women in art, but also about the aesthetics of patriarchy – of how women are truncated and typified. In this forensics of the male gaze, I would argue, Mthethwa was a sound inclusion. Her words, and ours, did little to sway public opinion. This was, in part, because Mthethwa’s trial, though begun in June 2015, had been often delayed and was still ongoing at the time of the opening; anticipation of the verdict was high.

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Like persons, images can be found “guilty by association” with people, values or viewpoints that may be considered immoral, politically offensive or serve as a reminder of painful national memories. In such instances, anticipated offence or hurt is often cited to justify the policing and regulation of the arts. This logic is explored in depth by Cockerill (2017) in an article about “Radical Moralism,” which she defines as a view that denies that an image has agency separate from what it represents, or the person who made the representation. Drawing a distinction between an artwork’s agency and that of its maker, she maintains that an artwork’s agency and its ability to act upon the viewer are determined by that viewer in that they can only “compel something from a viewer who is open to being compelled. What the viewer receives from the artwork is determined by the viewer’s positionality and their personal frame of reference” (ibid.). While Cockerill asserts that “Radical Moralism ignores context,” perhaps context is the key to understanding the strong reaction to Our Lady and the inclusion of Mthethwa’s work. What would have been the response, if Mthethwa’s photograph had been exhibited behind a dark curtain, with a trigger warning that the image might provoke a strong and painful response? Would this relatively non-descript photograph of an anonymous woman, displayed in a way that acknowledged the hurt and trauma the image embodied for some viewers, have confused the majority of public or art-going audiences? Or would such a presentation of the image have made a powerful statement to the everyday, nameless, faceless and seemingly banal occurrence of violence against women in South African society?

Lessons learned When we were developing the project we had a false sense of security, based on the lack of critical response to a different work by Mthethwa which had been included in the exhibition Home Truths (May 2016 to October 2016), curated by Michael Godby at ISANG, and which directly preceded Our Lady.The exhibition received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Moreover, the one negative review, though strongly renouncing the inclusion of the Mthethwa work as “shocking and insensitive,” applauded the exhibition as a whole for providing opportunities to engage critically; “the value of a show of this nature is that it allows a space for thinking and interpretation,” asserted Chad Rossouw (2016b).2 In retrospect I recognize that we were completely unprepared for the controversy that erupted. We made a grave error by not consulting with community groups such as the South African Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce. If we had established trusting relationships with relevant parties, we would have developed some understanding of the divisive nature of the curatorial decisions we were making and perhaps we might even have generated alternative strategies during the curatorial process and used their guidance in developing interpretation and public programming that also met our curatorial aims. We might also have built public support for the project and more constructive means of communications. Instead, we relied on internal discussions, consulting with ISANG’s curators and acting director concerning if and how to display Mthethwa’s photograph. As we chose to move forward with including the work, we devised two versions of the caption: one caption focused exclusively on the expressive content of the work itself and did not mention Mthethwa’s murder charge or trial; the other acknowledged the situation with the following provocation: “Mthethwa is currently standing trial, accused of murdering Nokuphila Kumalo.When considering the current circumstances, does it, and should it, affect

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the way in which the work is viewed?” Despite disagreement and rigorous debate, we eventually proceeded with the former. However, instead of taking a vote among us on one alternative or the other, we should have placed both labels in the public domain, asking which was more ethical and why. Moreover, we should have informed the public of our unanimous curatorial decision to produce a third label to be placed with the work in the event that Mthethwa was found guilty, at which point the context and relevance of his crime would have to be acknowledged. We also could have posed a series of questions to our audiences through wall texts, as the Tel Aviv Museum of Art did effectively in a later exhibition (2016–2017) including work by Mthethwa: Can the artist and the art be detached? . . . [W]hat about the works in the exhibition, now that the man who made them has been declared a murderer? Is leaving the works on the wall some kind of support of the murderer artist? Should the photographs be removed from the wall, with the claim that the artist’s work cannot be detached from his biography? And would such an act not be rather self-righteous, a slight clearing of the conscience? We also should have explained, prior to the opening, that we planned to address the gender/ race imbalance by inviting black female performance artists whose work was not included in either collection to respond to this exclusion within the space. Unfortunately, the supplementary program of performances, discussions and events, which we intended to address issues of intersectionality, was never publicized due to a staffing issue.3 Finally, our wider interpretive framing of the project was not rigorous enough to convey the complexity of the exhibition. Due to institutional, time and word count constraints, the press release and introductory wall text for Our Lady were both produced as brief, generalized statements expressing our curatorial premise. The full list of artists included in the exhibition was published with the press release but no individual works or groupings received in-depth analysis. This strategy – publishing curatorial intention rather than a reflection of the process – set the final exhibition at odds with the statement and created a void of context. In the absence of an exhibition catalog, we had intended to make printouts of the full curatorial text we had written freely available in the exhibition space. In this text we unpacked some of the feminist discourse informing the exhibition; we delved into the pressures facing museums to present art and knowledge in ways that can be understood by the widest possible audience and their reluctance to challenge audiences with “difficult” content; we also presented information that can be gleaned from historic collections about the prevalent societal values and beliefs that prompted collecting habits and preferences. The printouts of this text, however, were never placed in the exhibition space, which proved to be another misstep. It now seems clear that the practical considerations of delivery-centered curating made a complex presentation impossible and sabotaged the project.

A successful collaborative response On 28 November, three weeks after the opening of Our Lady, the South African Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce released a statement condemning the inclusion of Mthethwa’s work in an exhibition designed to interrupt patriarchy, believing the promotion of his work to be “in bad taste and deeply offensive” in light of the ongoing murder trial.

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They called for Mthethwa’s work to be taken down and replaced by a portrait of the murdered woman, painted by local artist Astrid Warren (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce 2016a). In response, ISANG and TNCM curators and management met with SWEAT to negotiate meaningful and sensitive ways forward. We realized that, by not sharing the thinking behind the curatorial decision to include Mthethwa’s work and by failing to recognize the strong emotional reaction the work would provoke, we had potentially sabotaged the project. Working with SWEAT provided an opportunity to abandon this cautionary approach and engage the issues directly. It was important during negotiations for us to bridge the artificial chasm created by the media – to recognize that we all shared the same viewpoint that violence against women is never acceptable and that steps must be taken to end this violence and its structural underpinnings. Together, our curatorial team and SWEAT drew up a plan amenable to both parties and SWEAT withdrew its demands that the work be censored. The actions agreed included: • •

• •

a revision of the photograph caption to include the current context of the murder trial, the performance of a creative direct action by SWEAT on the steps of ISANG during a Museum Night event raising awareness of the numerous murdered sex workers whose cases remain unsolved,4 a public discussion organized with SWEAT intended as an open dialogue about the Our Lady exhibition, and the inclusion of a portrait commissioned by SWEAT of Nokuphila Kumalo, the victim, to be included in the exhibition At Face Value which would open at ISANG in December 2016.

A joint press release (Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce 2016b) outlining these steps was issued on 1 December including the following statement: We are in agreement that art should challenge, educate, provoke and disrupt discourses, prompting debate. However, platforms of debate do not arise in a vacuum, and the inclusion of marginalized people is not automatic. In addition, both parties recognize the invisibility of Nokuphila Kumalo and women like her. Viewers of Mthethwa’s work will have the opportunity to place his work in the context of his trial for her murder. Though challenging, our collaborations with SWEAT helped us to acknowledge and confront the interpretive vacuum that our self-censorship had produced in regard to Mthethwa’s Untitled (Hope Chest series).

The censorship of Our Lady Despite our joint response and actions, objections to the inclusion of Mthethwa’s work continued with a succession of private e-mails, a public letter (Artthrob 2016) and a petition (In Memory Of Nokuphila Kumalo 2017). They were all amplified by the loudest voice of all, social media. Some people called for removal, others demanded greater transparency in curatorial decision-making and still others pressed for the reconfiguration of the exhibition in consultation with women artists, SWEAT and other citizens.5 A primary actor in this

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controversy was South African, Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz who mobilized action and debate about the exhibition on her Facebook page (Breitz 2016); Breitz made the initial calls for the exhibiting female artists to remove their works and advocated to ISANG and TNCM management that they remove works from the exhibition.6 In the two weeks after the release of our joint statement with SWEAT, three of the women artists in the exhibition requested via e-mail that their works be removed as a declaration of their objections to the inclusion of Untitled (Hope Chest series). They were advised that their requests had been received and that a decision about whether to reconfigure the exhibition would be made after the public dialogue organized with SWEAT was held on 15 December. The three later signed their names, along with the three other living women artists in the exhibition, to a joint open letter spearheaded by Candice Breitz, which Breitz read aloud on their behalf at the 15 December discussion (Artthrob 2016). The letter demonstrates that its author and some of its signatories had not seen the exhibition. This is made evident by the particular grievance that the inclusion of the photograph “reiterates a dominant tendency in our culture at large; that is, the propensity to view the most precarious in our society [as] . . . faceless, nameless and disposable nonentities who are not worthy of individual regard or dignity” (ibid.). In fact, through grouping the photograph with those by other artists who have collectively rendered white and black women as disempowered and by directly underscoring this disempowerment in our wall text interpreting Mthethwa’s artwork, we did not reiterate this propensity but instead identified and challenged it. The wall text (2016) read: His unnamed subjects read as a typological series, suggestive of an anthropological approach to documenting the “other.” This type of photographic approach has received broad criticism by many who view it as a violent approach to portraying the subject as a type rather than an individual. There is a dichotomy in this image between the erasure of the woman’s identity, and the personal, individual contents of her Hope Chest. Because the exhibition was curated solely from works in the permanent collections of ISANG and TNCM – no works were loaned from the private collections of the artists or the galleries that represent them – we could have chosen to reject the artists’ demands and instead continue to work with other stakeholders, as we had with SWEAT, to come to a mutual understanding. ISANG, nonetheless, acquiesced and on 12 December deinstalled the works by the three artists who had made the initial request via e-mail. TNCM was not consulted prior to ISANG taking this action, despite a clear agreement between the two organizations that no decision about whether to remove works would be taken until 15 December. TNCM’s founder and its director both strongly disagreed with what was viewed as unilateral decision-making and an act of censorship by ISANG and, sadly, the partnership was dissolved. The morning of the public dialogue, six months before the exhibition was due to close, TNCM removed the remaining eight of the ten works it had loaned to ISANG for the show. TNCM management did not state the reasons for removing these works, sparking further speculation from artists and the media; Hodes (2017), for instance, describes TNCM’s action as “[S]nubbed and petulant – or rightfully outraged by the National Gallery’s capitulation (depending on your perspective).”

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ISANG chose to leave the show open with only 16 works (or 59% of the total) on display. On 15 December 2016, the public discussion took place in a room echoing with the empty spaces where works had once hung on the walls. The initial impetus for holding the public dialogue was to open debate about the issues of concern identified in the media, the inclusion of Mthethwa’s work and the wider ethical obligations of museums when considering whether to show controversial works of art. Polarized, entrenched positions, however, prevented the emergence of constructive discourse. The conversation began with short opening statements from SWEAT, ISANG’s acting director, Kirsty Cockerill and me, after which the floor was opened and Candice Breitz voiced her objections (Gamedze 2017). The event was attended by a predominantly white audience, largely comprised of female activists holding placards protesting Mthethwa’s work and ISANG’s exclusion of female artists. Speaking about the gathering, artist and curator Thulile Gamedze (2017) characterized the South African art world’s response to controversy as “a grisly battle to lay claim to the voices of people who have been erased by Mthethwa, and larger society’s actions, and then erased representationally by the ‘Our Lady’ show, and by extension, us.” The discussion centered mainly around human pain and the representational hurt caused by the inclusion of Mthethwa’s photograph; attempts to discuss the aesthetics of the work itself or the reasons for its inclusion were derided. Nevertheless, a French journalist applauded that a platform for such open debate could even exist in South Africa, given that such conversation would not take place in France.7

Artistic responses to censorship and controversy Intervening performance pieces did take place in the exhibition space in the months after the public debate and they were hugely affecting. Donna Kukama’s Chapter Y: Is Survival Not Archival? (2017), for example, responded directly to the ephemerality of erased individuals and the notion of ISANG as a manifestation of colonial and patriarchal violence. In the entrance to the exhibition, Kukama covered with masking tape the title preceding the introductory wall text; the strips of tape, which were left in place as a remnant of the performance, functioned as a physical reminder of the removal of works which effectively canceled out the exhibition. In the main exhibition space, Kukama introduced an old projector screen covered with soil into the darkened gallery; this provided a textured writing surface on which she repetitively wrote and erased the names of women who had been raped and killed in the Western Cape province of South Africa (Goliath 2019: 138–141). Goliath (2019: 140) found the intervention a powerful critique, “[F]rom the start, Kukama’s intervention troubled the epitome of femininity seemingly encapsulated in the title Our Lady, a title she literally masked with torn strips of masking tape.” For me, it was extremely frustrating to watch, from the side-lines, how the interventions shined new light onto the exhibition in ways I would have supported and contributed to.

Conclusion As an exhibition, Our Lady was failed by its multiple stakeholders: by my co-curators and me who failed to share the ethical deliberations and decision-making behind the project; by the artists who demanded the immediate removal of their work without allowing the curatorial

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team and respective institutions sufficient time to discuss whether the exhibition could or should be reconfigured in response to the media and the social media discourse; by ISANG which so hurriedly shut down collaboration and bowed to pressure to remove works; and by The New Church Museum which responded by immediately removing the remainder of its works from the show. The wider context of censorship and the pressures of self-censorship in South Africa certainly shaped the dynamics of events but, as a curator, I must accept responsibility for the role I played in shutting down civic discourse. In contemporary art curating, silence – and its opposite, speech – is a constant negotiation with artists, artworks, museum directors, publics, collectors, funders and colleagues. Knowing when to speak up and when to speak less; when to speak out and when not to speak at all; which words to use, when, and why; and when to relinquish your platform to another voice are central to the practice of curating. Still, when I consider the many attempts to censor art in South Africa’s young democracy, including the case study of Our Lady, I wonder if it is possible that something positive might emerge from these painful episodes. Laetitia Zecchini (2014) challenges us to consider whether censorship can be thought of as a phenomenon beyond the “punitive gesture” to one that is potentially productive as well, “since it generates discourses and meanings, collective interventions, mobilizations and ‘communities of sentiment.’ ” Kukama’s performance and the 15 December discussion, no matter how frustrating, are evidence that this is possible. And, as Corrigall (2016) suggests, exhibitions like Our Lady could be seen to “advance a discourse around women, however flawed.” In some small way, the protests against Our Lady served to raise awareness about the shocking statistics of violence against women in South Africa and highlighted the undeniable bias toward collecting and exhibiting work by male artists. Attempts to censor art appear to have strengthened a resolve against self-censorship. On 1 October 2019, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce launched a new online petition calling for the removal of an artwork by Zwelethu Mthethwa, included in the exhibition All in a Day’s Eye: The Politics of Innocence (opened 24 September 2019) at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP)8 (Lessing 2019). The exhibition, curated by Gabi Ngcobo with a research team, including Donna Kukama, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Tshegofatso Mabaso, was criticized for including Mthethwa’s work with a caption noting that Mthethwa has “always maintained his innocence.” Defending the curatorial decision to include the work, Ncobo asserted that texts were produced “to accompany certain works that we needed to discuss based on aspects of the works that are often left unsaid, because they are deemed uncomfortable – especially within the art spaces in which we operate” (Ngcobo 2019). Following discussions with the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, the wall text was amended (Ngcobo (2019): In 2017 Mthethwa was found guilty for the brutal murder of sex worker Nokuphila Kumalo. Despite hard evidence proving otherwise, Mthethwa maintained his innocence by stating he did not remember his deeds. He is currently serving 18 years at Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Responding to the petition, Javett-UP supported guest curator Gabi Ngcobo and her research team’s rationale for including Mthethwa’s work: “[T]he Javett-UP believes that to remove Mthethwa’s work is to ignore the conversations relating to gender-based violence and essentially silence those who have fallen victim to, and survived it” (Javett-UP 2019).

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Notes 1 The word “Bushman” was used by European colonial settlers to describe the various groups of Khoesān-speaking indigenous hunter-gatherers. The term has a loaded history as being racist and derogatory. The alternative, San, is considered equally insulting to Khoesān speakers as a derogatory word first used by Khoi cattle herders.The many disparate groups of Khoesān speakers have different preferences for which word they choose to self-identify (Mail & Guardian 2007). 2 Home Truths subsequently traveled to the Sanlam Corporation Art Gallery where it was exhibited during the time that the controversy erupted over Our Lady. Several of the artists who were selectively critical of Our Lady had work included in Home Truths yet did not raise objections to the inclusion of Mthethwa’s work, alongside theirs, in that show. 3 The responsible ISANG staff member had understandably asked us to hold off on formalizing the program until she returned from her maternity leave in early 2017. 4 This intervention was later erroneously interpreted by the media (McDougall 2016) and widely shared on social media as an ongoing protest by SWEAT to have the work removed. 5 These protests developed in a complex environment amidst public outcry from other groups over different issues and works in another exhibition concurrently on display at ISANG, The Art of Disruptions (16 June 2016 to 23 October 2016, extended to January 2017). For instance, many complaints were launched at genderqueer artist Dean Hutton’s Fuckwhitepeople (2016), both from the wider public and from conservative predominantly white political parties; Freedom Front Plus called on ISANG to remove Hutton’s work while members of the fringe Cape Party attempted to vandalize it, managing to partially cover it with a sticker reading “Love thy neighbour” (Davis 2017). In January 2017, Iziko CEO Rooksana Omar released a statement defending its right to show Fuckwhitepeople (Davis 2017). 6 This was not the first time Breitz had called for censorship of art in South Africa. In 2014, she launched a Facebook campaign and online petition condemning a public sculpture by Michael Elion and requesting the Cape Town City Council remove the offending artwork which, ultimately, proved unsuccessful (Brown 2014: 38). 7 A recording of the public discussion was made available as a video in the exhibition space from January 2017 onward and shared with me by Andrea Lewis, our ISANG co-curator. It does not currently exist online or via any other platform. 8 The Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP) is a public-private collaboration between the University of Pretoria and the Javett Foundation.This new arts institution opened to the public on 24 September 2019 (Javett Foundation).

Bibliography Abrams, A. (2016) “Activists Call for Removal of Work by Murder-Accused Mthethwa From Exhibition About Women,” Artnet. 30 November. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/activists-removalzwelethu-mthethwa-murder-accused-764732 Africa News Agency (2016) “Take Down Murder Accused Mthethwa’s Artwork – Sweat,” The Citizen. 28 November. Online. citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1359847/take-down-murder-accu sed-mthethwas-artwork-sweat/ Ahmed, A.K. (2019) The Rise of Fallism: #RhodesMustFall and the Movement to Decolonize the University, PhD dissertation, Columbia University. Artthrob (2016) “A Letter to Iziko Sang and the New Church Museum.” 17 December. Online. artthrob.co.za/2016/12/17/a-letter-to-iziko-sang-and-the-new-church-museum/ Atkinson, B. (1999) “Introduction.” In Atkinson, B. and Breitz, C. (eds.) Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art, Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press. Atkinson, B. and Breitz, C. (eds.) (1999) Grey Areas: Representation, Identity and Politics in Contemporary South African Art, Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press. “Black Artist Supports Students After Burnt Work” (2016) The Citizen. 19 February. Online. citizen. co.za/news/south-africa/998886/artist-still-sides-with-students-despite-burnt-painting/ Breitz, C. (2016) Facebook. 30 November. Online. www.facebook.com/candice.breitz.3/posts/9283 80607295893

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Brown, S.J. (2016) “Lessons in Retrospect: A McLuhan Reading of the Controversy Surrounding Michael Elion’s Perceiving Freedom (2014),” Image  & Text, 27: 28–53. Cockerill, K. (2017) “Radical Moralism: No Vaccination,” Art Africa, 9: 66–69. Corbett, K.T. and Miller, H.S. (2006) “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,” The Public Historian, 25(1): 15–38. Corrigall, M. (2016) “Women’s ‘Work’ Is Far from Done,” The Sunday Independent. 11 December. Davis, R. (2017) “Art and Outrage: National Gallery Under Attack,” Daily Maverick. 18 January. Online. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-01-18-art-and-outrage-national-gallery-under-attack/#. WIHjQFN97IU Dubin, S. (1999) Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation, New York: New York University Press. Enwezor, O. (1997) “Reframing the Black Subject Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation,” Third Text, 11(40): 21–40. Falken, M. (2016) “Our Lady Exhibition Celebrates Female Form,” Artslink. 11 December. Online. www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=41208 Furlong, A. (2016) “Murder-Accused Artist Zwelethu Mthethwa’s Work at Iziko Sparks Heated Debate,” News 24. 2 December. Online. www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/murder-accusedartist-zwelethu-mthethwas-work-at-iziko-sparks-heated-debate-20161202 Gamedze, T. (2017) “Concerning Museums,” Adjective. 4 January. Online. www.adjective.online/ 2017/01/04/concerning-museums-thuli-gamedze/ Goliath, G. (2019) “ ‘A Different Kind of Inhabitance’: Invocation and the Politics of Mourning in Performance Work by Tracey Rose and Donna Kukama.” In Pather, J. and Boulle, C. (eds.) Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa, New York: New York University Press, pp. 124–147. Gon, S. (2018) “Fear on Campus (IV),” Politics Web. 18 December. Online. www.politicsweb.co.za/ opinion/fear-on-campus-iv Goodman Gallery (2018) “Kudzanai Chiurai: Madness & Civilization.” Online. www.goodman-gallery. com/exhibitions/875 Hodes, R. (2017) “Crimes of Conscience in South African Art,” Daily Maverick. 30 March. Online. www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2017-03-30-crimes-of-conscience-in-south-african-art/ In Memory of Nokuphila Kumalo (2017)“The National Art Gallery Must RespectWomen’s Lives.”Online Petition. awethu.amandla.mobi/petitions/the-national-art-gallery-must-respect-women-s-lives Javett Foundation (2019) “Who We Are.” Online. www.javettfoundation.org.za/#whoweare Javett-UP (2019) “The Javett-UP Art Centre’s Response to SWEAT Open Letter.” 1 October. Online. javettup.art/news/press-releases/the-javett-up-art-centres-response-to-sweat-open-letter Lessing, M. (2019) “Remove Artwork of Convicted Womxn Murderer, Zwelethu Mthethwa from Exhibition at Javett Art Centre.” 1 October. Online Petition. awethu.amandla.mobi/petitions/ remove-artwork-of-convicted-womxn-murderer-zwelethu-mthethwa-from-exhibition Matandela, M. (2015) “Rhodes Must Fall: How Black Women Claimed Their Place,” Mail and Guardian. 30 March. Online. mg.co.za/article/2015-03-30-rhodes-must-fall-how-black-women-claimedtheir-place McDougall, A. (2016) “South African Artist Accused of Murdering a Sex Worker Is Still Showing in Cape Town,” Marie Claire. 2 December. Online. www.marieclaire.co.za/latest-news/ south-african-artist-accused-murder-still-showing-work-cape-town Ngcobo, G. (2019) “Response by the Curator and Research Team of Collaborators of the Exhibition All in Day’s Eye.” 1 October. Online. javettup.art/news/press-releases/response-by-the-curator-andresearch-team-of-collaborators-of-the-exhibition-all-in-days-eye-the-politics-of-innocence-inthe-javett-family-collection-to-an-open-letter-issued-by-sweat Oguibe, O. (1997) “Beyond Visual Pleasures: A Brief Reflection on the Work of Contemporary African Women Artists.” In Hassan, S. (ed.) Gendered Visions: The Art of Contemporary Africana Women Artists, Trenton, NJ and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press Inc., pp. 63–72. O’Toole, S. (2016) “Not on Display,” Frieze. 16 December. Online. frieze.com/article/not-display

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Partridge, M. (2016) “A South African Horror Story,” Adjective. 15 December. Online. www.adjective. online/2016/12/15/a-south-african-horror-story/ Pather, J. (2017) “Right of Reply: UCT Is Not a Closed and Controlled Gallery,” Daily Maverick. 11 August. Online. www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-08-11-right-of-reply-uct-is-not-a-closedand-controlled-gallery/ Pather, R. (2016) “The Public Gallery – Activists Continue to Seek Justice for Murdered Sex Worker,” Mail & Guardian. 1 December. Online. mg.co.za/article/2016-12-01-the-public-gallery-activistscontinue-to-seek-justice-for-murdered-sex-worker Pertsovsky, N. (2017) “This Is Probably the List of Artworks UCT Has Removed,” Groundup. 25 April. Online. www.groundup.org.za/article/probably-list-artworks-uct-has-removed/ Reilly, M. (2018) Curatorial Activism:Towards an Ethics of Curating, London: Thames & Hudson. Robertson, A. (2017) “Artists Divided Over Murder Accused’s Art,” IOL. 22 January. Online. www.iol. co.za/news/artists-divided-over-murder-accuseds-art-7476194 Rossouw, C. (2016a) “Dialogue and Value,” ArtThrob. 2 December. Online. artthrob.co.za/2016/12/02/ dialogue-and-value/ Rossouw, C. (2016b) “Interiors and Exteriors: ‘Home Truths’ at Isang,” ArtThrob. 6 June. Online. //art throb.co.za/2016/06/06/interiors-and-exteriors-home-truths-at-isang/ Scher, R. (2017) “ ‘I Will Not Compromise About My Work’: David Goldblatt on Artistic Freedom, Censorship, and Moving his Archive Out of South Africa,” Artnews. 23 June. Online. www.artnews. com/2017/06/23/i-will-not-compromise-about-my-work-david-goldblatt-on-artistic-freedomcensorship-and-moving-his-archive-out-of-south-africa/ Sex Worker’s Education and Advocacy Taskforce (2016a) “Iziko South African National Gallery Promotes Work of Murder Accused Zwelethu Mthethwa.” 28 November. Online. www.facebook.com/ SWEATSA/posts/1146542348745006 Sex Worker’s Education and Advocacy Taskforce (2016b) “Joint Statement Issued 1 December 2016 by: SWEAT, Iziko Museums of South Africa & The New Church Museum.” 1 December. Online. www. facebook.com/SWEATSA/photos/a.125786514153933/1149960475069860/?type=1&theater Shorkend, D. (2017) “Art Exhibition with a Difference,” IOL. 8 January. Online. www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/ art-exhibition-with-a-difference-2096651 Smith, T. (2012) Thinking Contemporary Curating, New York: Independent Curators International. Södertalje Konsthall (2019) “Kudzanai Chiurai: Madness & Civilization.” Online. www.sodertaljekon sthall.se/en/exhibitions/vansinnets-historia/ South African Constitution (1996) “Chapter 2: Bill of Rights.” Online. www.justice.gov.za/legislation/ constitution/SAConstitution-web-eng-02.pdf Staff Reporter (2007) “San, Bushmen or Basarwa: What’s in a Name?” Mail & Guardian. 5 September. Online. mg.co.za/article/2007-09-05-san-bushmen-or-basarwa-whats-in-a-name Steinhauer, J. (2016) “As Artist’s Murder Trial Drags on, Display of his Work Sparks Uproar,” Hyperallergic. 13 December. Online. hyperallergic.com/344836/as-artists-murder-trial-drags-on-displayof-his-work-sparks-uproar/ Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2016) “Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism.” Online. www.africa-tamuseum.org.il/artist/zwelethu-mthethwa/ Van Niekerk, G. (2017) “Outrage Over Our Lady Exhibition,” City Press. 15 January. Online. www. channel24.co.za/News/Local/outrage-over-our-lady-exhibition-20170114 Zecchini, L. (2014) “When Books and Art Hurt: Censorship, Emotions and Cultural Regulation in South Asia,” Conference Program. Online. ceias.ehess.fr/index.php?3032

6 BISHAN PROJECT Efforts to build a utopian community under authoritarian rule Ou Ning Translated by Li Bing and Lu Sipei

Embracing rural reconstruction Before I filled up a MoleskineTM notebook1 with the “blueprint” for Bishan Project in 2010 (Ou 2015a), I had spent a decade of my professional life focused on urban life. I curated largescale exhibitions and participated as an artist in exhibitions at home in China and abroad. These exhibitions took place in cities, as that is where cultural resources are concentrated – so much so that major cities have incurred an “overflow” of exhibitions. I also made two documentaries based on urban research I conducted – San Yuan Li (2003), portraying a rural village trapped within the urban sprawl of Guangzhou, and Meishi Street (2006), delineating a slum in Beijing. Against this backdrop, I decided to redirect my practice to the Chinese village, a vacuum of public cultural life, embracing my role as both a curator and an artist. My interest in the countryside originates from my early life and family relationships. I was born into a rural family and brought up in the Leizhou Peninsula at the southern tip of the Chinese mainland. In the first 30 years of my life, my poor and backward hometown had been a sore spot for me. I studied hard to get away from the place and tried my best to get it “out of my system.” Only after I found my footing in the city and witnessed the drastic changes brought by urbanization did I realize my passionate attachment to the countryside. During my research and shooting of the documentaries about urban villages in Guangzhou and slums in Beijing, I came across a multitude of destitute farmers; these migrant workers, like millions more across China, crowded into cities to earn a living but, due to their lack of resources and the household registration system, were confined to dilapidated urban enclaves, struggling on the margins of society. My own brothers and sisters, shut out by the iron gate of the gaokao (college entrance exam) system, left our hometown at a young age and devoted their youth to assembly lines in urban factories. Back at home, the farmland is now deserted and our house empty. Urbanization not only drains the labor force from the countryside but also encroaches upon its land, degrades its social body and atomizes the rural population. The status quo kept me thinking: as a curator and an artist, what could I do? What provoked me to act was a combination of pressing urban–rural problems and the aphasia of Chinese contemporary art when it comes to social issues, a phenomenon that accompanied its ascendance on the global art market.

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International attention to China’s contemporary art peaked before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. At that time, curators and artists took part in exhibitions of all sorts, intoxicated by soaring prices for artworks and the illusion of a golden time for a rising major power. They turned a blind eye to the enormous social cost of development and simmering conflicts. Art became a spectacle to be produced and consumed, increasingly irrelevant to social reality. With this context in mind, I reasoned that, if a curator is a mere exhibition maker (Ausstellungsmacher) and an artist just signs his or her name on artworks, sends them to exhibitions and puts them on the market, then the influence of artists can reach no further than the boundaries of the art system. I concluded that if I wanted to intervene in and respond to China’s aggressive urbanization and massive rural decline, I would have to expand the scope of my work and even to redefine myself as an activist, a participant in social movements in the broad sense, but more specifically as a social actor with an artistic approach or what I refer to as an artivist. In 2005, I came across the contemporary New Rural Reconstruction Movement led by Wen Tiejun, which supports the development of village cooperatives as a means to contend with market reforms.Wen (2005) believes that the main cause of social conflict in rural areas is the excessive extraction of agricultural surplus, which undermines “the property and income distribution system inherent in the small-scale peasant economy.” That system, in his opinion, “is the norm and a stabilizing factor for Chinese society” (ibid.). Wen’s ideas led me to study the Republican-era Chinese Rural Reconstruction Movement of the 1930s, initiated by Liang Shuming, Y.C. James Yen and others, which sought to revitalize village life through health care, land and education reform and astutely negotiated the complex political relationships that were necessary to meet their goals. Philip Kuhn (1986: 359) explains: To revitalize the countryside through educational and economic reforms meant working out relationships of patronage and protection with political authorities. This was surely because any attempt to work with the peasantry in an organized project inevitably raised questions of political orientation and legitimacy, whether or not the project had any explicitly political aims or activities. After research and field work, I came to a solid understanding of Chinese rural reconstruction movements in the past and present, as well as rural experiments in other areas of Asia (Ou 2017). I found, however, that orthodoxy in rural reconstruction is counter-productive for each practitioner is faced with different historical and contemporary conditions. As I saw it, the key is to proceed in light of the specific context and to develop culturally appropriate approaches and methods. This includes, in China, working with the state. Although I am an anarchist (Ou 2013a, 2015a), I have never dreamt about revolution; shaped by the approach of Hong Kong anarchist musician Lenny Kwok (Blackbird n.d.) on the relevance of anarchy to contemporary life, I have never identified myself as a stiff opponent of the state. In Chinese, anarchism is translated as “non-government-ism” which is easily mistaken as “anti-government.” In the Chinese context, I prefer to transliterate anarchy as An Na Qi (Chinese: 安那其). After the 1989 Tian’anmen Incident, democracy advocates still living in China discovered that confrontation would only shrink their political and living space, eventually forcing them to leave, thus making them powerless in their home country. In my estimate, choosing “reconstruction” over “confrontation” is a more productive option.

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Moreover, I recognize that nobody, be it Liang Shuming or James Yen in the Republican era or Wen Tiejun in the present day, can succeed in rural reconstruction without cooperating with the government. If we stand against the government, our practice would be revolutionary rather than reformist, and thus quite different in intent. The reorientation of my practice from city to countryside was not prompted by a hope that village life could offer an environment less encumbered by political constraints than I had experienced in the city. Rural reconstruction cannot be separated from politics. Reform practices by grassroot intellectuals constitute only an auxiliary or complementary pathway within the framework of the current political regime and must be developed under government supervision. And so I set about to pilot a culturally appropriate rural reconstruction project, actively seeking government support and partnerships along the way.

Locating the project in Bishan Village In 2007 I traveled to many small towns in China to identify a site for the project. I did not choose my hometown or a typical village in another province because the harsh realities of such places are not conducive to rural reconstruction. Instead, I selected Bishan Village, Yi County, in Anhui Province. I worked with a collaborator on the project, poet and curator Zuo Jing, who was born in Anhui Province and could provide local knowledge. Bishan Village is located in the area historically called Huizhou, home to the famous Huizhou merchants who traded across the country during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) dynasties. The influx of wealth generated by these merchants funded the construction of numerous grand Huizhou-style residences and ancestral halls in the area.They are still standing. Despite depending on tourism as its economic pillar (Bishan is close to Mount Huangshan, a renowned tourist attraction), the village continues to preserve rural traditions dating back to ancient times. Reflecting deep ties to their Confucian cultural heritage, the local residents of Bishan Village are genuine and even-tempered; social conflicts are relatively few. All of these make Bishan an almost utopian space or what Chinese refer to a “PeachBlossom Paradise” (Chinese: 桃花源) for modern times. In fact, Bishan had already begun to attract artistic attention by the time I first arrived; poets Zheng Xiaoguang and Han Yu had just transformed a historic residence into a small hotel, the Pig’s Inn. Although Bishan is not among the poorest of villages, it nevertheless epitomizes rural problems in the times of urbanization. Most young people among its population of nearly 3,000 are working in cities in the Yangtze River Delta region, leaving senior villagers and children behind. Many historic residential houses are left in disrepair. Currently, the main source of income for locals derive from selling tea leaves, local food specialties and antiques, running restaurants and offering transportation services to tourists. Only a few people still farm, particularly after the government expropriated much of the area’s arable land to develop large-scale industrial agriculture and to sell to resort hotels for development. Water facilities built during the People’s Commune period are long deserted. Collective consciousness has deteriorated, with few public activities except for exercise classes and games of Mahjong. Not until 2007 was a road constructed connecting the county seat with the village and the village itself remains inaccessible to cars; the narrow village roads are unpaved and lack proper lighting. From 2007 to 2010, I developed plans for the Bishan Project, as captured through sketches in my MoleskineTM notebook (Figure 6.1), and at the end of that period I made Bishan my

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Ning, Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia in a Moleskine Notebook (detail), 2010.

FIGURE 6.1 Ou

Source: Collection of the artist.

home. I bought an old Huizhou-style residence that had been empty for years, renovating it into my base for life and work. Three years later my family joined me and I sent my child to a local school. Although Zuo Jing and I envisioned the project to be a complex and multidisciplinary social collaboration generating practical and sustainable initiatives such as organic agriculture, deep ecology, rural finance and progressive education that address village problems (Corlin 2017), in the first stages of the project we had to rely on our experience as curators and artists due to our lack of skills in other areas. While fully aware of the limitations of art, I remain convinced that some forms of artistic practice, in particular, socially engaged art (Bishop 2012;Thompson 2012), are conducive to rural reconstruction in China. Unfortunately, when exploring the synergies between art and countryside, we were frustrated by one setback after another.

Adopting an “artivist” approach Our plan was to engage both local residents and tourists alike by channeling cultural resources at hand into a diverse range of media. Public activities, which, in earlier times, had attracted farmers from around Yi County and beyond to travel to Bishan to take part, had been absent from the village since 1980, when the People’s Commune was dismantled and rural

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production was contracted instead to individual households. The word gongshe (Chinese: 公 社) or commune bears so much negative historical meaning in China, however, that we did not use it to describe our project; instead, we opted for gongtongti (Chinese: 共同体), which signifies communities and social groups. While at first I was concerned that my interest in utopia might be too closely linked to failed and painful political projects of mid-twentieth-century China (Scott 1999, 2010), I was reassured by the hippie communes, eco-villages and other intentional communities I visited that that the construction of an ideal society on a small scale was altogether different and benign in intent. For the Bishan Project logo (Plate 7), we chose green and yellow, due to their associations with nature and prosperity, over red, the color of revolution. We began with what Zuo Jing and I knew best, curating a series of artistic events with associated educational initiatives and opportunities for villagers to earn a bit of income by marketing their craftwork to tourists. We also worked to garner wider public attention through launching an ambitious media strategy, adopting signature aesthetics in visual design and staging off-site exhibitions on the development of the Bishan Project in major cities in China and globally. We reasoned that these marketing and outreach activities would attract like-minded social agents and professional teams to participate in the future so as to help create a more comprehensive social project. We hoped that the spectrum of initiatives would create a platform for villagers, contemporary artists and the many volunteers and interns that came to contribute to the Bishan Project to forge a community of practice. And, though the Project always functioned in practice as a non-profit venture, as we grew to better understand the urgent fiscal needs and interests of the villagers, we became increasingly more invested in establishing a model of sustainable economic development. Though we operated like a non-profit organization (NPO), and, in some aspects, also like a non-governmental organization (NGO), Bishan Project was registered as a commercial entity. This was due, in part, to the fact that it is exceedingly difficult in China to receive permission to register as an NPO or NGO. In addition, my faith in anarchism makes me skeptical of any organization or institution, including NGOs and NPOs, which are increasingly hierarchical, bureaucratic and corporatized. The commercial registration of the project was an adaptive strategy, with the aim of forming a community. What we did not anticipate was that our approach would mark the Bishan Project as the trailblazer for the so-called “Artistic Rural Reconstruction movement” (Qu 2018) in which artists and architects developed projects, such as a bed and breakfast industry, which too often exploited village life for the benefit of urban communities as well as to raise their own profiles. Profiting from a perfect storm of diminishing urban land reserves, strong demand to divert capital toward development of the countryside and eagerness among local officials to approve plans in the name of “building a new socialist countryside” (Qu 2018), participants in Artistic Rural Reconstruction boasted both strong returns and moral superiority. In reality, however, their work led to the gentrification of rural areas, turning countryside into a vacation backyard of the urban middle class. As a result, Artistic Rural Reconstruction undermined the agency of farmers who were effectively abandoned yet again, becoming spectators at their own doorstep. To spark a larger movement was not our intent in the Bishan Project and the nuanced and sustained relations between villagers and artists, to which we were committed, were not often or easily replicated.

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engaging with the exhibition Mutual Aid and Inheritance, Bishan Harvestival, Bishan, China, 2011.

FIGURE 6.2 Villagers

Source: Photograph by Hu Xiaogeng.

The inaugural Bishan Harvestival (Peng 2011) was characteristic of our early approach. The three-day event included a chudifang (Chinese: 出地方) ceremony – a folk custom to celebrate the harvest – by the villagers; a large-scale exhibition, Mutual Aid and Inheritance (Figure 6.2), featuring collaborations between local craftspeople and 25 established artists, designers, architects, musicians and writers; smaller scale exhibitions on Huizhou history and culture and on Yi County craft traditions; a craft market; screenings of early rural movies and contemporary documentaries about the countryside (Plate 8); concerts of local folk music and opera; a seminar on rural China; and children’s poetry classes. As the first cultural event solely funded and organized by the Bishan Project, Harvestival received local government support in the form of venue, administration and security.

The start of political interference The success and influence of the Bishan Harvestival prompted the local government to invite Zuo Jing and me in 2012 to curate the Seventh Yixian International Photo Festival, which it sponsored. Previously, the festival had been an official event promoting tourism through domestic landscape photographers. We transformed it into an international photography festival with global participation from more than 40 artists and a theme, The Interactions. The festival criticized over-urbanization, promoted rural construction and advocated mutual support between urban and rural communities (Peng 2012). To build synergy, we planned to host the Second Bishan Harvestival concurrently.

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What we hadn’t expected was that the date we had chosen for the launch of the festivals would later be announced as the opening date of the Eighteenth National Congress of the People’s Republic of China, the Congress in which Xi Jinping would be elected as the new Party secretary. Two days before the scheduled opening of the festivals, officials from the provincial and municipal cultural bureaus visited the photo festival site unannounced and, without the curators present, censored all works to be exhibited, ordering their removal. The following day, orders arrived from Beijing declaring large-scale activities across the country inappropriate during the Congress. As a result, some television entertainment shows were canceled and prominent dissidents banned from posting on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. In Yi County, the local government canceled all exhibitions and events, including both the Harvestival and the photo festival. It seemed to us peculiar that security efforts concerning the Congress should direct so much attention to the countryside, rather than to Beijing. After the censorship of the photo festival, Zuo Jing and I scrutinized our curatorial statement, the works chosen and the accompanying texts and could only guess that the authorities’ misgivings might lie with our overarching critique of over-urbanization or perhaps concern those photographs in the show that captured compelling evidence of grave environmental pollution and its impact. We also speculated, though this was never confirmed officially, that the censorship may have been prompted by our inclusion of the project Coal + Ice by Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.–China Relations at the Asia Society. When Schell arrived to oversee the installation of his photos, Beijing national security authorities sent staff to monitor his activities. Still, we could never be sure of exactly what triggered the censorship and the cancellation of the entire festival. The local government made no announcement and did not explain their actions. As commissioned curators, we could do nothing but accept the decision and explain it by force majeure.

Censorship and the pressures to self-censor What took place is typical of the phenomenon of censorship in China: it is often exercised at the last minute so as to inflict maximum damage; no justification is given or, if an explanation is supplied, it is usually an absurd technicality such as the lack of proper licensing or other bureaucratic issue that only further obfuscates the wielding of power to maintain state authority. Censorship can be triggered by a host of factors seen as potential threats to state security such as sensitive moments in the year, individuals who are secretly blacklisted or being watched, topics that challenge authorized Party narratives or something else entirely. The unpredictability of how, when and to whom censorship is applied keeps the population guessing. The associated lack of transparency encourages an overcautious exercise of self-censorship. In fact, ambiguity is a strategy that serves the government well. Because it is impossible for the state to intervene in all activities it considers as potential risks to its control, self-censorship is an efficient and effective means to maintain the status quo. I had experienced censorship before. In 1995, after organizing a concert tour in China for U.S. musician John Zorn and Japanese musician Yamatsuka Eye, I was censored in Shenzhen by national security and culture authorities.They confiscated the New Masses, an underground music and culture magazine under my editorship, on the grounds of lacking performance and publishing licenses. Synonymous with a U.S. left-wing political magazine published between 1926 and 1948, the New Masses introduced independent music and once published an article

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about anarchism authored by Lenny Kwok, the creator of Hong Kong band Blackbird. Only two issues went to press, distributed at various concerts that I organized for free. Then in 2004, the year after my film San Yuan Li was shown at the Fiftieth Venice Biennale, Guangzhou national security and culture authorities again censored my work, this time in Guangzhou. SanYuan Li was categorized as an illegal documentary.We surmised it was because it laid bare the darkness of an urban village in Guangdong.The authorities also declared illegal the independent film and video organization U-theque, which I had established in 1999. In addition, in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, they outlawed our screening of recent Chinese independent documentaries along with our free underground movie publications. Guangdong authorities then used the official investigation of U-theque to try to solicit evidence from me to frame the Southern Metropolis Daily (Chinese: 南方都市报).The Southern Metropolis Daily is a newspaper that had provided financial support for U-theque screenings and which was subjected to government reprisals based on its accurate reporting of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak and the physical abuse and subsequent death of migrant worker Sun Zhigang while in custody. These two incidents of censorship demonstrated the risk-averseness of the authorities but also had the goal to make me censor myself. My concerts, movie screenings and independent magazines never advocated political opposition but authorities still worried that the communities gathered around New Masses and U-theque would become pressure groups. The heavy-handed interventions were intended to propel me to redefine my practice through the constraints of fear, to occupy a position governed by the “what-ifs” of my imagination. My persistence in pursuing socially purposeful projects would soon come back to haunt me in my work at Bishan Village. The censorship of the 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival cast a shadow over the Bishan Project.The local government began to keep a distance from the project, neither supporting it nor holding it back, and freezing our channels of communication with them. We could only guess what their attitudes and boundaries might be. Meanwhile, the central authorities worked to further damage my relationship with the local government by repeatedly citing my “historical track record” of censorship. All we could do was move forward with new activities that tested how far we could go.

Developing a rural knowledge production base In the spring of 2014, after almost three years’ preparation, the Bishan Bookstore (Plate 9) opened in the village. It was the first countryside branch of the acclaimed Nanjing-based Librairie Avant-Garde, honored as the most beautiful bookstore in China by CNN (Wong 2015) and one of the ten most beautiful bookstores in the world by BBC (Macdonald 2014). Inspired by the Rural Press (Chinese: 乡村书局) that Liang Shuming had established in Zouping, Shandong Province in the 1930s, I hoped the Bishan Bookstore, besides selling books, could function as a rural knowledge production base, with reading services to villagers and visitors as well as publishing capacity. I applied for and received approval from the local government which provided an empty ancestral hall as the venue. The Bishan Bookstore was an attempt to introduce non-art resources into the village. It soon gained popularity. To enhance its allure, I introduced reading parties featuring books in classical Chinese alongside concerts and art events. Many villagers frequented the store to read books and many visitors were attracted by its ancestral-hall-converted space. The books sold well because most of them were about literary, historical and rural studies, appealing to

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the tastes of visitors. Young people returning to their hometown for the Spring Festival and Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping) Festival came to learn more about this place, and one of them even rented the bookstore to host her wedding ceremony. People from around the region including Yi County town and Huangshan City came to visit. The bookstore even received tourist groups arriving in buses. Not long before, Bishan was seen as just one of the many unremarkable villages of Anhui Province, short of tourist resources and overshadowed by nearby Xidi and Hongcun. Although it received recognition in 2011 with the Bishan Harvestival, until the Bishan Bookstore opened, it had no fixed tourist attractions. The Bishan Bookstore was the first venue in the village open to the public every day throughout the year and many tourists took it as a must-see. Many county-level governments in neighboring provinces offered free venues for such rural bookstores. It seemed that the local government was pleased with the outcome. Commerce of this kind was also inspirational for me because of its social impact. Art exhibitions were not always well received in the countryside because art was not something familiar to local people and most could not see any practical use for art in their daily life. Further, a lack of venues and the limited duration of temporary exhibitions suggested that focusing on art could compromise the sustainability of the Bishan Project. In contrast, the bookstore sold books, which made it economically viable, and the villagers valued it. They believed that reading was useful, providing the only real pipeline to change their fortunes; what was more, the villagers recognized that they could benefit financially from the increased tourist traffic that the bookstore brought by opening small businesses. At the same time, we also recognized and supported the talents of craftspeople and performers in Bishan and the surrounding villages. For instance, Zuo Jing conducted research on the handcrafts of Yi County which he developed into a touring exhibition, with financial support from the Yi County government. He also published a book on the subject (Zuo 2014).Villager Wang Shouchang’s ink drawings of historic and present-day Bishan were made into postcards and sold at the bookstore, and he was paid royalties. Retired primary school teacher Yao Lilan’s photography was exhibited in a small gallery converted from a field-side cottage. And Bishan’s own amateur Huangmei Opera troupe began performing regularly, thus increasing its income. Socially and economically purposeful initiatives such as the bookstore and the new platforms for village craftspeople helped foster a climate of trust between artists and villagers in which we could talk through issues of concern as a community and come to a consensus. One of those issues, for instance, involved whether or not street lamps should be installed. In the eyes of most villagers, street lamps were a symbol of development and modernity; the people of Bishan expressed shame that their village remained dark at night, while the villages of Xidi and Hongcun had installed street lamps a long time ago. Many urban intellectuals, such as those of Artistic Rural Reconstruction, oppose the introduction of such technologies into the countryside. This is their way of holding close to romanticized notions of the “primitive,” while dismissing the opinions of villagers and the difficult conditions that such technologies have the potential to address. In regard to street lamps, the typical refrain from urban intellectuals is to object, in favor of protecting the pleasures of stargazing. Zuo Jing and I are not among such intellectuals. Understanding and responding supportively to villagers’ needs and interests is integral to our work. In fact, during the Chinese Lunar New Year holidays of 2014, when the Bishan Village Committee held a mobilization meeting for returning family members, I myself proposed the installation of street lamps.

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However, the flourishing of the Bishan Project was once again hindered, this time by Harvard University student Zhou Yun, who visited the village and subsequently posted an online critique, charging the project with “othering” local residents and thus intimating an alignment with Artistic Rural Reconstruction: I am calling the Bishan Project into question because its founder wants to create the “Bishan Commune,” and speaks of “villagers’ autonomy and self-governance”; however, the Power Point presentation he uses to introduce his ideas is completely in English, and full of big words such as civil society, social engineering and party politics, with constant allusions to Western works such as Walden, Skinner, and The Last Whole Earth Catalog; he also deliberately emphasizes that the notebook used to record his vision was a Moleskine. In this discussion, all of the details and Status Symbol[s] continuously produce a cultural divide, placing real villagers on the outside. . . .Therefore, with regard to the “Commune,” whose “Commune” is it? (Zhou,2 as quoted in and transl. by Kurek 2015: 57–58) Citing the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, she argued that the bookstore’s symbolic boundary created a “distinction” between the urban middle-class and rural villagers. She also asserted that I had opposed introducing street lamps, giving her further ammunition to allege that we were patronizing the villagers. I addressed Zhou Yun’s critique through an online article (Ou 2014a) in which I argued that she was instrumentalizing the Bishan Project to show her theoretical acumen. Unfortunately, the dispute caught the attention of the wider media, which only served to escalate the controversy. A flood of media people rapidly descended on Bishan Village and their reporting was rife with misunderstandings and distortions (Corlin 2018).The Bishan Project responded by resolutely offering commentary to the media, while the government stood by, refusing all interviews and remaining silent; officials did not appreciate the uproar.To make matters worse, the media attention to a civil rural reconstruction movement inevitably entailed an interrogation of the government’s stance and acts concerning the issue. Pitting the Bishan Project against the government was the last thing we needed. Still, the remarkable social effects of the Bishan Bookstore encouraged me to push forward similar experiments.

Creating a community cultural center After the “Bishan Controversy” abated, I bought another empty ancestral hall in the village. The place was long deserted and the village committee had tried many times to persuade me to take over it. I accepted only when I came up with another compelling idea for a social enterprise. The goal was to create a community culture center that would foster a sense of solidarity among all of us who lived in the village. The project was rooted in international field work I had conducted concerning practical approaches to building a utopian community, such as co-housing, consensus decision-making, permaculture and community currency, as captured in a second MoleskineTM notebook, Bishan Commune: How to Continue Your Own Utopia (2014–2015), and a series of articles (Ou 2013b, 2014b, 2014c, 2014d, 2015b). Inspired equally by the creativity and expertise shown by villagers in a range of vocations, with this project I committed to embedding the principles of deauthorization and deaestheticization so central to socially engaged art.We called it the School of Tillers.The title (Chinese:

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originally 农家学派, more recently 理农馆) referred to the ancient Qin dynasty community of the same name which, according to Graeber (2013: 188–189), provides the earliest known instance of an anarchist movement. Opened in 2015, the School of Tillers operated as a coffee shop but also hosted a wide range of free cultural events that would appeal to local people and provided a venue for villagers to run micro-businesses. Facilities included a gallery and screening place, a small library, a study center and a zakka, or handcraft marketplace.The screening room showed movies and TV plays chosen by the villagers every evening and, in addition, served as the stage for our Talk & Buy flea market where villagers presented their second-hand goods in front of a big screen. The gallery presented exhibitions inspired by the village and its environs, such as the 3D photo exhibition Timekeepers, which featured Slovenian photographer Matjaž Tančič’s portraits and family spaces of Yi County residents; and Liu Chuanhong’s narrative painting exhibition Memoir in Southern Anhui, a visual fiction based on Huizhou villages. The study center held lectures and workshops of local interest, for example, on community art; dyeing and weaving with local plants; and soil enhancement with microorganisms. The zakka sold books, rural, cultural and creative products and villagers’ farm produce (providing farmers with free packaging and publicity). A Researchers in Residence Program brought additional income to the community by helping villagers to list their empty houses on Airbnb. The School of Tillers helped local people with management and marketing of these microbusinesses and all the income went to the villagers. The new ways in which the School of Tillers acknowledged the expertise of local people prompted me to become the apprentice to elderly villager Qian Shi’an, a talented craftsman, in the construction of a bamboo tea pavilion with traditional techniques (Figure 6.3). I got the idea from Lloyd Kahn’s Shelter (1973), a utopian-seeking survey of vernacular architecture from around the world; the first line reads, “In times past, people built their own homes, grew their own food, made their own clothes” (Kahn 1973: 3). I hoped to learn how Bishan villagers could build their own houses with local materials and without the help of modern tools. The tea house, which Qian and I called The Happiness Pavilion, could be seen as socially engaged art but also simply as a shed on a farmer’s land, so he and I did not seek approval for

Shi’an and Ou Ning, The Happiness Pavilion (under construction), Bishan, China, 2016.

FIGURE 6.3  Qian

Source: Photograph by Ou Ning.

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the authorities. I also planned an exhibition at the school showcasing Qian’s gardening, handcrafts and photography as well as how the pavilion was built. In this exhibition, Qian would be artist and curator and I would simply facilitate. However, after completing all but the roof of the Pavilion, all our efforts were wasted. For the same reasons that we had registered the larger Bishan Project as a commercial entity, we likewise registered the School of Tillers as a commercial enterprise. A business license, we also deduced, would serve both to help the villagers generate income through the coffee shop, flea markets and zakka and to reassure the government that our intentions were economic rather than political. After running through all the legal procedures, we secured the business license. The only trouble was that the local cultural bureau did not respond to our application for an exhibition permit for the School; we received neither a nod of approval nor a rejection. Just as we had experienced when requesting information as to why the photo festival was censored, the government remained silent. Local authorities thus signaled that they would not assume any responsibility for the project and, moreover, that they could swoop in to stop it at any moment. This is a common strategy officials depend on to encourage preemptive acts of self-censorship. We responded instead by testing the government with action – executing our plans without prior approval and hoping that the authorities would not find our work objectionable.

Erasure Early in 2016, Anhui authorities began the painful and at times violent process of closing down the Bishan Project. First, they launched a number of smaller actions. Officials from the local cultural bureau came to check the books sold at the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers and ordered us to remove from the shelves Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. Security authorities required the Airbnb hosts organized by the school to register all guests. Market regulation authorities confiscated villagers’ produce, citing a lack of production dates and quality certificates. The goods were only returned later, after a protest held by villagers. After that, the level of censorship quickly escalated. One day after the start of the Lunar New Year, the water and electricity were cut from my home and from the School of Tillers. At the same time, the Happiness Pavilion was burned to the ground. The Handcraft Marketing Cooperative that Zuo Jing was renovating was damaged. Local security authorities warned that, upon orders from Beijing, my family and I had to leave immediately. I was evicted from Bishan Village and was forbidden to conduct any public activities in Bishan. The young volunteers working with me also left. I was placed on a national blacklist with all my work in China now under surveillance. I chose to keep silent and refused press interviews; a British Times journalist got word of the censorship, however, and reported it (Macleod 2016) after which the story was picked up by the wider press (Qin 2016). All evidence of the Bishan Project was erased from the village. A statue that we had donated depicting local hero Wang Dazhi, an early leader in rural reconstruction and one of the initiators of the Xin’an Children Touring Troupe, was torn down. Signs for the School of Tillers Researchers in Residence Program were removed from the front of Airbnb houses. The School of Tillers was emptied and my home remains unoccupied. All footpaths in the village were paved with flagstones, as if to literally erase my footprint from the town. Zuo Jing’s

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Handcraft Marketing Cooperative was later permitted to reopen but only after cooperative leaders declared that it had nothing to do with the Bishan Project. In the aftermath I learned that, prior to these acts of erasure,Yi County had sent an ad hoc village Party secretary to Bishan. The secretary held several meetings for Party members, persuading and mobilizing them to abolish the Bishan Project. At these meetings, the new secretary collected evidence of public statements I had made concerning “non-government-ism” and “utopia.” Tellingly, he defined the nature of the problem as “avoiding the leadership of the Party.”

Place-making and the pressures of self-censorship I used to believe naively that “artists” were somehow privileged to break rules and remain immune from punishment. Thus, in that first MoleskineTM notebook in which I conceived the Bishan Project, I brazenly included a synopsis of Erwin S. Strauss’ How to Start Your Own Country (1979). I also whimsically designed a flag and passport for the Bishan Commune and even a style of clothing, the Agritopia Dress. What I did not expect was that these musings would later be used as evidence to crush the Bishan Project. In retrospect, I can see that the Bishan Project was banned not only because some of its art events explored themes that the Chinese government considers sensitive. We were defeated because our work was seen to have overstepped the Party’s leadership in the countryside. The central government is not unaware of the problems that rural residents face. The vast rural landscape and its huge population remain cornerstones of Chinese society. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has always placed addressing rural dilemmas high on its agenda, issuing new policies promoting rural development every year.3 Despite its shared goals with the Chinese government, the New Rural Reconstruction Movement takes a dramatically different approach and has not been extended the political freedoms that led the Rural Reconstruction Movement to thrive in the Republican era. Xi’s authoritarianism is rising and strongman politics has returned to China. The Bishan Project also suffered pressure from public opinion. Though the reductive nature of the discourse on social media, sparked by Zhou Yun’s critique and furthered by sensationalized reporting, was a far cry from the force of state-imposed censorship, the pressures it brought to bear offered the government another convenient justification to suppress our work. Today Bishan does not function as a rural utopia, as I had hoped. Instead, it has become a trendy tourist destination, like the Shaker village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky or the reformist mill workers’ community of New Lanark, Scotland. Over 30 homes in Bishan Village now offer bed and breakfast accommodations. The Pig’s Inn and the Bishan Bookstore are still in business. A boutique hotel of over 200 mu (about 13.3 hectare) of farmland is under development. Numerous young people have come to Bishan to set up art studios, libraries, small-scale organic farms and guesthouses. At the Pig’s Inn, the son of the owners is now managing the business and has expanded to organize art exhibitions and to establish a microbrewery in town. The Bishan Project that I imagined was neither an artists’ village nor an ivory tower. It was intended to be a mutual-help community where villagers are the majority, living together, constructing hand-in-hand and sharing the results of their joint efforts. Reality shows that it is not easy to realize such a vision.

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I now see the Bishan Project as an experiment in place-making, in the spirit of anthropologist Marc Augé’s (1995) theories of place and non-place. Through artistic and cultural forces, community connections and social movements, place-making not only creates a new physical space but also a common spiritual space, turning a village, a block or even a city into a site that encapsulates historical memory, identity and social relations. Although I lost the opportunity to do further work in the countryside, I am now translating the approach I developed at Bishan into an urban context in Yantai City, Shandong Province, with greater possibilities for replicability and sustainability. First, I helped to create a non-profit community library in an empty compound in Suochengli, the oldest historical neighborhood in Yantai. The library is furnished with books and magazines related to local history and hosts exhibitions and lectures for residents in the neighborhood on a regular basis. The Library bears some resemblance to the Bishan Bookstore and School of Tillers but is directly inspired by the model of the Working Men Institute in the former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. Founded in 1838 by philanthropist William Maclure, the Working Men’s Institute continues to work toward its mission of “the dissemination of useful knowledge to those who work with their hands” (Working Men’s Institute 2018). My idea was to place more small libraries in the different neighborhoods of Yantai, offering services to people just as 7-Eleven convenience stores do. I was recently forced by the Beijing authorities to quit the project, but it still exists and is run by local people.

Notes 1 This notebook was part of the 2010 exhibition Detour: The Moleskine Notebook Experience at Bund18 in Shanghai, China. 2 Zhou’s original post from 2014, on douban.com, is now blocked from public access. 3 The results can be seen in infrastructure projects, such as roads and telecommunications, poverty relief and a fledgling social security system. President Xi Jinping (XinhuaNet.com 2005) has famously said that “Lucid Waters and Lush Mountains Are Invaluable Assets” (Chinese: 绿水青山就是金山银山), stressing the importance of both economic development and environment protection in the countryside. Xi (ChinaNews.com 2018) also attaches great significance to Confucian traditions, advocating a return to the teachings of the “family ethos” (Chinese: 家风) and “rural sages” (Chinese: 乡贤), and such cultural heritage is rooted in the countryside.

Bibliography Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, New York:Verso. Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York:Verso. Blackbird (n.d.) Weblog. Online. www.blackbird.hk/lenny ChinaNews.com (2018) “Xi Jinping Yao Qiu Xiang Cun Yao Pei Yu Zhe ‘San Feng’ ” (“President Xi Required That Countryside Should Cultivate Three Ethos”). 18 March. Online. www.chinanews. com/m/gn/2018/03-18/8470504.shtml?f=qbapp Corlin, M. (2017) Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside:The Bishan Commune and the Practice of Socially Engaged Art in Rural China, PhD Dissertation, Aarhus University. Corlin, M. (2018) “Trojan Horses in the Chinese Countryside: Ou Ning and the Bishan Commune in Dialogue and Practice,” FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. Online. field-journal.com/ issue-9/trojan-horses-in-the-chinese-countryside-ou-ning-and-the-bishan-commune-in-dialogueand-practice Graeber, D. (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Graeber, D. (2013) The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, New York: Spiegel & Grau. Kahn, L. (1973) Shelter, Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications.

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Kuhn, P.A. (1986) “The Rural Reconstruction Movement.” In Fairbank, J.K. and Feuerwerker, A. (eds.) The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 13, Republican China 1912–1949, Part 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 329–360. Kurek, A. (2015) The Bishan Project: Cultural Production and Place Reconstruction in Rural China, MA thesis, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Macdonald, F. (2014) “Ten of the World’s Most Beautiful Bookshops,” BBC Culture. Online. www.bbc. com/culture/story/20140327-worlds-most-beautiful-bookshops Macleod, C. (2016) “Crushed Dreams of Utopia in Rural China,” The Times. May 2. Online. www. thetimes.co.uk/article/from-our-correspondent-crushed-dreams-of-utopia-in-rural-china-k9 wvnj23j Ou, N. (2013a) “Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik?” In Hou, H. (ed.) Zizhiqu: Autonomous Regions (ex. cat.), Guangzhou: Guangzhou Times Museum, pp. 34–39. Ou, N. (2013b) “Looking for Utopia.” In Ou, N. (ed.) Go Bush! Alternative Life in New Zealand, Beijing: V-ECO. Ou, N. (2014a) “Hui Ying Yi Yin Qing Xia Dui Bi Shan Ji Hua De Zhi Yi” (“My Responses to Yi Yin Qing Xia’s Questions”), Douban.com. Online. www.douban.com/note/366566077/ Ou, N. (2014b) “Xian Cun Zui Jiu De Wu Tuo Bang: Da Ma Ji Wu Zheng Fu Zhu Yi” (“Life and Death of Fristaden Christiania (I): Cannabis and Anarchism”), Pengpai News Thought Market. Online. www. thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1274663 Ou, N. (2014c) “Xian Cun Zui Jiu De Wu Tuo Bang: Guo Zhong Zhi Guo, Mi Huan Zhi Cheng” (“Life and Death of Fristaden Christiania (II): State Within a State, a City of Illusion”), Pengpai News Thought Market. Online. www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1274664 Ou, N. (2014d) “Xian Cun Zui Jiu De Wu Tuo Bang: Mei You Ling Dao Zhe De Wu Zheng Fu Zhu Yi She Qu” (“Life and Death of Fristaden Christiania (III): Anarchist Community Without Leaders”), Pengpai News Thought Market. Online. www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1274665 Ou, N. (2015a) Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia, Aarhus: OVO Press and Antipyrine. Ou, N. (2015b) “Yi Ge Ji Ti Tao Li Wu Zhuo Shi Jie De Shen Hua” (“Legend of a Collective Escape from a Dirty World”), Tencent Master. 4 October. Online. dajia.qq.com/blog/48833501267 1526.html Ou, N. (2017) “Rediscovering Rural Reconstruction in China.” In Morris-Suzuki, T. (ed.) New Worlds from Below: Grassroots Networking and Informal Life Politics in Twenty-First Century East Asia, Canberra: Australian National University Press, pp. 37–50. Peng,Y. (ed.) (2011) 2011 Bishan Harvestival (ex. cat.), Bishan: Bishan Commune. Peng, Y. (ed.) (2012) The Interactions: 2012 Yixian International Photo Festival (ex. cat.), Yi County: Yi County People’s Government. Qin, A. (2016) “Architects Seize on Potential in China’s Countryside,” The New York Times. 17 June. Online. www.nytimes.com/2016/06/18/arts/design/architects-see-potential-in-chinas-country side.html Qu,Y. (2018) “Yi Shu Xiang Jian: Bu De Bu Chong Xin Da Kai De Pan Duo La Ahi He” (“Rural Construction Through Art: A Pandora’s Box That Has to Be Opened”), Artintern.net. 7 May. Online. review. artintern.net/html.php?id=75679 Scott, J.C. (1999) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven:Yale University Press. Scott, J.C. (2010) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, New Haven:Yale University Press. Strauss, E.S. (1979) How to Start Your Own Country, Boulder: Paladin Press. Thompson, N. (2012) Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011, Cambridge: MIT Press. Wen,T. (2005) Sannong Wenti Yu Shiji Fansi (The Three Rural Problems and Some Reflections at the End of the Twentieth Century), Beijing: Joint Publishing. Wong, M.H. (2015) “China’s Most Beautiful Bookshop . . . is in a Parking Lot,” CNN Travel. Online. edition.cnn.com/travel/article/nanjing-book-shop/index.html

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Working Men’s Institute (2018) “Visit New Harmony.” Online. visitnewharmony.com/playexplore_cpt/ working-mens-institute/ XinhuaNet.com (2005) “Lu Shui Qing Shan Jiu Shi Jin Shan Yin Shan” (“Lucid Waters and Lush Mountains Are Invaluable Assets”). 15 August. Online. www.xinhuanet.com/politics/szzsyzt/ lsqs2017/index.htm Zuo, J. (ed.) (2014) Yixian Baigong (The Handcraft of Yi County), Beijing: Jingcheng Press.

PART 2

Negotiating self-censorship

7 NAVIGATING CENSORSHIP A case from Palestine Jack Persekian

Freedom of expression is a human right.Yet the ways in which people can feasibly and safely express themselves are inevitably tied to the forces of governments and markets that attempt to also control artists and art institutions. Historically, censorship has been associated with places further East or further South – “other” places. Many people assume that people in the West live in societies free from censorship. Yet censorship is not only a tool used by repressive regimes to restrict expression on religious, political and moral grounds. Once you start to look deeper, you will find that censorship has many nebulous forms and the means of restricting freedom of expression are increasingly a part of global culture (Pilpat 2018).

Art institutions and censorship Artists and cultural institutions are a part of an ecosystem that includes many individuals and institutions – from galleries, museums, biennales, art fairs, auction houses and the art media to collectors, curators, critics, patrons and managers. In the past decades, a new “global” art economy has emerged with very specific dynamics and stakeholders. In an ideal world, that economy would offer the protection necessary to overcome hurdles to censorship, but in reality it too often dictates the direction of the art being produced and threatens to censor important works. The issue of censorship creates a moral dilemma for cultural practitioners, professionals and institutions. If they self-censor the exhibitions and programming that they deliver in order to retain certain patrons, avoid offending the public or evade run-ins with governments, cultural institutions risk alienating artists and becoming threatening instead of supportive. On the other hand, if cultural practitioners are not subtle enough about the way they share challenging messages, they run the risk of failing to support meaningful discourse in society. Demands on institutions to self-censor works come from two diametrically opposed positions. On one side, there is the need to cater to the underlying political and economic demands on the arts and cultural sector and, on the other side, there is the need to be ethically conscientious and sensitive to the needs and interests of diverse constituencies or what some

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conservative pundits derisively refer to as “politically correct.” There is no way for art institutions and their curators to carry out their work without striking a delicate balance between both sides. If one position is given priority – if the balance is tipped to favor one side over the other – the institution will be destabilized, which might lead to increased restrictions or loss of trust, and, in the worst-case scenario, its demise. The very existence of cultural institutions depends on balancing cultural, economic and power tensions. Although the economic recession of 2008 shifted many aspects of the economy, neoliberalism remains the prevailing driver of economic forces and is increasingly connected to the art market and art production. As the economist Clare McAndrew outlines in The Art Market Report, in 2018 the global art economy grew for the first time since 2014 with $63.7 billion in total global sales, a rise of 12% from 2016 (McAndrew 2018). The combined wealth of ultra-high net worth individuals – that is, anyone with more than $30 million in the bank – globally grew 3.5% to 226,450 individuals. Their combined total wealth increased by 1.5% to $27 trillion (Wealth-X 2017). These high net worth individuals are increasingly contributing to the growth of the art market, for better or for worse. As a result, artists and art institutions are constantly “curating,” i.e. internally self-censoring their work, as they navigate the demands of the art market and of diverse funding bodies (each with different expectations), the complaints and expectations of the public, the laws and customs of the places they are working in and – one hopes – their own will to comply with those things when it is ethically right to do so and to change and challenge them when it is not. As much as we may wish to break free from the dictates of the oligarchs, it seems that we are drifting further and further toward monopolies, inequality and deeper disparities between “winners” and “losers.” At the same time, if art is to be meaningful to the public, and to gain the support of cultural institutions and the art market, it must, to some extent, engage with the cultural, social, political and economic boundaries it seeks to critique – a constant challenge for arts professionals and artists. These boundaries require artists and cultural curators to step outside their comfort zone and rethink their practice in light of the ever-shifting socioeconomic and political landscape, abandoning, to a certain extent, the privileges that come with their hard-achieved successes and accomplishments – in other words, working from their experience and achievements to better negotiate and understand the evolving environment and changes that come with it, rather than negotiate a better and easier life. Some art institutions are repositories of knowledge and objects. They function primarily as spaces for the display of those objects. They have very protracted development curves and tend to be far more stable, albeit unexciting, as institutions; they tend to work with dead artists. Many of the power holders in these institutions consider stability far more important than attempts at challenging outdated taboos and dangerous beliefs. In general, they are terrified of controversy, skeptical of change and quite conservative. Priorities are set according to the tastes of wealthy donors or the art market, which is driven to produce programming that fits prescribed trends and merchandise that satisfies the insatiable appetite of financiers. Art institutions that challenge commonly held, but worn-out, beliefs function in a very different way. They tend to act more as hubs, drawing on all sorts of talent and ideas, which makes these institutions into centers of insight and humanistic literacy. They adopt different strategies to support themselves and artists as they take on the task of developing effective interpretative strategies to present meaningful work to the public and encourage moral debate. Even when such art institutions have the resources and the capability to underwrite potentially controversial projects, they must carefully manage risks and decide if and when to

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self-censor artworks. They must also be mindful of maintaining a delicate balance of morals, intellect and principles when positioning themselves vis-à-vis the expectations of the public, political authority, capital interests and the art market, all at the same time. After all, it is the values the institution upholds and the artistic intellect it nourishes, as well as the principles and the moral grounds upon which it is built, which matter in the end. Self-censorship, then, is to some degree inevitable. In some instances, it is even advisable. It is necessary to strategically pick one’s battles. What cultural producers have to do when we are faced with these decisions is not simply to push reactively at the boundaries potentially restricting us, but to ask ourselves to examine our motivations, to interrogate our moral compasses and to study our political context in terms not only of what we can get away with, or what will generate capital or publicity, but, most importantly, what would make a lasting difference to the discourses we seek to contribute to, now and in the long run. One of the most valuable contributions that cultural institutions can make to society is to press against the boundaries defined by taboos, customs and fears in an effort to create spaces where artists and the public can experiment within the interstices, interrogate and propose new models of thinking and living, discover new mediums and approaches and engage in work that fosters transformation.

Censorship and Palestine For Palestinian artists and institutions, confronting censorship is not only a matter of navigating the dictates of the art world or protecting freedom of expression but a way to struggle against the ongoing “culturcide” being waged on the Palestinian people. In this sense, censorship is not only about stopping something new from being said or created but also concerns modifying the past and denying the people their historic and cultural heritage. For generations, Palestinian artists and arts institutions have had to navigate multiple layers of explicit (from outside forces) and implicit censorship (exercised by the organizations’ internal authority structures and by self-censorship), as their work is highly vulnerable to military, economic and political pressures. Palestinian art institutions are endlessly treading the fine line between pushing boundaries, endangering their own survival and losing their integrity as a vehicle of expression and empowerment for the diverse Palestinian people. Pressure comes from several competing powers with interests in supporting – but also directing – what will be produced and valued. The history of censoring works produced by or about Palestinians dates back generations. In Palestine, both Israeli and Palestinian political groups have long suppressed and controlled freedom of expression. In the most extreme forms, suppression has included the assassination of Palestinian artists, notably the novelist Ghassan Kanafani (1972) (Ensalaco 2012) and the cartoonist Naji al-Ali (1987) (Grierson 2017) among others. It has also been exerted through the destruction of Palestinian cultural institutions and community centers such as the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Institute in Ramallah (Dalrymple 2002). Since 1967 when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has established policies and censorship practices to target Palestinian identity. These policies ranged from making it illegal to fly the Palestinian flag in the occupied Palestinian territories to arresting artists for artworks that use the colors of the flag, including depictions of the watermelon and poppy that have emerged as subversive symbols of Palestinian identity and the struggle for freedom (Corriea 2018). Although the ban on flying the flag was lifted in 1993,

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the time of the Oslo Accords, recently Israel has reintroduced the ban and has actively fined and imprisoned people who raise the flag on their cars (while Israelis, especially settlers and the Israeli Army, commonly sport Israeli flags on their vehicles as they drive through the occupied Palestinian territories). Another example of suppression is the censoring of teaching about the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the mass expulsion and killing carried out by Israel when the State of Israel was established in 1948. The word was outlawed from 2009 in the textbooks of Palestinian citizens of Israel along with teaching about the Nakba in schools (Kashti 2011).This type of censorship affects the population’s freedom of expression and right to education and is a part of a larger cultural war aimed at erasing the Palestinian narrative and, eventually, Palestinian national identity. Censorship is not exclusively the result of Israeli policies. Throughout Palestine’s history, there have been several examples of attempts by Palestinian governmental bodies to censor those whose works have been deemed too political. In recent years, this has included the arrests of several journalists and human rights defenders leading to exceptionally high rates of self-censorship among journalists and reports of bans on their publications (MADA 2014). Today the messages of artists travel more easily through digital space, increasing opportunities for exposure and censorship.This exposure can result in artwork more easily reaching the public, but it also poses risks for artists who choose to press against political, social and cultural boundaries. In 2015, Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian poet who is a citizen of Israel, was arrested after posting on Facebook and YouTube a video of herself reading a poem titled “Resist, my people resist” as the soundtrack to images of Palestinians in violent confrontations with Israeli troops (Al Jazeera and News Agencies 2018). The Israeli prosecutors said her post was a call for violence, falling under a nebulous growing definition of “incitement,” one of 200 cases brought against Palestinian artists and activists by Israel, which has yet to open a single case of Jewish Israeli incitement (7amleh 2017).Tatour was put under house arrest for three years and barred from publishing her work and accessing the internet. If not a result of oppressive governments, censorship can also be encouraged by oppressive societies. In 2015, when marital rights were granted to same sex couples in the United States, Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar painted a rainbow mural on the Israeli separation wall entitled “Through the Spectrum” to express his solidarity with movements fighting for the right to sexuality and freedom from discrimination worldwide. As images and news of his artwork spread, a wide range of responses erupted from Palestinian, Israeli and international voices. While many of these responses were supportive of the work, a vocal Palestinian minority launched a smear campaign that included threats on the artist’s life and an organized action to whitewash the rainbow (Neuendorf 2015). Today, the wall stands with its rainbow whitewashed and the struggle for freedom of expression continues in many levels of Palestinian society. Even when Palestinian artists and cultural institutions refuse to yield to the pressures of censorship and self-censorship, there are many factors that affect their ability to reach audiences. The increasingly powerful role that social media companies have come to play as political, social and artistic regulators – especially when they closely collaborate with repressive governments – strongly impacts freedom of expression. In recent years, increasing numbers of Palestinian journalists, human rights defenders and organizations have had their accounts and content deleted by Facebook without notification (Greenwald 2017). There are also countless undocumented cases of Facebook censoring the projects of artists working on the issue of Palestine and collaborating closely with the Israeli government which

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has publicly boasted a 95% rate of responsiveness to their requests for removal of content from Facebook (Gostoli 2016). Outside of Palestine, Palestinian artists and their work are disproportionately scrutinized, essentialized and discriminated against, making it difficult to reach international audiences. For instance, in 2011, the Musée de l’Elysée canceled the Elysée art prize after a sponsor of the prize, Lacoste, withdrew its financial support when Palestinian Larissa Sansour’s work, “Nation Estate,” was selected (Swash 2011). For Palestinian artists and patrons in Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, the impossibility of movement is also a defining factor – influencing which audiences artists can reach and the local impact that they can make. Residents of the West Bank are not permitted by the Israelis to enter Jerusalem or Gaza and, while access to the West Bank is permitted to the residents of Jerusalem, they are not allowed to enter Gaza. Residents of Gaza, on the other hand, cannot leave the 360-km2 prison that is Gaza at all. Many Palestinians who have been displaced and now carry other nationalities are often denied entry into Israel and Palestine, limiting their presence in the historic homeland, while Israel provides many Jews who have no direct ancestral history in Palestine or Israel access and citizenship.There is an ongoing deportation of key staff and the refusal to grant residence visas for foreign academics wishing to work in Palestine (Russia Today 2016). These restrictions dramatically limit the possibility of sharing work with the audiences with whom Palestinian arts and cultural institutions have natural connections through common language and culture, as well as preventing artists and institutions from collaborating internationally. These attempts at “culturicide” are particularly apparent in Jerusalem, the place both Israelis and Palestinians claim as their capital. Since the eighth century, the cultural character of Jerusalem has been largely Islamic and Arab (apart from some 100 years during the Crusader period), with smaller populations of Jews and Christians in the Old City. Even with the Ottoman and British occupations, the Arabic culture of the city remained mostly intact. However, following the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967, there has been a clear effort by Israel to transform the city’s cultural makeup and character to one that is predominantly Israeli and Jewish (Hasson 2012). While many of the harshest policies often involve forcibly removing Palestinian people from Jerusalem through a complex bureaucracy, cultural policies and programming are also deployed to censor, reduce, appropriate and erase many aspects of Palestinian, Arabic, Christian and Islamic culture from the city. These include contemporary artworks and cultural festivals (BBC News 2009) as well as ancient cultural and historical sites and artifacts (Hawari 2010), all of which have been documented by local and international sources (Boullata 2004; Rowe 2011). In Jerusalem, when you walk down the streets of the Old City, a mix of Arabic, Hebrew, English, German, French, Russian and Spanish fills your ears. These are the languages of enemies and lovers, occupiers and the occupied, travelers and distant relatives and families of generations. In Jerusalem, the movement of your tongue and the tone of your breath are highly politicized. Depending on who you walk by, you may need to censor your speech – you may choose not to walk certain corners so as to avoid the cameras, the soldiers, the neighbors, your cousin or your mother. When you are home, alone in your room, writing in your journal, you may censor yourself: not even allowing yourself to write a private message. These examples illustrate how far-reaching censorship and the resulting self-censorship can be – from attacks on individuals and institutions to the denial of history and cultural production in daily life. This makes Palestine one of the most challenging contexts in the world for artists and cultural institutions.

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Financing and freedom of expression In the current dire political situation, the sources of foreign aid and public funding dedicated to freedom of expression are ever-shrinking, creating a desperate situation for cultural institutions in Palestine. Consequently, we have seen the closure or freezing of activities and programs at some art institutions while others have had to lay off employees and make do with safe, predictable skeleton programming. As a result, the few remaining arts and cultural institutions have had to make their venues available to whoever can pay for them. This is not unheard of in other places in the world but, in the case of Palestine, cultural institutions are among the last open spaces for the expression and examination of the Palestinian identity. Without them, major aspects of self-reflection and opportunities for critical thinking will be lost. Palestinian cultural institutions in general are trying to work against current polarized and prejudiced realities and to stem the political tide that is drowning out freedom of expression and creativity. In response to this “culturicide,” much of the programming for the past decades has focused on cultural preservation and on national and historic identity. The assault on the existential creativity of the human spirit has led to a need to constantly document and assert Palestinian identity, leading to a deficit in the Palestinian contribution to more universal areas of concern for artists, which is also a type of systematic censorship. In this context, attempts by institutions to address issues such as diversity, plurality, tolerance and difference by working with artists whose discourses challenge the dominant environment of racism and rampant fanaticism is particularly important and requires strategic planning. One strategy is to work toward ensuring that artists and institutions can be as financially independent as possible. This can be achieved by diversifying sources of funding and, at the same time, forming partnerships, associations and other collective forms of organization that can create safety in numbers. At Al Ma’mal Foundation, the cultural institution where I am currently the director, we are trying to deal with this challenge by expanding programming that can be self-sustaining and cultivating relationships with individuals and institutions that provide us with unrestricted support and funding. These income-generating strategies range from ticketed events with food and beverages to more creative ideas such as providing curatorial services for other institutions. With this work, we are also addressing a need in the local community for cultural space: young people hold events in our venue on a regular basis and are encouraged to bring their own ideas and work; they feel unthreatened, protected from the increasingly aggressive and hostile environment outside and the lack of safe spaces to hold arts and cultural events in Jerusalem. Cultural institutions – if they succeed in reimagining their mission and role – may be able to lend their stature to the community and create safe spaces for the exchange of ideas and for grappling with challenges. Institutions need to leverage their influence not only to lobby for their causes but also to provide some protection in the face of aggression, including censorship, from political authorities, market forces and the media. To do this, institutions must actively work together, both with other cultural institutions and, more importantly, with civil society institutions, grassroots organizations and community centers working to accomplish societal change. In Jerusalem, we have begun to build an alliance of local institutions, including Al Ma’mal, Al Hoash,Yabous, al-Hakawati and the Music Conservatory, which we named “Shafaq – the

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Jerusalem Arts Network” (Jerusalem Arts Network n.d.). The coalition came together to concretize an artistic and cultural policy specifically for Jerusalem within the framework of a larger Palestinian cultural strategy, taking into account the unique, urgent needs of local people and cultural institutions. Shafaq is designed to provide the city’s artists and cultural workers an opportunity to work as a collective and establish a unifying foundation for their work. Together, we are also developing a framework for combating Israeli hegemony in the city, alongside a program for cultural growth and development, while championing freedom of thought and expression, as well as the will to fight oppression. The art event Qalandiya International provides another example of a productive coalition to enhance Palestinian cultural agency (Qalandiya International n.d.). For this initiative, colleagues from several cultural institutions across Palestine and I formed a consortium to oversee the realization of a biennial. Through this structure, all partner institutions – Al Ma’mal and Al Hoash in Jerusalem, Sakakini, Riwaq, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Ramallah Municipality, the International Academy of Arts in Al Bireh, the Arab Cultural Association in Haifa, Iltiqa’ and Shababik in Gaza and others – share ideas, research, resources, publicity and, perhaps most importantly, the space and time to sit and work together across a country that is torn apart by checkpoints, borders and walls within a region that is disconnected and broken by war and conflict. Through making key decisions collaboratively in an atmosphere of trust, reciprocity and self-organization, the Qalandiya International partners increase their safety, effectiveness and creativity and organize an event that is visible and reputable (Bishara 2018). Collaborative working has created an environment that empowers us to address areas of vulnerability in the Palestinian arts and cultural strategy and expand the space for freedom of expression. Over the years, now preparing for our fifth edition, the Qalandiya Biennial has expanded beyond Palestine across borders and across continents and is now organizing events in Amman, Beirut, Doha, Johannesburg, Dusseldorf, London, San Francisco and New York, raising the number of partner institutions to 16. Participants in the 80+ biennial events have more than doubled and the outreach and exposure have considerably grown. Building international relationships with other institutions and donors, besides bringing strength to our cause and increasing our media visibility, has provided us with increased protection and helped our artists’ messages reach broader audiences. In times when forces of oppression seek to further divide people, coalition work is one of the most effective strategies to both protect and empower artists and institutions.

Conclusion Artists and cultural institutions, independent in thought and action, are vital for protecting freedom of expression and developing art and culture in our societies. To do this, they must strive to strike an equilibrium between responding to the pressures of oppressive regimes and the demands of the market, as well as to leverage capital that can support both cultural resistance and free and critical thinking.When artists create and, crucially, when institutions decide what creative output they promote or exhibit, they must be willing to navigate the tensions that are a part of the art-making process. By working together, building broad coalitions and supporting the production of challenging art, art and artists are empowered to deal with some of the most important political, social, economic and environmental challenges we face today and create free, healthy space for future generations.

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Acknowledgment This work would not have materialized without the invaluable contribution of Alison Ramer.

Bibliography 7amleh The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media (2017) “Index of Racism and Incitement in Israeli Social Media.” 7 February. Online. 7amleh.org/2017/02/07/7amleh-center-pub lishes-the-index-of-racism-and-incitement-in-the-israeli-social-media-2016/ Al Jazeera and News Agencies (2018) “Dareen Tatour Sentenced to Five Months in Prison Over a Poem.” 31 July. Online. www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/07/dareen-tatour-sentenced-monthsprison-poem-180731084215893.html BBC News (2009) “Jerusalem Artists Go Underground.” 3 November. Online. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/8338316.stm Bishara, H. (2018) “Best of 2018: Our Top 20 Exhibitions Around the World,” Hyperallergic. 21 December. Online. hyperallergic.com/475249/best-of-2018-our-top-20-exhibitions-around-the-world/ Boullata, K. (2004) “Art Under the Siege,” Journal of Palestine Studies, 33(4): 70–84. Corriea, M. (2018) “Israel Plans to Ban the Palestinian Flag,” Palestine Monitor. 27 August. Online. www. palestinemonitor.org/details.php?id=vnuj1ga20235yrinwifkmr Dalrymple, W. (2002) “Palestine: A Culture Under Fire,” The Guardian. 2 October. Online. www.the guardian.com/artanddesign/2002/oct/02/art.artsfeatures Ensalaco, M. (2012) Middle Eastern Terrorism: From Black September to September 11, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gostoli,Y. (2016) “Is Facebook Neutral on Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?” Al Jazeera. 27 September. Online. www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/facebook-neutral-palestine-israel-conflict-16092111575 2070.html Greenwald, G. (2017) “Facebook Says It’s Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments,” The Intercept. 30 December. Online. theintercept.com/2017/12/30/facebook-saysit-is-deleting-accounts-at-the-direction-of-the-u-s-and-israeli-governments/ Grierson, J. (2017) “Police Reinvestigate 1987 London Murder of Palestinian Cartoonist,” The Guardian. 29 August. Online. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/29/police-reinvestigate-1987london-of-palestinian-cartoonist-naji-salim-hussain-al-aliHasson, N. (2012) “A Surprising Process of ‘Israelization’ Is Taking Place Among Palestinians in East Jerusalem,” Haaretz. 18 April. Online. www.haaretz.com/.premium-israelization-in-east-jerusalem1.5282949 Hawari, M. (2010) “The Citadel of Jerusalem: A Case Study in the Cultural Appropriation of Palestine,” Present Pasts, 2(1): 89–95. Jerusalem Arts Network (n.d.) “About Shafaq.” Online. jerusalemarts.net/about-shafaq/ Kashti, O. (2011) “Arab Education Officials: Israel Must Lift Ban on Teaching the Nakba,” Haaretz. 29 December. Online. www.haaretz.com/1.5004912 McAndrew, C. (2018) “The Art Market Report,” Art Basel. Online. www.artbasel.com/about/initiatives/ the-art-market Neuendorf, H. (2015) “Backlash Over Khaled Jarrar’s Rainbow Flag Mural on West Bank Wall,” Art Net News. 7 July. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/rainbow-flag-mural-palestine-314675 Palestinian Center for Development of Media Freedoms (2014) “80% of Palestinian Journalists Censored Themselves,” MADA News. 16 October. Online. www.madacenter.org/news.php?lang=1&id=152 Pilpat, S. (2018) “The State of Artistic Freedom Report,” FreeMuse. Online. freemuse.org/resources/ item/state-artistic-freedom-2018/ Qalandiya International (n.d.) Online. www.qalandiyainternational.org/

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Rowe, N. (2011) “Dance and Political Credibility: The Appropriation of Dabkeh by Zionism, PanArabism, and Palestinian Nationalism Nicholas Rowe,” The Middle East Journal, 65(3): 363–380. Russia Today (2016) “University Lecturer Denied Entry to Israel, Banned for 10 Years.” 19 October. Online. www.rt.com/uk/363194-israel-bans-soas-lecturer/ Swash, R. (2011) “Lacoste Denies Censoring Palestinian Artist in Art Prize,” The Guardian. 23 December. Online. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/22/lacoste-palestinian-elysee-art-prize Wealth-X (2017) “The World Ultra Wealth Report 2017.” Online. www.wealthx.com/report/ exclusive-uhnwi-analysis-world-ultra-wealth-report-2017/

8 TRUTH OR DARE? Curatorial practice and artistic freedom of expression in Turkey Özge Ersoy

In 2011, when Siyah Bant (Black Ribbon), a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey, organized its first meeting in Istanbul, censorship issues in contemporary art were rarely reported in any depth. Since then, the initiative has documented incidents and supported extensive research about interventions into the production, presentation and circulation of works in the visual arts, film, theater, music and literature. Siyah Bant has emphasized that censorship incidents in the arts are not isolated or sporadic and that they should be studied and fought against within the framework of freedom of speech and human rights (Karan 2013). In 2016, at the invitation of Siyah Bant, I penned a report about how artists, curators and art institutions in Turkey negotiate limitations of artistic freedom of expression. During my research, I realized that debates were often confined to single censorship cases. Further, practitioners shied away from discussing the structural problems causing arbitrary interventions into artistic expression (Ersoy 2016). This article responds to the absence of such accounts. In this chapter, I approach artistic freedom of expression not as a “clearly defined ‘thing in itself ’ ” or “a determinable endpoint,” but rather as an effort to create and develop the conditions of debate within a civic space eroded by the pressures of censorship and self-censorship (Karaca 2015). I discuss how artists and curators question the independence of privately supported art centers; how cultural organizations communicate with their neighbors as well as with lawyers to sustain their programs; and how fringe and temporary exhibition venues challenge curators to subvert both police intervention and community pressure. Throughout the chapter, I ask whether it is possible to replace the immobilizing question of how we can prevent censorship or self-censorship with the following question: how can censorship incidents give critical insights into the dynamics between contemporary art and politics and how can curators develop better tools to sustain freedom of expression? I argue that the strongest tool that artists and curators have to fight against censorship is a continuous and collective practice of discussing and testing the ever-changing limits of artistic freedom of expression. The first section outlines the four court cases that curators in Turkey refer to when speaking about how legal authorities keep narrowing the boundaries of artistic freedom of expression by charging art practitioners with “denigrating the Turkish nation,” “its flag” and “its

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institutions,” as well as with “propagandizing for terrorism.” The decisions in these cases, ranging from 1993 to the present, are often arbitrary and rely on definitions that are subject to change so as to suit political agendas and hint at the changing nature of legal interventions in an environment that is increasingly dominated by fear and uncertainty. The following sections present three case studies that show how curators negotiate interventions by non-state actors, which are less visible but just as arbitrary. In this part, I focus on specific exhibitions at three Istanbul-based arts organizations: Akbank Sanat, an art center established in 1993 by one of the largest banks in Turkey; Depo, an 11-year-old arts and culture initiative founded by a civil society organization and ARTIST Istanbul Art Fair, a 28-year-old annual event organized in conjunction with the oldest book fair in the country. Together, these case studies shed light on how curators seek to go beyond victimization in censorship and self-censorship incidents; my examples also communicate the compromises that curators have to make to support fellow artists, curators and institutions.

From denigrating the nation to terrorist propaganda: legal interventions In Turkey, constitutionally guaranteed artistic freedom of expression is often subject to exceptions, generally in the name of “national security,” “public order” and ever-widening antiterror legislation. Since the 1990s, a decade characterized by political instabilities, a full-blown Kurdish insurgency, armed clashes and village evacuations, state interventions into artistic expression and its circulation have been based on alleged threats against the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Turkish state (Karaca 2011). In the 1990s and 2000s, two artists were accused of denigrating the “Turkish nation”: Hale Tenger for her work I Know People Like This II (Böyle Tanıdıklarım Var II) (1992) and Halil Altındere for the catalog of an exhibition he curated, titled Free Kick (Serbest Vuruş) (2005). And in more recent years, two particularly significant cases have arisen in which filmmakers Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu as well as artist and journalist Zehra Doğan have been prosecuted for “terrorist propaganda.” These cases show that criminal charges against artists do not simply draw on laws but on arbitrary interpretations of these laws which change to suit political agendas.The cases also demonstrate that artists rarely benefit from their constitutionally guaranteed right of artistic freedom. Hale Tenger was among artists who explored the escalation of violence and nationalism in Turkey in the early 1990s. At the 3rd Istanbul Biennial in 1992,Tenger exhibited a wall installation titled I Know People Like This II, in which she displayed sets of bronze figurines of the god of fertility, Priapus, and the three monkeys that refer to the proverbial principle “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” (Plate 10). The three monkeys form the background of the composition and Priapus figurines form several stars and a crescent, evoking the elements of the Turkish flag.The work performs a critique of both the violent acts committed in the name of the nation-state and of the process through which citizens become complicit bystanders. At the time of the exhibition, a conservative literary critic targeted Tenger in his newspaper column, stating that the work was “unacceptably offensive” and that “one had to reckon the consequences of such a provocative work” (Kosova 2018). Following the complaint of an anonymous plaintiff, the police began an investigation of the work and asked the biennial team not to de-install it before the investigation ended, even if the exhibition concluded prior

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to the end of the investigation (Tenger 2018). The artist was prosecuted at a peace court (the lowest level of civil courts) under Article 2893, the Law for the Turkish Flag. After the case was dropped because there was no apparent flag in the artwork in question, prosecutors went to a higher court, the civil court of first instance, accusing Tenger of “denigrating emblems of the Turkish nation” under another article about offenses to the Turkish flag.The defense argued that the artwork did not refer to the Turkish flag but “meant to depict the universe” and was a critique of patriarchy and male violence (Kosova 2018). Tenger was eventually acquitted. When invited to exhibit the work at other public institutions in the following years, the artist did not want to take the risk of going through another court process and refused the invitation (Başaran 2011). In 2005, Halil Altındere, an artist with a long-standing interest in nation, identity and power structures, curated the exhibition Free Kick as part of the “hospitality zone” of the 9th Istanbul Biennial, which tackled the notions of militarism, trauma and memory (Tüzünoğlu 2005). The exhibition brought together 34 artists and a selection of documentaries reflecting on Turkey’s recent political history. Many of the works on display suggest a sense of dependency, aggression and tension between civilians and the military, including three particularly resonant photographs: Murat Tosyalı’s Obedience (2004) portrays a male body naked from the waist up, wearing the emblems and the shoulder straps of the Turkish Armed Forces; Demet Yoruç’s Hulk (2004) depicts a military officer resembling the green-colored fictional superhero of that name; and Burak Delier’s Guard (2005) captures a young man hiding a knife behind his back while standing in front of a guard in soldier garb. After the opening, an anonymous viewer filed a complaint about the exhibition with the public prosecutor’s office and, consequently, a criminal court of peace in Istanbul ordered the confiscation of the exhibition catalog – according to Altındere, the first time this had happened in Turkey’s history (Karaca 2011). Referring to the aforementioned three artworks, the confiscation verdict stated: “It is understood that [the catalog] publicizes pictures that mark the Turkish Army as a target that needs to be attacked under all circumstances and in every way, and, exhibiting bad intentions, it essentially publicly denigrates the Turkish armed forces” (Karaca 2011: 166). Although the catalogs were confiscated, the artworks on display were left in place, with one exception. Delier’s Guard was taken down as a result of an act of “collective self-censorship”; the curators and the other artists in the exhibition had asked Delier to be “prudent” and remove his work from the exhibition before the opening (Delier 2012: 27). The decision not to intervene into the exhibition while confiscating the catalog exemplifies how the authorities arbitrarily restrict the circulation of art that is critical of those in power. It also begs the question of what the authorities feared the most: the circulation of these images after the exhibition or a backlash against the censoring of an exhibition that was part of a large-scale, internationally recognized biennial? (Karaca 2011). Altındere’s lawyer appealed the decision and argued that artistic critiques did not constitute an offence. Consequently, a criminal court of first instance overturned the confiscation decree, stating that the artistic value of the works might be “debatable,” that they might evoke “the use of force” and that a large proportion of society might not approve of them but that, “as long as their content conforms to the European Convention of Human Rights norms, we must remember that a democracy needs to be able to tolerate [or endure] all these effects” (Karaca 2011: 167).

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However, an Istanbul office of the Director of Public Prosecutions opened another criminal proceeding against Altındere, accusing him of public denigration of the Turkish Armed Forces under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code – the infamous law adopted in 2005 for punishing insults against “Turkishness.”1 The prosecution demanded a prison sentence of two years. The defense argued specifically for artistic freedom of expression, stating that artistic critiques cannot be regarded as insults and that they have to be treated differently from political speeches and other types of critical expression (Karaca 2011). Altındere was acquitted in 2006, and the court decision constitutes a major precedent for protecting freedom of expression in the visual arts. While neither artist was sentenced to imprisonment, these prosecutions have significantly undermined artistic expression: Tenger refused to exhibit the work in Turkey after the court case and the press was discouraged from using the images of the artworks in Altındere’s case, limiting their wider distribution (Karaca 2011). Tenger points out that she has continued to make works that are critical of censorship and state pressure but has developed a “strategy to circumvent being prosecuted again” by using more indirect references (Tenger 2018). In 2006, anti-terror legislation introduced ever-widening definitions of what constitutes criminal activity and, consequently, the atmosphere of unease and fear in the visual arts has grown substantially. The legislation has been especially harmful in predominantly Kurdish regions, where authorities deem cultural expression to be a separatist act, thereby blurring the boundaries between the right to critique, defamation and political propaganda. Anti-terror laws have thus contributed to the polarization of society and the criminalization of artistic production (Başaran and Günal 2018). The curators I interviewed for this chapter agree that such criminalization has intensified in the last decade, as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government have targeted many opponents and institutions critical of their power which has contributed to the growing anti-intellectual sentiments in the country. They add that tensions have risen in a political atmosphere defined by the 2015 termination of a twoyear-long cease-fire between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), as well as the state of emergency implemented after the 2016 coup attempt against President Erdoğan and his government.2 Following the coup attempt in 2016, emergency decrees and the actions of the government-appointed trustees in municipalities and mayor offices of predominantly Kurdish cities have targeted many artists, curators and writers (Ince and Siyah Bant 2016). According to the annual report of Susma (Speak Up) Platform (2017a), which, like Siyah Bant, documents censorship incidents in Turkey,3 numerous art galleries, theaters, cinemas and writers’ associations in these cities were closed down and the few that continued to function were allowed to do so only under close scrutiny and with the condition of changing the language of activities from Kurdish to Turkish. Arts and culture magazines as well as broadcast, television and news agencies were dissolved; festivals were canceled; statues and monuments erected by pro-Kurdish municipalities were removed at the discretion of government-appointed trustees (Insan Hakları Platformu and Bianet 2017). The prosecution of the filmmakers of the documentary Bakur (North) (2015) offers a telling example of this new environment. Directed by Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, Bakur portrays daily life in three Kurdish guerrilla camps in southeastern Turkey. Filmed during the peace process in 2013–2014, the work offers rare documentation of PKK members

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playing games, sharing food and training; it also features interviews about what the state, freedom and justice imply for them. This film marks the first time professional cameras entered these camps (Artists at Risk Connection 2018). The film was scheduled to premiere at the 34th Istanbul Film Festival in 2015; however, the festival committee removed it from its program shortly before the festival started, after receiving a notice from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism which warned that all films produced in Turkey had to be granted a registration document (eser işletme belgesi) (T24 2015).This notice followed the targeting of the filmmakers as the directors “of that treasonous PKK film” by a conservative newspaper (Başyiğit 2016a). Before this incident, several films without the certificate had been screened at the festival without any issues. In protest against the removal of the film from the program, 22 filmmakers withdrew their work from the festival; all the juries withdrew from festival-related competitions; the closing ceremony was canceled; and filmmakers and film organizations published a joint statement calling for “the laws and regulations that make censorship possible to be urgently changed” (Siyah Bant 2015). Bakur was later screened at other independent film festivals in Istanbul, Diyarbakır and Mardin without a problem, as some festivals with no major ties with the Ministry choose not to require the registration document because they consider it a tool of censorship (Başyiğit 2016b).4 In 2017, two years after the documentary was released, the filmmakers faced charges for “propagandizing for a terrorist organization” under Article 7/2 of the Anti-Terror Act (Bianet 2017). They currently face up to five years of imprisonment. The final verdict in this ongoing case will set another legal precedent for artistic freedom of expression, as it is the first time that a documentary is on trial and a severe penalty, namely a trial with a prison sentence, might be given to filmmakers for their work (PEN America 2018). In 2017, the same year that Bakur’s filmmakers were prosecuted, artist and journalist Zehra Doğan was sentenced to 2 years, 9 months and 22 days in prison for “terrorist propaganda” because of her news coverage, social media posts and sharing a painting of hers on social media (PEN America 2019). In 2016, Doğan moved to Nusaybin, a town in southeastern Turkey, to report on the armed conflicts between Turkish state forces and the PKK, following the end of the peace process. While pursuing her journalistic work in Nusaybin, Doğan also started sharing her paintings on social media. She was arrested in July 2016 for the charges of “membership of a terrorist organization” and “terrorist propaganda” (ibid.). In December 2016, she was released, pending trial. In March 2017, the Second High Criminal Court of Mardin province decided that her journalistic and artistic work was considered “terrorist propaganda” and, consequently, she was sent to prison once again. Doğan’s painting in question depicts a scene from Nusaybin, which was heavily damaged in the aftermath of intense fighting between state security forces and the PKK. Adapted from a photograph found on social media, the work represents demolished buildings with Turkish flags hanging from them, five armored vehicles and a military convoy in the foreground (Artists at Risk Connection 2019). In the painting, armored vehicles are depicted as creatures that look like scorpions, devouring a group of individuals. “I was given two years and 10 months [jail time] only because I painted Turkish flags on destroyed buildings,” Doğan writes in a now deleted tweet posted after her sentencing. “However, they [the Turkish government] caused this. I only painted it” (Goldstein 2019). The indictment indicated that the artwork was a statement against the military operations that aimed to restore public order and went “beyond the limits of criticism”; it was considered as

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“propaganda for the PKK’s barricade and trench policy” (Artists at Risk Connection 2019). During her time in prison, Doğan was denied painting materials and art books; newspapers reported that she kept painting by producing dye from plants and menstruation blood (Bianet 2019a). She was released in February 2019 after spending 600 days in jail. As the Bakur and Zehra Doğan cases demonstrate, the scope of anti-terror laws has been widened significantly. The definition of “terrorism” in the application of the law remains ambiguous, as do the terms “terror,” “terrorist organization,” “membership in a terrorist organization” and “making propaganda for a terrorist organization.” This ambiguity is used to imprison artists, discourage artistic expression, target art professionals and strengthen a culture of fear where self-censorship has become the norm.

Business as usual? While artistic freedom of expression erodes through arbitrary and restrictive interpretations of legislation, non-state actors continue to struggle to build solidarity amongst one another. In Turkey, private families, banks and corporations have been at the fore to support major museums and contemporary art centers, as there is a remarkable absence of public funds and structural support for contemporary art. Growing in numbers since the 2000s, privately supported institutions struggle to “make maneuvers” to continue their public programs. In my research over the last few years, I have found that directors and curators often admit to continuous institutional self-censorship and give a list of potential reasons for walking on a tightrope, including the loss of financial support, fear of litigation and media backlash (Ersoy 2016). While most acts of institutional self-censorship remain invisible, some become public and cause controversies. A recent example is the cancellation of the group exhibition Post-Peace less than a week before its scheduled opening at Akbank Sanat – an art center supported by one of the largest banks in Turkey – in February 2016.The debates that followed illustrate the polarization of opinion over private institutions as well as the victim versus perpetrator binary that often becomes the norm in discussions around censorship. Curated by Katia Krupennikova, Post-Peace explores the current modalities of peace and war and was the winner of the fourth annual Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition in 2015. Akbank Sanat’s press statement about the cancellation reads: “In accordance with [our] sense of responsibility in the Turkish contemporary art world and following various considerations regarding the delicate [or sensitive] situation in Turkey, the exhibition has been canceled” (Batycka 2016). While the institution refrained from issuing further explanation about why it canceled the event, vague terms such as “responsibility” and “sensitivity” used to justify the cancellation indicate the arbitrariness of the decision. Akbank Sanat refused to respond to press inquiries or react to the statements made by the curator, the artists and the jury. As the organization did not cancel other public programs such as film screenings that were scheduled around the same time, the reasons for the cancellation have been subject to speculation and many believe that it was prompted by a commissioned work by artist belit sağ (Ersoy 2016). Invited to create a new work for the exhibition, sağ first proposed a video based on Ayhan Çarkın, a former special operations member who confessed to extrajudicial killings of over 1,000 people in the 1990s (sağ 2016). According to sağ, Akbank Sanat turned down her first proposal, after which she produced another work, Ayhan and Me (2016), referring to the

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FIGURE 8.1 belit 

sağ, Ayhan and Me, 2016. Video, 14′17″ (still).

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

rejection of her first proposal (Figure 8.1). The cancellation was announced a few days after the artist shared the new work with the institution. Following the cancellation, the curator, the artists and the international jury of the competition published statements that called it an act of censorship while recognizing the tense political climate in the country caused by recent terror attacks and the resumption of hostilities between Kurdish insurgents and the state security forces (Anonymous Stateless Immigrants 2016; El Baroni et al. 2016; Krupennikova 2016). Although these statements aimed to criticize Akbank Sanat’s unilateral decision, they failed to address the underlying structural problems such as the institution’s disputable risk assessment and the apparent lack of communication between the host institution, curator and artists. In one of the few statements that publicly demand transparency from Akbank Sanat, sağ (2016) pointed out that their unilateral decision marginalizes the contributors and blocks their participation in decision-making mechanisms. She writes that institutions like Akbank Sanat are aligned with “oppressive government policies” when they neither admit to their acts of censorship nor take responsibility for these acts. Cultural workers, sağ argues, have to expose and resist this mentality (sağ 2016). Taking a more prudent stance, curator Başak Şenova (2016a), who initiated the competition, asserts on her website: “[W]e are rushed into making either black or white decisions.” She highlights her determination to stay in the “grey area” and try to understand the context that drove the cancellation. Şenova’s statement drew much criticism from the art world over her perceived reluctance to stand against the institution that made the decision. Two months after her statement, Şenova (2016b) announced her resignation from the International Curator Competition. In a subsequent website post, she explains that she sought to find another venue to show the exhibition and to discuss the responsibilities of exhibition-making but that she “did not succeed” (ibid.). She expresses her concern about the

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“destructive tone” in the reactions of all involved, “the accusations” and “the lack of clarity” making her efforts and the goal of the competition “pointless.” Opinions were split: Some critics chose to immediately call on the institution to admit the cancellation as an act of censorship, while others gave up trying to reform the Akbank Sanat, referring to the incident as an “institutional failure.” Despite the extensive discourse, there was only one – but highly significant – inquiry about the risk assessment that led to the cancellation. In a private letter sent to Akbank Sanat’s director, a group of international arts initiatives and organizations, including Siyah Bant, asked how the institution estimated the risk of the artworks on display and whether they would consider hosting the exhibition if the political conditions improved (Whyatt 2016). Although no response ensued, this letter, as an attempt to demand accountability and dialogue without launching accusations at the institution, is a crucial precedent for practitioners seeking to create conditions to discuss the limitations of artistic freedom of expression. The controversy around Post-Peace resurfaced in 2017, as Ekmel Ertan and Işın Önol, two independent mid-career curators, were invited to organize another group exhibition at Akbank Sanat. Including works by seven artists from Turkey and abroad, Black Noise opened in September 2017. According to the curatorial statement, Black Noise refers to silence that has a sound with “a measurable, transformable power.” Ertan and Önol (2018) do not see silence as ineffectual; in their estimate, “silence, in fact, is loaded with sound and action.” Ertan and Önol (2018) state that neither the participating artists nor the press raised any issues about their collaboration with Akbank Sanat which is surprising, given the scale of the debate in 2016. Both curators highlight the relationship of trust between artists, curators and the institution. They emphasize that they shared their ideas and hesitations with the institution from the very beginning of the process and wanted to see whether good communication would result in “healthy collaboration.” Ertan suggests that they knew it was a risk to trust this particular collaboration. He explains, “We are aware that institutions do not exist in a vacuum – those such as Akbank Sanat are closely connected to banks with conservative reflexes.” “However,” Önol adds, “we wanted to hold on to one of the few available spaces left for exhibition-making” (Ertan and Önol 2018). Others are more skeptical that privately funded institutions are now able and/or willing to support “sensitive” artworks and curatorial propositions. For example, Övül Durmuşoğlu, another mid-career curator, admits that many artists and curators have worked closely with the private sector since the 1980s because of the resistance against “arts in service of the state” and a distrust of state institutions based on systematic interventions into freedom of expression but also points out that families and banks that support contemporary art are currently under pressure from the president and the ruling party. “I don’t believe that it is possible to collaborate with such institutions to present challenging artistic work anymore,” Durmuşoğlu (2018) declares; “they have so much to lose and they will require more limits and restrictions every day.” Ezgi Bakçay (2018), a curator and member of an artist-run space and cooperative, concurs and yet argues that it is inappropriate to blame independent curators for organizing exhibitions at these institutions that are prone to protect the status quo at the expense of artistic expression “unless we create other spaces such as cooperatives or temporary initiatives to support their work.” For Banu Karaca, an academic and co-founder of Siyah Bant, the issue at stake is not solely curators’ good intentions when working with institutions. Karaca (2018) notes that

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institutions with “conservative reflexes” swiftly compromise artworks at the expense of the continuity of their operation; they “want business as usual, and understandably so.” She emphasizes that the solution is not a boycott or rejection of these institutions. “Whether we work as scholars, researchers or curators for privately supported institutions, be it a university or an art center, we are implicated in their power relations,” she continues. “We have to learn how to express the contradictions we struggle with when working with such organizations” (Karaca 2018). Karaca proposes that curators and institutions be more outspoken about their daily dilemmas, negotiations and working models so that the arts community can develop better tools to counter moments of crisis.

Negotiating with neighbors and lawyers Compared to arts organizations supported by banks and corporations, some of the arts and culture initiatives founded by individuals offer a relatively more open space, although their ability to host controversial works is increasingly curtailed in the current political climate. Depo – an initiative of Anadolu Kültür, which is a non-profit organization advocating for cultural diversity and cultural rights – is a rare example of an organization that hosts exhibitions and public programs exploring politically sensitive subjects. Nonetheless, the situation of Depo has changed dramatically over the last few years. When I first interviewed Asena Günal, programs coordinator of Depo and co-founder of Siyah Bant, in early 2016, she stated that their team enjoyed a rare privilege to be outspoken about some of the most controversial political issues in the country, such as the Kurdish rights movement, the Armenian Genocide and the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul and beyond. Günal explained that this relative freedom in programming was possible because, unlike the banks and corporations that support the arts, Depo founder Osman Kavala, a businessperson and civic leader, did not have close business ties with the government. Günal (2016) recounted that, at that time, the pressures of censorship and self-censorship came not from funders but from the residents of the Tophane neighborhood of Istanbul where Depo is located. This often manifested itself through pressure groups of 10–15 men with common “sensitivities.” For instance, in 2010, a neighborhood group armed with sticks and clubs attacked people who attended openings at four different art galleries in Tophane, allegedly because of their alcohol consumption on the street (Başaran 2014). Since that day, Depo has used folding screens placed at the entrance of the building during openings to make sure that visitors are less visible on the street level. Still, in 2016, during an event at Depo coorganized by transgender people, a group of neighborhood residents tried to intimidate the participants with threats such as “they would be beat up” and “they would be hurt” (Günal 2016). Where the perpetrator remains ambiguous, these threats are exemplary of the forms of power that pressure individuals to take “precautions.” Günal expresses her discomfort with the idea of caving into “neighborhood pressures” (mahalle baskısı) but admitted her fear about physical violence against her team and the participants during events. “In the end, we had to ask our collaborators to be ‘somehow less visible,’ ” she recalls (2016). When I interviewed Günal in 2018, I asked her whether the state of emergency declared in 2016 has had an impact on Depo’s programming. She recalls that, in the process leading up to exhibitions, some of the invited artists now consult with the Depo team about specific works, asking whether their political content would make them “too dangerous.” Günal states that their team has tried to maintain the position, increasingly rare in Turkey today, of showing and

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supporting works that bigger institutions would be reluctant to include in their exhibitions. However, that drastically changed when Depo founder and human rights activist Osman Kavala was detained and then jailed in the fall of 2017. In October 2017, Kavala was arrested for “attempting to abolish, replace or prevent the implementation of the constitutional order through use of force and violence” and “attempting, by use of force and violence, to abolish the government or prevent it from fulfilling its duties,” based on Articles 309 and 312 of the Penal Code (Amnesty International 2018). According to reports, he has been accused of having links with the organizers of the coup attempt in 2016 as well as the Gezi Park protests in 2013 (ibid.).With no credible evidence for these charges, his imprisonment exemplifies the intimidation policy of the government toward oppositional voices and civilian activities in the arts, culture and civil society (Günal 2017). Kavala spent 489 days in prison before the indictment against him and 15 other rights defenders was completed and accepted by the Istanbul 30th Heavy Penal Court in February 2019. Asserting that these 16 individuals organized and financed the Gezi Park Protests, the indictment accuses them of being “the indirect perpetrators of the attempt to overthrow the government (Turkish Penal Code 312/2) through violence” (Bianet 2019b). The indictment requests life imprisonment for all the defendants (Bianet 2019c). The ongoing criminal investigation and Kavala’s long detention without a trial have amplified the sense of unease and insecurity within the arts community, including within the Depo team, which now struggles to be “cautious.” In our conversation, Günal said that Depo decided to postpone an exhibition, including a selection of photographs and documentary films by young artists and filmmakers exploring the daily life in Kurdish regions of the country, which was scheduled to open in January 2018. “For the first time, we had the urge to consult with lawyers to make a decision about an exhibition,” Günal (2018) explains.The lawyers watched the two films with “potentially sensitive” content and later cautioned that the works could face charges of “propagandizing for a terrorist organization” and “denigrating the Turkish nation and its institutions.” Günal (2018) admits that the decision to consult with lawyers is itself another way to embody the state logic and assume that artworks can potentially constitute a crime. However, the Depo team did not want to take risks and endanger Kavala while he is still in prison. “Someone might walk into the exhibition and target Kavala again, claiming that his so-called ‘separatist’ activities continue even when he is incarcerated,” Günal adds. Since Kavala’s imprisonment, numerous publishing houses, civil society and human rights organizations have made public statements asking for his release. The visual arts organizations, however, still maintain their silence. Many colleagues from these institutions have voiced advocacy for the Depo team through e-mails, phone calls or by going to the prison where Kavala is held with banners of support (Başaran and Günal 2018). Nevertheless, as they raise their voices to protest the criminal charges against Kavala, they act only as individuals, not representatives of institutions. Özlem Altunok (2018) of Susma Platform notes that silence is normalized in the climate of fear; “no one wants to lose the platform where they have a voice and most people already see the reflex of protecting the institution as a form of resistance,” she states. It then becomes necessary to discuss the different forms of institutional silence. After all, how do curators communicate the difference between silence at the expense of the continuity of the institution versus one at the expense of the freedom of an individual? The question of how the lack of institutional solidarity affects the arts community remains unanswered.

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“Public decency” and collective curatorial models at fringe and temporary exhibition sites In recent years, it has become common practice for curators to exercise self-censorship to safeguard institutions and their stakeholders. In this climate, those who work at temporary and fringe exhibition sites, such as fairs and festivals away from the city center, seek new formats to test the limits of artistic freedom of expression. Organized in conjunction with the International Istanbul Book Fair since 1991, ARTIST Istanbul Art Fair is an example of this. The fair takes place in a convention center in the Büyükçekmece district, an hour and a half away by tram from the Karaköy – Beyoğlu area where most of the city’s arts organizations are located.5 The curatorial work at ARTIST is often subject to censorship to protect “public decency” or “societal sensitivities” (toplumsal hassasiyetler) and yet it offers a model of resistance to subvert not only police intervention but also community pressure. Artist Rafet Arslan (2018) recalls that every time he participates in ARTIST, there are similar types of interventions by the police or by the audience, including threats, removal of artworks and targeting of artists and curators. None of these interventions are based on court decisions. The police, curators or artists choose to remove artworks after they are targeted by anonymous visitors, social media users and newspaper columnists, demonstrating a random application of constraints based on “sensitivity” and “obscenity.” For instance, in 2013, Nova Kozmikova’s It Was Pouring Out! (Akıyordu!) (2013), which depicts then Prime Minister Erdoğan with oil pouring out of his nostrils, mouth and ears, was removed from the exhibition by the curators, after an anonymous complaint prompted a police investigation and a flurry of bad press by conservative newspapers (Arapoğlu 2013; Freemuse 2014). In 2016, artist Özgür Korkmazgil withdrew from the exhibition after the police sought to remove part of his installation comprising oil paintings depicting a lamb chop and close-ups of a female body, following anonymous complaints (T24 2016). And, in 2017, a painting by Mustafa Özel showing two male bodies was temporarily removed after being targeted on social media, although it was later put back on display with an age limit (18+) (Susma Platform 2017b). Arslan (2018), also one of the curators for the 2017 edition of ARTIST, recalls that he was on his way to the fair when he learned on social media that Özel’s work was removed; “when I arrived in the fair area the work was back on display but no one was able to tell whether it was the gallerist, the management of the fair, or the police who removed the work for ‘obscenity.’ ” This lack of clarity has contributed to the polarized social media firestorm targeting the 2017 ARTIST organizers. Conservatives blamed them for showing “obscene” images while free speech advocates accused them of not showing solidarity with the artist. On the one hand, temporary and fringe exhibition venues suffer more than other platforms because of the inherent vulnerabilities of their provisional nature. Their relatively more impromptu organizational character often clouds the trajectory of decision-making around incidents of censorship and self-censorship, thus fuelling social media polemics. On the other hand, it is precisely this provisional nature that allows them to host emerging, experimental or “sensitive” works that might not be visible in established art institutions and to offer collaborative curatorial models to negotiate self-censorship. Ezgi Bakçay (2018), who has led the collective curatorial working model in the non-profit section of the fair since 2016, argues that ARTIST is a laboratory for a conflicted (çatışmalı) public space; its audience is diverse and ambiguous compared to exhibition-goers who visit

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museums or large-scale exhibitions in the city center. It is this diversity and ambiguity that lead the curators to consider the mediation of artworks as one of the main concerns of the exhibition. Bakçay proposes that the challenge is to find and display artworks that make their proposition in an indirect yet subversive manner so that “they don’t get viewers’ reaction immediately; they can remain on display and meet diverse publics” (ibid.). According to Bakçay (2018), the position of the curator is different from that of the artist in this type of exhibition. She explains that the curator has to take responsibility for artworks as well as for the continuity of public exhibition spaces, which are dwindling in numbers, in contrast to most artists showing at this type of exhibition, who typically take responsibility for only their own works. To share such responsibility, Bakçay initiated a collective curatorial group comprising more than 10 individuals, including artists and curators, that meets regularly in the lead-up to the exhibition and discusses exhibition-making strategies, especially how to negotiate with the heavy-handed surveillance of artworks in which “every year police officers visit the venue and take photographs of every single artwork on display” (ibid.). Three incidents that happened at Terra Incognita – the non-profit section of the 2016 edition of the fair, featuring independent groups of artists, curated exhibitions, performances and displays by civil society organizations – demonstrate how the curatorial collective struggles to anticipate and respond to interventions in the name of “public decency”: Özgür Korkmazgil withdrew from the exhibition; the police intervened into Vooria Aria and Ada Kollwitz’s installation; and Dream Pavilion, a collective project about queerness and body politics, became one of the most popular sections. One week after the opening of the fair, the police sought to remove one part of Özgür Korkmazgil’s quadriptych oil painting which depicted a close-up of a vagina. The artist consequently removed his entire work from the exhibition; Rahmi Öğdül, curator of this section, placed a piece of black cloth on the wall to protest the intervention. Bakçay (2018) admits that the curatorial collective predicted the intervention but no one wanted to tell the artist to remove his work before the opening of the exhibition. “The best we could do was to discuss how to share the responsibility when the intervention happened but eventually we all ended up with a feeling of helplessness” (ibid.). While the collective seeks to predict potential interventions and find ways to communicate this with artists, they also witness unexpected and “absurd” interventions. The incident about MONUMENT ONE, an installation exhibited by hinterland galerie – a Vienna-based independent art space – exemplifies this. Conceived by artists Vooria Aria and Ada Kollwitz, the installation depicts a Styrofoam donkey rearing on a tall pedestal, referring to the tradition of erecting public monuments for rulers or army officials. Bakçay (2018) recalls that, during the fair, she received a phone call from a police officer who asked the curator to confirm that the donkey’s penis was bitten by a snake. The police consequently argued on the phone that the work would cause psychological harm to children and requested that the installation be covered with a folding screen with a 18+ sign. “Even if we try to think carefully about every single work on display, it becomes impossible to anticipate what will be found ‘sensitive,’ ” Bakçay explains (ibid.). For Bakçay, Dream Pavilion (2016) is a rare example of a project that presented works exploring “sensitive” issues and yet was not subject to censorship. Dream Pavilion brought together works of 37 artists and activists in a room that looked like a makeshift tent from outside. Organized by cultural worker Yekhan Pınarlıgil, artist leman sevda darıcıoğlu and writer Murat Alat, the project featured works ranging from photography to installation, performance

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and film screenings dealing with queerness, gender politics, sex crimes and crimes against LGBTQI+ individuals. Bakçay (2018) points out that the project drew on the aesthetics of cruising cinemas and pavyons (nightclubs only for men), using red velvet curtains, gold doors, old pop songs, wigs and feather boas as props. Although the police placed a 18+ sign at the entrance two days before the closing of the exhibition following anonymous complaints about “public decency,” this exhibition was frequented by numerous families with no controversies arising. Dream Pavilion shows that when artists and curators move beyond the aesthetics of regular art fair displays to create “transformative spaces,” in Bakçay’s words, they can circumvent intervention to exhibit works with subversive aesthetics, including ephemeral works such as performance or film screenings. Bakçay (2018) reports that the curatorial collective has learned from these experiences and continues to make preemptive decisions when selecting artworks. Although it is difficult to anticipate potential interventions in the name of “societal sensitivities,” Bakçay says that the group is not keen to select works that directly refer to the state, political leaders or explicit sexual content. “One could call this self-censorship or the internalization of the state mentality,” Bakçay continues. “But I would rather call it a tool for resistance” (ibid.). The curator emphasizes that the process of negotiating the selection and sharing the responsibility for more “sensitive” works becomes a survival strategy based on solidarity. When asked if there is a particular strategy the curatorial collective has developed together, Arslan and Bakçay emphasize that it is crucial to have a common and consistent language among curators, to be alert and to make clear statements as soon as interventions occur, although they both admit this is a work in progress. “False information disseminates fast and whets the appetite of social media,” Bakçay (2018) explains. “We need to do this to protect the works and ourselves from hearsay and gossip raised by social media trolls as well as fellow artists.” The collective curatorial model that develops over a number of years not only helps to keep one of the few venues for experimentation open but also offers a tool for continuous negotiation among curators and artists. In a context where institutional solidarity remains weak and all practitioners feel under heavy pressure from both state and non-state actors, a sustained discussion about finding ways to expand the limits of artistic freedom of expression seems to be the strongest survival strategy.

Conclusion According to a 2017 Susma Platform survey of cultural producers who work in the art, literature, publishing, university and non-governmental organizations (NGO) fields in Turkey, 93% believe that self-censorship has increased in the last ten years and 83% say that they think about the possibility of being censored while working on a project. In the contemporary art environment, where institutional solidarity networks remain weak and self-organization models such as associations or syndicates are few in number and lie dormant, where they do exist, curators often find themselves alone; they struggle to foster a culture of constructive discourse on how to work to and test the limits of artistic freedom of expression. In debates about artistic freedom of expression, I often observe two divergent positions: one is that artistic freedom has to be fought for at any cost and institutions have the responsibility to show controversial artworks even if they lose their collection, archive or funds. The other is that institutions are responsible to a larger public and their continued survival is of

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paramount value, therefore justifying the suppression of artworks, if needed. Those positions pose the risk of creating an ethos focused solely on the artist or solely on the institution. I believe that the most urgent question is how to move beyond the question of primacy of the artist as auteur versus the institution as sovereign and negotiate how these parties can make compromises to sustain one another’s practice which are, after all, interdependent. Unlike in “freer” countries where funding structures are susceptible to political pressures and therefore censorship is much less visible, in Turkey, interventions into artistic expression often happen after artworks are produced and exhibited. This form of visibility allows curators and artists to discuss the cases publicly, which, as Karaca argues (2018), also presents an opportunity to mobilize against censorship. As this chapter shows, it becomes more and more urgent to create and sustain the conditions of debate among non-state actors, engaging colleagues to speak about their hesitations and fears when they choose to remain silent or when they compromise an artwork to protect an exhibition or an institution. Artistic freedom of expression is not a given right. It is publicly challenged and reaffirmed all the time.This understanding allows practitioners to move beyond the victim versus perpetrator binary and claim agency to test the changing limits of this freedom. In an environment defined by fear, pressure and panic – made worse by prosecutions of artists, cultural workers and rights defenders – curators have the potential to make an important contribution by documenting their struggles, becoming better equipped to negotiate the limits of artistic freedom and, thereby, more effectively supporting artistic and institutional practices. After all, the real challenge is to have the stamina to sustain the conditions for discussion.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Asena Günal, Banu Karaca, Ekmel Ertan, Ezgi Bakçay, Hale Tenger, Işın Önol, Övül Durmuşoğlu, Özlem Altunok, Merve Ünsal and Rafet Arslan for their contributions to this chapter.

Notes 1 The term was changed to “Turkish nation” and “its institutions” in the 2008 revision of the Article 301. Article 301 has been used to prosecute journalists such as Hrant Dink, founding editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, who was assassinated in 2007; publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu who works on minorities and human rights in Turkey; and writers such as Perihan Mağden who wrote about conscientious objection to military service, Elif Şafak who wrote a novel where a fictional character refers to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and Orhan Pamuk, Turkish Nobel Laureate in Literature, who was tried after he made remarks about killings of Armenian and Kurdish citizens in Turkey’s recent history in an interview for a newspaper in 2005. 2 Siyah Bant reports from 2013 show that artistic production in Kurdish communities was already under surveillance and often persecuted by the state, even before the end of the peace process. Politicians’ speeches signaled what would happen after the cease-fire. For example, in 2011, former Minister of the Interior Idris Naim Şahin declared that the arts served as “the backyard of terrorism” (Freemuse, Siyah Bant and The Initiative for Freedom of Expression 2014). 3 Launched in 2016, Susma Platform is part of the P24 Platform for Independent Journalism. It aims to document censorship, self-censorship, defamation, moral “lynching” and other restrictions to freedom of speech in Turkey, to exercise legal rights to defend those freedoms in such cases and to provide avenues for solidarity, cooperation and organization. 4 Initiated by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the registration system has been used to enforce age limits for viewers of films with commercial distribution and, from 2011 onward, has been required for all films produced in Turkey, even if they are screened at festivals (Anonymous 2017).

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5 The Annual Book Fair and the ARTIST Art Fair draw large audiences compared to other annual art fairs.The 2017 edition of the Book Fair and ARTIST Art Fair received around 740,000 people, while the Contemporary Istanbul Fair, the leading contemporary art fair in the country, received 90,000 visitors according to their websites.

Bibliography Altunok, Ö. (2018) Interview with the Author. 9 February. Amnesty International (2017) “Weathering the Storm: Defending Human Rights in Turkey’s Climate of Fear.” Online. www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/EUR4482002018ENGLISH.PDF Anonymous (2017) “Artistic Freedom of Expression in Turkey: State of Emergency,” Arts Everywhere. 28 August. Online. artseverywhere.ca/2017/08/28/artistic-freedom-turkey Anonymous Stateless Immigrants (2016) “Statement on Post-Peace Exhibition Censorship,” ArtLeaks. 9 March. Online. art-leaks.org/2016/03/09/anonymous-stateless-immigrants-statement-on-postpeace-exhibition-censorship Arapoğlu, F. (2013) “Yeter Artık Ya Polis Çağırıcam!” (“Enough Is Enough, I Will Call the Police Now!”), e-skop. 17 November. Online. www.e-skop.com/skopbulten/%E2%80%9Cyeter-artikya-polis-cagiricam%E2%80%9D/1653 Arslan, R. (2018) Interview with the Author. 11 February. Artists at Risk Connection (2018) “Profile: Çayan Demirel and Ertuğrul Mavioğlu, Turkey.” January. Online. artistsatriskconnection.org/story/cayan-demirel-and-ertugrul-mavioglu Artists at Risk Connection (2019) “Profile: Zehra Doğan,Turkey.” 24 February. Online. artistsatriskconnection.org/story/zehra-dogan Bakçay, E. (2018) Interview with the Author. 20 February. Başaran, P. (2011) “İktidarın hassasiyetleri” (“The Government’s Sensitivities”), Bir+Bir. Online. bianet. org/bianet/biamag/131342-iktidarin-hassasiyetleri Başaran, P. (2014) “Siyah Bant. The Interpellated Subject Speaks: Articulating Dissent in an Era of Information Control,” Open Space. November. Online. www.openspace-zkp.org/2013/en/journal. php?j=7&t=47 Başaran, P. and Günal, A. (2018) “Kültür Sanat Alanı Daralırken” (“The Shrinking Arts and Culture Field”), Birikim, 347(March): 78–86. Başyiğit,V. (2016a) “Turkey’s Film Festivals Face a Narrowing Space for Expression,” Index for Censorship. 30 June. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/06/film-festivals-artistic-freedom-expressionturkey Başyiğit, V. (2016b) “Türkiye’deki Film Festivalleri ve Sanatta İfade Özgürlüğü” (“Film Festivals and Artistic Freedom of Expression in Turkey”), Siyah Bant. Online. www.siyahbant.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/SiyahBant_Rapor_Film-Festivalleri_2016.pdf Batycka, D. (2016) “Istanbul Gallery Cancels War-Themed Exhibition, Citing ‘the Delicate Situation in Turkey’,” Hyperallergic. 26 February. Online. hyperallergic.com/278987/istanbul-gallery-cancelswar-themed-exhibition-citing-the-delicate-situation-in-turkey Bianet (2017) “Movie Makers Protest Hearing of Documentary ‘Bakur/Kuzey’ Over Terrorist Propaganda.” 28 December. Online. bianet.org/english/freedom-of-expression/192836-movie-makersprotest-hearing-of-documentary-bakur-kuzey-over-terrorist-propaganda Bianet (2018) “Osman Kavala Applies to ECtHR Due to Long Detention Without Trial.” 12 June. Online. bianet.org/english/law/198108-osman-kavala-applies-to-ecthr-due-to-long-detentionwithout-trial Bianet (2019a) “Journalist and Painter Zehra Doğan Sends Pictures That She Draws in Prison.” 30 January. Online. bianet.org/english/freedom-of-expression/204992-journalist-and-painter-zehradogan-sends-pictures-that-she-draws-in-prison

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Bianet (2019b) “Gezi Indictment Against 16 People Including Osman Kavala Accepted.” 4 March. Online. bianet.org/english/human-rights/206067-gezi-indictment-against-16-people-including-osmankavala-accepted Bianet (2019c) “Osman Kavala, 15 Rights Defenders Facing Life Sentence Over Gezi Park Protests.” 20 February. Online. bianet.org/english/law/205683-osman-kavala-and-15-rights-defendersfacing-aggravated-life-imprisonment-for-organizing-gezi-park-protests Delier, B. (2012) “Bir Oto-Sansür Vakası: Muhafız” (“A Self-Censorship Case:The Guardian”). In Günal, A. (ed.) Siyah Bant, Istanbul: Siyah Bant, pp. 26–34. Durmuşoğlu, Ö. (2018) Interview with the Author. 19 February. El Baroni, B., O’Neill, P., Dressler, I. and Christ, H.D. (2016) “Jury for the Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition,” ArtLeaks. Online. art-leaks.org/2016/03/08/statement-by-the-jury-forthe-akbank-sanat-international-curator-competition-2015 Ersoy, Ö. (2016) “Türkiye’de Sanatsal İfade Özgürlüğü Bağlamında Sanatçı, Küratör ve Kurum İlişkileri” (“Relationships Among Artists, Curators and Institutions in the Context of Artistic Freedom of Expression in Turkey”), Siyah Bant. Online. www.siyahbant.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/ Siyahbant_Arastirma_KuratoryelPratikler-2.pdf Ertan, E. and Önol, I. (2018) Interview with the Author. 8 February. Freemuse (2014) “Turkey: Artistic Freedom of Expression Under Threat.” 7 May. Online. freemuse.org/ news/turkey-artistic-freedom-of-expression-under-threat/ Freemuse, Siyah Bant and The Initiative for Freedom of Expression (2014) “Universal Periodic Review: Turkey: 2014: Joint Stakeholder Submission.” Online. freemuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ UPR-2014-Turkey.pdf Freemuse, Siyah Bant and The Initiative for Freedom of Expression (2015) “Turkey: Freedom of Artistic Expression: Update to UN Submission to the Universal Periodic Review.” Online. freemuse.org/ wp-content/uploads/2015/06/UpdatetoTurkey_UN-UPR18-06-15.pdf Goldstein, C. (2019) “After Three Years of Prison for a Watercolor, Outspoken Kurdish Artist Zehra Doğan Has Been Freed in Turkey,” Artnet News. 25 February. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/ almost-three-years-prison-outspoken-artist-zehra-dogan-released-turkish-prison-1473943 Günal, A. (2016) Interview with the Author. 4 February. Günal, A. (2017) “ ‘Cultural Hegemony’ by Means of the Police,” Red Thread, (4). Online. www.redthread.org/en/article.asp?a=67 Günal, A. (2018) Interview with the Author. 10 February. Ince, E. and Siyah Bant (2016) “Report: No Space for Peace Talk in Turkey’s State of Emergency,” IFEX. 13 December. Online. www.ifex.org/turkey/2016/12/13/state_emergency Insan Hakları Ortak Platformu and Bianet (2017) Fact Sheet: State of Emergency Measured in Turkey. 12 February. Online. bianet.org/english/politics/184123-21-statutory-decrees-under-state-of-emergenc Karaca, B. (2011) “Images Delegitimized and Discouraged: Explicitly Political Art and the Arbitrariness of the Unspeakable,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 45: 155–184. Karaca, B. (2015) “The Myth of Unfamiliarity,” L’Internationale. 25 April. Online. www.internationale online.org/research/real_democracy/19_the_myth_of_unfamiliarity Karaca, B. (2018) Interview with the Author. 10 February. Karan, U. (2013) “Sanatta İfade Özgürlüğü, Sansür ve Hukuk” (“Freedom of Expression in Arts, Censorship and Law”), Siyah Bant. Online. www.siyahbant.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/siyah bant_kitap02_web.pdf Kosova, E. (2018) “I Know People Like This: Die Künstlerin Hale Tenger unter Verdacht wegen der Beleidigung der türkischen Flagge” (“I Know People Like This: Artist Hale Tanger Accused of Denigrating the Turkish Flag”), author’s translation. In Frimmel, S. and Traumane, M. (eds.) Kunst vor Gericht: Ästhetische Debatten im Gerichtssaal (Art on Trial: Aesthetic Debates in the Courtroom), Berlin: Matthes & Seitz Berlin, pp. 383–393. Krupennikova, K. (2016) “Facebook Post.” 25 February. Online. www.facebook.com/katia. krupennikova/posts/10208875948840437

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PEN America (2018) “Threat of Prison Sentence for Two Turkish Filmmakers Marks Another Blow to Free Expression in Turkey.” 8 February. Online. pen.org/press-release/threat-prison-sentence-twoturkish-filmmakers-marks-another-blow-free-expression-turkey PEN America (2019) “PEN America Celebrates Release of Turkish Artist, Writer Zehra Doğan.” 25 February. Online. pen.org/press-release/zehra-dogan-released/ sağ, b. (2016) “Open Letter,” ArtLeaks. 10 May. Online. art-leaks.org/2016/05/10/113900 Siyah Bant (2013) “Research Reports: Cultural Policy.” Online. www.siyahbant.org/wp-content/ uploads/2012/01/SiyahBant_Research_Reports_Cultural-Policy.pdf Siyah Bant (2014) “Cultural Policy Effects on Freedom of the Arts in Turkey,” Index on Censorship. 13 February. Online. www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/02/developments-cultural-policy-effectsfreedom-arts-ankara Siyah Bant (2015) “’Bakur’ Belgeseline Bakanlık Sansürü Geldi” (“The Documentary ‘Bakur’ Has Been Censored by the Ministry”), Siyah Bant. 6 July. Online. www.siyahbant.org/bakurbelgeseline-bakanlik-sansuru-geldi Susma Platform (2017a) “Censorship and Self-Censorship in Turkey: September 2016-December 2017.” Online. susma24.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Tu_rkiye_de_Sansu_r_-ve_Otosansu%CC% 88r_ENG.pdf Susma Platform (2017b) “TÜYAP Sanat Fuarı’nda +18 Uygulaması” (“18+ Rating at TÜYAP Art Fair”), 10 November. Online. susma24.com/tuyap-sanat-fuarinda-18-uygulamasi Şenova, B. (2016a) “Following the Cancellation of the 2015 Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.” 2 March. Online. basaksenova.com/postpeace_en.html Şenova, B. (2016b) “The End: Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition.” 26 May. Online. basaksenova.com/ICC_en.html T24 (2015) “Bakur, İstanbul Film Festivali Programından Çıkarıldı” (“Bakur Has Been Removed from the Istanbul Film Festival’s Program”). 12 April. Online. t24.com.tr/haber/pkk-belgeseliistanbul-film-festivali-programindan-cikarildi,293320 T24 (2016) “Polis Sansürüne Tepki Gösteren Sanatçı Sergiden Çekildi” (“Artist Withdraws from Exhibition as a Response to Police Censorship”). 19 November. Online. t24.com.tr/haber/polissansurune-tepki-gosteren-sanatci-sergiden-cekildi,371740 Tenger, H. (2018) Email to the Author. 8 July. Tüzünoğlu, A. (2005) “Free Kick ve Sonrası” (“Free Kick and After”), Art-ist, 2(4): 101–105. Whyatt, S. (2016) “Turkey: Art Exhibitions Cancelled, a Troubling Trend,” Artsfreedom. 12 May. Online. artsfreedom.org/?p=11374

9 THE COMPLEXITY OF TAKING CURATORIAL RISKS Case studies from East Asia Oscar Ho Hing Kay

In curatorial practice, especially in East Asia, censorship is common. It takes on many forms, from blatant political interference and subtle denial of funding to self-censorship. And it is done for all kinds of reasons. Repressive regimes like to maintain control over artistic expression through actions ranging from direct interference to hidden schemes such as controlling the usage of cultural venues and unjust distribution of funding. In addition to instituting a sophisticated system of surveillance, these regimes play psychological games so as to generate fear, an effective tool to encourage self-censorship. Under the pressure of possible punishment for allowing “inappropriate” art to be seen, a curator faces a tough struggle to strike a balance between upholding artistic freedom and protecting the individuals and institutions involved. The circumstances in which censorship is exercised can be highly complex. Quite often, it is not a simple matter of black and white, a battle between good and evil. Through personal accounts of five incidents of censorship that I encountered during my own curatorial practice in East Asia, I will show the professional and ethical struggles involved when dealing with censorship and self-censorship. From 1988 to 2001, I was the exhibition director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre. Then, after freelancing as an independent curator for a few years, in 2004, I helped establish the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Today I teach cultural management and I continue to curate, both independently and with my students.The cases studied here took place during a curating career of over 25 years. Before proceeding to discuss incidents demonstrating the complexity of censorship struggles, I will outline a case that brings into relief the insidiousness of censorship in a regime where the rules are ambiguous and the politics is are repressive.

Ambiguous regulations and the role of the curator In Singapore, where censorship is common and where the government has established a complex system of committees monitoring the media and arts, the authorities never fully spell out what is and is not permitted, enabling citizens to exercise “self-control” as an effective form of social control. Artists and curators are left guessing. In 2010 the Media Development

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Authority, one of the most influential of these committees, proposed an “empowering” scheme which involved asking arts groups to do their own assessment of acceptability and undertake the necessary censorship. In the proposed scheme, an official “content assessor” would then review that assessment and the group could be fined up to $5,000 if the assessor disagreed with the art group’s assessment. The proposal was eventually withdrawn due to opposition from the arts community (“MDA Scraps Self-Classification Scheme” 2014). In 1998, the Artist Regional Exchange (ARX), an Australian artist collective based in Perth, organized ARX5, the fifth of a series of exhibitions encouraging cultural exchange within Asia. It was to be held in Hong Kong and Singapore in 1998 and then move to Perth in 1999. The organizer invited curators from the three cities involved to select local artists for a joint exhibition. I was the Hong Kong curator involved. When the exhibition relocated from one city to the next, new work could be added in. In the fall of 1998, the exhibition moved to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM), a national museum founded two years earlier and the most established art museum in the country until the opening of the National Gallery of Singapore in 2015. It included a work not shown in the Hong Kong iteration of the exhibition, an installation entitled Lee’s Garden (Figure 9.1) by Zunzi, a popular political cartoonist from Hong Kong. The piece was a metaphor of Singapore as the private garden of Lee Kuan Yew, who had stepped down in 1990 from the position of Prime Minister and was given a new title, Senior Minister, but remained politically powerful. The large-scale caricature, composed of individual ink-jet printouts pasted onto a wall, represented Goh Chok Tong, Singapore’s Prime Minister at that time, spraying pesticide,

FIGURE 9.1 Zunzi, Lee’s

Source: Courtesy of Zunzi.

Garden, 1998. Destroyed.

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while Lee Kuan Yew, in a gesture of endorsement, pats him on his back. The pesticide sprayer painted the word “penalties” across the lawn. The day before the opening, SAM Director Kwok Kian Chow ordered the removal of Zunzi’s work because, according to Kwok, it made fun of local leaders. In Singapore, censorship of cartoons “disrespectful” to political leaders is not uncommon (Tju 2004). Kwok reminded us that, before joining the Singapore exhibition, all participating artists were asked to sign an agreement that their works “will not be defamatory, offensive or obscene or contravene in any way the law of the place.” Kwok argued that Zunzi’s work was a breach of that agreement. Zunzi was willing to make adjustments, as long as the main concept of his work was not compromised. We both demanded clarification of the definitions of “defamatory, offensive or obscene or contravene[ing] . . . the law” and enquired exactly where in the artwork the agreement was violated. The response was both interesting and frustrating. At first, concerns centered on the repetition of the word “penalties” in the cartoon. After Zunzi agreed to erase the word, we received an additional complaint against the pesticide sprayer, followed by Kwok’s suggestion that the artist remove the heads of the two leaders from the drawing. At that point, Zunzi and I found it pointless to continue the negotiations; because Kwok was the Director of the venue, we had to accept this act of institutional self-censorship. After taking down the installation, the museum staff disposed of the work without even consulting Zunzi (Lingham 2011). During the negotiations, Kwok had claimed that, in Singapore, caricatures of political leaders were not allowed. And, yet, the Minister for Information and the Arts, George Yeo, had noted in Parliament in 1995 that caricatures in “good taste” were allowed.1 The confusion of the museum staff reveals a system left intentionally ambiguous; in such a system, to ensure not making the wrong guess, acting conservatively was the safest choice. Curating in a country where censorship is systematically enforced but ambiguously legislated is a challenge. The ambiguity of the concept of “acceptable standards” makes it particularly challenging for a curator or artist to measure the “acceptability” of a work. The fear of unknowingly violating standards and facing repercussions can thus push practitioners to behave in an “overly correct” manner and to self-censor. Taking into account this context, the incidents I discuss in the remainder of this chapter demonstrate various ways of negotiating the imperatives of artistic freedom and curatorial integrity as well as those of protecting the artists, their subjects, the institution and its staff. In some cases, these imperatives require the radical modification of a work, while in others the relevant parties will decide to take a risk. All cases require discussion and deliberation between staff and, sometimes, with the artists and subjects involved.

Protecting the institution and its staff while taking political risk: June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition Even in Hong Kong, a place that claims to be open and free, political pressure from China is strong. Censorship in Hong Kong during the transitional period of the 1990s, before the “handover” of Hong Kong from the UK to China, was not obvious. Since the handover in 1997, the number of cases of censorship has increased. Artists have withdrawn from participating in politically-oriented exhibitions out of fear of what might happen and there has been a reduction of commercial sponsorship for works and exhibitions “unfriendly” to China.The refusal of

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sponsorship for political reasons is hard to document, however, as corporations can easily make up non-political excuses. One of the most blatant acts of censorship occurred in 2016, when Lancôme canceled its sponsorship of a concert by the singer Denise Ho, an activist during the Umbrella Movement, after the company was criticized by The Global Daily (Ho 2016), the official English-language newspaper of the Chinese government. Censorship is often brazenly exercised (Tsui 2017): for example, the Hong Kong Museum of History declined to represent in its exhibits the historic reaction in Hong Kong to the June Fourth Tiananmen Square Massacre; the University of Hong Kong Museum and Art Gallery refused to display in 2015 an artwork by Lee Tin Lun critical of the election process in China, Hong Kong and Macau (“Oldest HK Museum Accused” 2015); and a Taiwanese politically active musical group invited by pro-democracy campaigners was refused entry into the country without a “proper” explanation (Zhang 2018). Soon after I assumed the post of Exhibition Director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre (the Arts Centre), an independent cultural space established in 1974, the people of Hong Kong confronted a political movement in China unprecedented since the communist takeover in 1949: the 1989 Beijing Democracy Movement. Although the movement took place primarily in China, it had great impact in Hong Kong, which was due to return to China eight years later. Hongkongers (a term commonly used these days) from all walks of life actively supported the Movement through demonstrations, sending supporting materials to China and organizing cultural and political activities in solidarity. At that time the Arts Centre was the only independent arts space in Hong Kong with a sizable venue. It became an important platform for pro-Movement activities. One year after the June Fourth Tiananmen Square Massacre, we organized a privately funded exhibition of works by local artists commemorating the massacre as part of a series of commemorative activities arranged by various independent groups all over Hong Kong. The commemorative show was simply called June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition. It intended to remind people not to forget the bloodshed and to reconfirm the continuous fight for freedom and democracy.2 Post-1989, the atmosphere in Hong Kong became tense. After a zealous period of supporting the Movement, the fear of possible revenge from their future ruler – China – led to massive migration of Hongkongers to other democratic countries. From a total population of 5.7 million, an average of 60,000 people left annually during 1990–1992 (Tong 2009). As I started working on the exhibition, ethical questions emerged. The participating artists and I were aware of the political implications and the possible risks involved. But the staff at the Arts Centre held divergent opinions. Some shared our political convictions and were eager to participate, while others were indifferent or reticent. The latter group included the janitors who worked at the Arts Centre just to make a living and others who did not want to be seen as employed by an institution that organized “subversive” exhibitions. After witnessing the June Fourth massacre, they were fearful and this fear was understandable. Anxieties were further intensified by accounts from the older generation who had witnessed some of the most brutal acts of persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Finally, there was the fear that the exhibition might jeopardize the Arts Centre itself. Reticent staff members, nevertheless, had to contribute to the programs of the Arts Centre because it was their job. They had no choice. I could have been heroic and held tight to my beliefs. However, I saw that, at a time when political zeal was accompanied by anxiety over possible political repercussions, one could too

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easily be blinded by a sense of self-righteousness and too lightly disregard the imposition of political risk onto others. Considering the possible impact on my staff, I strategized to pull the exhibition from the Arts Centre’s official program and transform it into an independent show with an independent curator (me) that was simply renting space from the Centre.3 I communicated my plan to my team and received no objection, so the exhibition went forward. The staff could contribute if they wished but were not obligated to do so. This approach protected both the institution and our staff while enabling the project to be realized. To further protect the Centre at a turbulent time, I proposed adopting a principle of neutrality in our programming, stating that we would not avoid political matters but our interest was in the arts. The statement was primarily for internal reference but could be released if and when we were challenged by outside parties. Accepted by the Board, this “a-political” compromise may have diluted somewhat the image of the Arts Centre as an open platform and suggested that we were shying from critical engagement. However, I felt that the protection of staff should take priority. The incident showed the necessity of being ethically sensitive when curating within the context of potential political threats.The uncertainty of the possible impact forces one to react and sometimes to overreact. The compromise in this case, however, was minimal.

Putting artists at risk: a curator’s dilemma – Our China (Hong Kong version) During the mid-1990s, as Hong Kong’s return to China was approaching, the issue of Hong Kong identity became an increasingly popular yet sensitive topic (Zheng and Wong 2002: 3–4). Debates over local identity intensified amidst an ambitious campaign by Beijing officials to encourage among Hongkongers patriotism and identification with China (Ko 2008). With the support of politicians and business people, groups associated with the soon to be Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) organized many cultural activities to promote a love of China and identification with all things Chinese. In popular culture, for instance, songs with patriotic titles such as “My Chinese Heart” and “To Be a Brave Chinese” were actively promoted. Suddenly, the talk of “being Chinese” was everywhere in Hong Kong. As a response to this hot topic, in 1996 I curated an exhibition Our China (Hong Kong Version) at the Arts Centre. The exhibition (Hong Kong Arts Centre 1996) invited Hong Kong artists of various generations who had been using what they described as “Chinese” elements in their works. They were asked to submit either old or new works that they felt could best represent this use of Chinese references. The intention, as explained to the artists, was to find out what China meant to the Hong Kong people. What I did not anticipate was that the final outcome would make a rather interesting – and risky – political statement. Most of the works submitted were not political. However, as a totality, they revealed an interesting phenomenon concerning Hongkongers’ definitions of being “Chinese.” The China defined through the works was dominated by mountains and mist, as evoked by the ancient literati; by ancient symbols such as dragons and yin-yang; and by the modern Chinese-chic culture of Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s, as appropriated by the fashion house of Shanghai Tang. Only one piece recognized China as a communist regime, Danny Yung’s protest against the suppression of the 1989 Beijing Democracy Movement.

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I knew all of these artists and their work but, when the pieces were gathered together, a new curatorial perspective emerged. It was an innovative perspective within the political context at that time. The near complete absence of the current realities of China in the exhibition showed a lack of cultural identification with the communist regime among Hong Kong artists. At a time when the Communist Party of China was trying so hard to claim a shared “Chineseness” among Hongkongers, the exhibition could be seen as a subversive mockery of this patriotism campaign. Based on this interpretation, I considered rewriting the curatorial statement, making it a counter-statement to the patriotism campaign. This curatorial approach would have been timely and thought-provoking. However, I recognized that the artists in the exhibition never intended to make a political statement. When they agreed to participate, they did not know that the show would have a political slant. When I explained my new curatorial interpretation to the artists, some seemed unable to comprehend the political dimensions of the shift. I was uncertain whether even those who appeared to understand fully grasped the implications. Nevertheless, most of the artists gave their support simply because of the trust they had in me. That trust made me uncomfortable. I felt strongly that, if even only one artist did not fully understand the potential ramifications of the new curatorial interpretation, it should not be implemented. It was a loss to give up an approach that could make such a timely statement. However, given the fact that I had no idea what the consequences would be for those participating and that the artists were not aware of such an interpretation at the beginning, I decided not to politicize the exhibition. The artists’ trust and the fear of betraying that trust confirmed my resolution. As a result, the exhibition was uninteresting and received little critical response. I had compromised my curatorial vision. I missed an excellent opportunity to make a bold argument. But I did that because of the possible risks to others. This consideration trumped in importance my curatorial freedom to frame the show in line with my new interpretation.

Protecting artists: contemporary photography from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China There are times when self-censorship is necessary. In 1994, I curated the exhibition Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China at the Hong Kong Arts Centre (1994). It was rare at that time to bring together outstanding photographers from all three places. We received substantial funding from a commercial sponsor which enabled us to develop a grand-scale exhibition as well as a well-organized publicity campaign. Two days before the opening, when the catalogs were printed and publicity already launched, the wife of one of the Chinese artists requested an urgent meeting in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong in China. The artist, who is now an internationally renowned photographer,4 had been arrested a few days earlier during a raid of an underground church in China. For years, the photographer had been documenting underground churches. He was detained for engagement with underground church activities, a crime that could lead to serious consequences. He managed to discard his film before the arrest but remained in custody for further investigation. The subjects of the works that the photographer had contributed to our exhibition were exactly those underground churches for which he was under investigation. His wife had

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traveled from Beijing to the border to request that we not show her husband’s works as they would certainly be used as evidence for the prosecution. I agreed to the withdrawal with no hesitation. I also decided that it was essential that no external parties, especially the press, should know of the arrest of the artist or our associated removal of his photographs from the show. If the story went to the media, it would garner good publicity for the exhibition but would jeopardize the safety of the artist. For that reason we made the withdrawal invisible. Only one senior staff member from the funder’s organization was confidentially informed. However, the publicity materials which included the photographer’s name had already been sent out and the catalogs had been printed. Cutting out the pages in the catalog presenting the artist’s work would only draw more attention. We concluded that, in a large exhibition such as this, neither the audience nor the press would notice the absence of one participant. As expected, the exhibition opened without any attention directed to the absence of the artist’s works; apparently, no one noticed. Everything went well until, one day, a reporter recognized the absence of the photographs and asked for an explanation.The situation was dangerous. Keeping the truth from her would only lead to additional investigation but telling her the story might have serious consequences. Finally, I agreed to tell her the story only if she promised not to release it. She kept her word. According to the National Coalition against Censorship (2019), a curator needs to “reject all barriers abridging access to any material, however controversial or even abhorrent to some.” In this case, however, it was necessary to take action to protect the artist. Fortunately, the artist was later released with no charges, although his camera was confiscated.

Taking a calculated risk: Pierre et Gilles’ Homo Erectus For the 2005 inaugural exhibition of the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, a privately funded museum endorsed by the city and central governments and at which I was the founding director, we chose to show the work of French photography duo Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, commonly known as Pierre et Gilles. Their dazzling, highly decorative and carefully staged photographs feature celebrities and other popular icons. The stylish images fit in well with the environment of Shanghai, which likes to see itself as the most fashionable and cosmopolitan city in China. Some of the works by Pierre et Gilles are homoerotic in nature. For example, the exhibition included one such image, a diptych called Homo Erectus (2004) portraying silhouettes of two nude male figures, each with an enlarged penis protruding downward (De Noirmont et al. 2005: 120). Although the sexual organs were depicted as dark shadows, the work sat dangerously on the border of what official Chinese standards define as pornographic. Nevertheless, I believed the general public of Shanghai would find the work acceptable. Senior Shanghai government officials were to attend the exhibition opening and some staff members had grave concerns that those officials might find the work offensive, leading to repercussions.We kept these concerns in-house, talking neither to the artists nor to the French organizer, to prevent them from spreading to the media. Some colleagues suggested removing the work but that carried the risk of an international scandal, especially as this inaugural show was the opening of the first major museum of contemporary art in China. Others proposed installing the work in an inconspicuous corner, ignoring the need to respect the sequential totality that the artists expected. Yet others

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suggested submitting the work to the authorities in advance for approval but such action would have forced officials to make a formal response which would definitely have been to reject it. In the end, we decided to take a gamble and leave the work as originally planned. Several factors informed that decision: the chairman of the museum had a good relationship with the Shanghai government; the work touched on sex but not politics, so was potentially less agitating to the authorities; and, finally, Shanghai was working hard to establish an image of the city as a progressive cultural hub before the 2010 World Expo, which would be held there, hence authorities would try hard to prevent an incident to emerge that might downgrade this image. We were banking on authorities recognizing that the price of exercising censorship at the opening of a new museum would be too high. After the opening ceremony, the guided tour for the VIPs was nerve-racking. When the officials walked into the room where Homo Erectus was installed, however, the senior officer simply ignored the work and walked in another direction. The other officials followed him. Maybe he missed the work but, most likely, he saw it and pretended he did not. In the end, everything went well. The decision to keep Homo Erectus in the show was made after serious evaluation but there was still risk involved. It is difficult to retain cultural freedom under an authoritarian regime.

CODA The new challenges of social media: protecting the subject of art – integrity of being Government retaliation is not the only challenge to curatorial integrity today. Social media has created an environment where controversial exhibitions, artists and even their subjects may face bullying and violent threats. Along the Edge (2018) was the 2018 edition of an annual arts festival organized by the MA Programme in Cultural Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Within the established tradition of the festival, which aims to respond to current social and political issues through exhibitions and performances, the 2018 iteration, called Integrity of Being, focused on marginalized and underprivileged communities in Hong Kong. Among the exhibits, which included stories of the local Muslim community, was a documentary film about a Hong Kong woman who had married a Pakistani man and converted to Islam. As part of the festival promotion, a trailer of the film was released on Facebook a few weeks before the opening. It drew vicious cyber-bullying, including racist and misogynistic attacks on the female protagonist in the film. These attacks were so threatening and insulting that, a few days prior to the opening, the woman requested that the documentary be withdrawn. The filmmakers agreed. As a co-curator of the exhibition, not for a moment did I think of insisting on showing the work in the name of freedom of expression. The feelings of the woman and the impact on her family were equally if not more important. Her concerns were justified and had to be respected. It was nevertheless important to explain to the public the rationale behind withdrawing the film and, more importantly, to take a position on what had happened. After a discussion with students and, in consultation with the woman depicted in the film, the curatorial team decided to replace the documentary with an installation that appropriated the cyberbullying

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threats in order to condemn them. Online hate statements were selected, printed, mounted on foam boards and displayed on the wall. The protagonist of the film did not want to have her face – or the faces of her husband and family – shown. She had no objection, however, to displaying the hostile messages. Interpretation was provided so that the withdrawal would not be understood as giving in to prejudice and threats of violence. The resulting installation not only offered an explanation for the self-censorship but also brought to light the racial and religious prejudice existing in Hong Kong. Dealing with censorship is always situational. One may remove a work or cancel an exhibition simply out of fear or, reluctantly, for the well-being of others; alternatively, one may transform an exhibition to bring to light the forces that fuel censorship. In this case, the removal of the film protected the individual under threat, while the installation advanced the curatorial argument for social justice by offering a critique of the hateful speech of social media attacks.

Conclusion In curatorial practice in East Asia, one frequently encounters censorship and the associated pressures to exercise self-censorship. One of the most powerful instruments of an authoritarian government is to exercise control over artistic expression and yet avoid setting clear regulations and standards. The ambiguity can readily generate the fear of possibly violating unspoken rules and thus putting the institution, its staff and the artists it works with at risk. In turn, this fear encourages self-censorship. Social media has added a new layer of fear to an already complex situation. Of course, we would all like to support freedom of artistic expression and stand up against oppressive forces. But, as each individual case of censorship is different, a curator needs to carefully assess the ethical as well as artistic rationales, the risks and the political consequence for the people and institutions involved. If censorship is a dirty word in curatorial practice, self-censorship is worse. Clearly, there are times that a curator needs the courage to resist censorship and take a risk; nevertheless, there are also times they need the courage to exercise self-censorship and sacrifice artistic freedom or one’s own curatorial vision in the name of protecting the life and well-being of others.

Notes 1 After the Zunzi incident, the arts community in Singapore challenged the definition of “good taste” (Ihlein 2005). 2 The exhibition was held annually after this initial iteration; for the first few years, it was hosted by the Arts Centre and thereafter by other venues such as the Fringe Club. 3 The Arts Centre has a policy of renting out space to external organizations to generate income. These exhibitions are clearly marked as organized by external parties that have nothing to do with the Centre. 4 Since the author has not received permission from the artist and the subjects of his photographs remain sensitive within China, the name of the artist cannot be released.

Bibliography Along the Edge Arts (2018) Online. www.facebook.com/alongtheedgeartsfestival/

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De Noirmont, J., Ho, O. and Ngan, I. (eds.) (2005) Pierre et Gilles Retrospective, Shanghai: Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Ho, D. (2016) “Lancôme Sih Gihn Gan Jeun” (“Follow up of the Lancôme Incident”). 10 June. Online. www.facebook.com/HOCCHOCC/posts/10157027634100230 Hong Kong Arts Centre (1994) “Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China,” Hong Kong Arts Centre ArtsLink. February. Hong Kong Arts Centre (1996) “Our China (Hong Kong Version),” Hong Kong Arts Centre ArtsLink. September. Ihlein, L. (2005) “Censorship: Blacktown/Singapore,” Bilateral. 2 February. Online. www.lucazoid.com/ bilateral/censorship-blacktownsingapore. Ko,Y.K. (2008) “Dung Git Lihk Si: Heung Gong Dahk Keui Jing Fu Gun Sih Heung Gong Dik Leuhng Dyuhn Sik Lihk Si Gun” (“Frozen History: The Two Chapters of the Hong Kong Government’s Views on Hong Kong”). In Issue, Hong Kong: Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University. Lingham, S. (2011) “Art and Censorship in Singapore: Catch 22?” ArtAsiaPacific, 76. November–December. Online. artasiapacific.com/Magazine/76/ArtAndCensorshipInSingaporeCatch22 “MDA Scraps Self-Classification Scheme for Arts Groups: What’s the Controversy About?” (2014) Straits Times. 22 August. Online. www.straitstimes.com/singapore/mda-scraps-self-classificationscheme-for-arts-groups-whats-the-controversy-about National Coalition Against Censorship (2019) “Guidelines for Participating Organizations.” Online. ncac.org/about-us/coalition/coalition-guidelines “Oldest HK Museum Accused of Censorship Over Political Exhibit” (2015) Ejinsight. 10 February. Online. www.ejinsight.com/20150210-oldest-hk-museum-accused-of-censorship-over-political-exhibit/ Tju, L.C. (2004) “Political Cartoons in Singapore: Misnomer or Redefinition Necessary?” The Journal of Popular Culture, 34(1): 77–83. Tong, B. (2009) “Gong Yan Dik Yi Man Chiu Yu Ho Goi Bin Wan Go Wa?” (“How Did Hong Kong Immigrants Change Vancouver?”), CUP Magazine. 11 June. Online. www.cup.com.hk/2019/06/11/ tiananmen-massacre-vancouver/ Tsui, E. (2017) “How Has Art Fared in Hong Kong Under China’s Rule? The Scene Is Thriving, but Some Artists See – Or Fear – Censorship,”South China Morning Post.20 June.Online.www.scmp.com/culture/ arts-entertainment/article/2099102/how-has-art-fared-hong-kong-under-chinas-rule-scene Zhang, K. (2018) “Why Hong Kong Rejected Taiwanese Singer Freddy Lim’s Visa Application,” South China Morning Post. 24 December. Online. www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/ article/2179415/why-hong-kong-rejected-taiwanese-singer-freddy-lims-visa Zheng, W.T.V. and Wong, S.L. (2002) “Ng Nin Loi Heung Gong Se Wui Ying Sai Leun Ping” (“The Social Situation of Hong Kong in the Last Five Years”), Twenty-First Century Journal, 73(October): 71–80. Online. www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/media/articles/c073-200207038.pdf

10 NEGOTIATING SELF-CENSORSHIP IN THE REPRESENTATION OF COLOMBIAN ARMED CONFLICT Cristina Lleras

I returned to Colombia in 2000 after finishing my undergraduate studies in the United States. While abroad, I had kept myself ignorant of the state of affairs in the country. Upon my arrival, I became a curatorial assistant at the National Museum of Colombia. When I began my job, the National Museum was undergoing a physical restoration and a conceptual renovation that had begun in 1994 with the appointment of Elvira Cuervo de Jaramillo as Director (Segura 1995). As a result of major investments of public resources, the Museum had developed a strategic plan that included a new mission and vision aiming to develop a contemporary narrative and to increase acquisitions. It was a tense time politically and would become even tenser in the years to come.The leftwing guerrilla Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) and the government were holding peace talks (Verdad Abierta 2012).Yet the internal armed conflict in Colombia would reach its highest toll of victims in the years to come. Peace talks would come to a halt in 2002 and would only be reactivated in 2012 with a Peace Agreement finally signed in 2016. In exploring how to amass artifacts related to recent history and armed conflict, one idea the Director was considering was to acquire a toalla (towel) belonging to the leader of FARC, known as Tirofijo. In pictures and on television, Tirofijo, the oldest guerrillero alive, was always seen wearing a peasant’s towel as a symbol of his background. However, when a 2001 article published by El Tiempo, one of Colombia’s major newspapers, revealed Cuervo’s idea of collecting objects owned by protagonists of the country’s recent conflicts, including the towel (Bejarano 2001), her proposal generated heated debate and the response was overwhelmingly negative. A subsequent El Tiempo article reported that Cuervo had received serious threats as a result of her proposal and offered her the opportunity to defend her position. Cuervo explained that the Museum’s role is to acquire pieces that relate to historical processes, not to fetishize the objects themselves: “People think that we are going to build an altar to Tirofijo and this is not true.We know how much harm the guerrilla has done,” she declared (El Tiempo 2001). Cuervo then challenged her critics: “Let the critics tell me how we are going to narrate the last 15 years of history of this country without narcotrafficking, paramilitarism and the increase of guerrillas” (ibid.).

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The toalla was never acquired due to the sour public reaction and also because, amidst the controversy, peace talks had broken down, thus making the acquisition an even greater political risk. In conversation with me, Cuervo (2019) bitterly remembered the sensitivities sparked by the debate and her painful decision to step back and renounce the proposed acquisition. This small but significant incident at the National Museum of Colombia represents a troubling trend of self-censorship regarding collecting and exhibiting heritage with the potential to promote complex reflections on the idea of national identity. In abandoning Cuervo’s bold and timely initiative, the Museum missed an opportunity to demonstrate the value of deploying collections to foster important sociopolitical conversations at a time when no other public institution of its kind was taking on this leadership role. What came to be known as the “toalla de Tirofijo” affair is now history, though the debate it sparked is just as relevant, or even more so, today, when thousands of former guerrillas are transitioning toward civil life. Some of the leaders of former guerrilla groups are being called to respond to judicial investigations but are simultaneously participating in politics. Others have taken up arms again in a country still engaged in armed conflict. And former FARC fighters are only part of a much larger population of ex-combatants in Colombia. It is estimated that, since the 1990s, around 70,000 people have demobilized, including large (some say overestimated) numbers of right-wing paramilitaries (2003–2006), smaller numbers of guerrilla groups, as well as individuals who have deserted (El Tiempo 2016). Since 1958, 262,197 people have been assassinated in armed conflict. While the majority have been civilians, 46,813 among them were (legal and illegal) combatants (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2018a). Representing this large population of men and women who have been part of illegal armies or have taken steps to create a new life for themselves without weapons remains a challenge for museums. As reflected by the toalla incident, such representation may cause social outrage because millions who have lived through events, and even experienced violence themselves, have deep emotional reactions, particularly toward the most visible protagonists. But an exhibition I co-curated soon afterward at the National Museum taught me that museums must – and can – take on these issues. Times of Peace: Agreements in Colombia 1902–1994 (Museo Nacional de Colombia 2003) succeeded in navigating a way to selectively display and acquire works representing some aspects of the turbulent political past. It included materials related to earlier peace talks (for instance, a cease-fire and truce agreement with FARC reached in the 1980s) and to guerrilla forces that had demobilized in the 1990s. We excluded the recent failed talks with FARC because the premise of the exhibition was to show that agreements could actually be reached and because the governmental strategy toward demobilization had changed (Fattal 2019). Our decision to avoid recent events over which there was much discord helped to evade rancor (El Tiempo 2010). We subsequently acquired many of the pieces in the exhibition for the permanent collection.

Historical representation today: the Museum of Memory of Colombia Fifteen years later, governmental initiatives in Colombia have greatly advanced in matters of historical memory research related to recent armed conflict.They have aimed not only to recognize the experiences and voices of victims1 but also to shed light on the participation and

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responsibilities of legal (armed forces, civil servants, public officials) and illegal (right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing guerrillas, militias) actors, as well as non-armed individuals such as businesspeople and politicians. The Museum of Memory of Colombia (MMC) is one of these recent initiatives, a platform aimed at supporting a culture of non-recurrence. It is part of the National Center for Historical Memory, created to contribute to symbolic reparations, as stated in the Law for Victims and Land Restitution (Congress of the Republic of Colombia 2011). This law recognizes the existence of armed conflict and aims to create reparation mechanisms for people who were victimized in Colombia after 1985. I joined the MMC’s curatorial team in 2016 to support the process of developing a narrative that represents the unique nature of conflict in Colombia, and that is both flexible and responsive so that it can be strengthened and transformed over the years. Armed conflict in Colombia is dynamic and pervasive, having lasted some six decades and having created almost nine million victims. In representing a conflict that is sustained by silences, the Museum must interrogate these omissions to accommodate new questions, approaches and research as they emerge. In so doing, it must recognize and challenge its own curatorial silences. One of the greatest curatorial challenges faced by the MMC team under my leadership concerns the representation of responsible parties. Acknowledging those responsible is vital to the denaturalization of violent behaviors and the disavowal of tropes used to justify violence. A culture of non-recurrence can only be created by looking at the underlying structures that support conflict (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017). The curatorial dilemmas we encountered were twofold. On the one hand, there was a need to build a complex narrative that did not reduce armed conflict to a binary opposition between victims and perpetrators and, on the other hand, there was the obligation to adequately differentiate between the two groups without demonizing the latter. Pressures to oversimplify or avoid representing perpetrators came from an array of sources, as I will describe in this text. Pinpointing exactly how these silences regarding the representation of responsible parties are realized is not an easy matter in Colombia. In elaborating representations of the armed conflict, curators have to take into account the context of a society deeply divided over the meaning of peace, the causes of conflict and what to do with the past. Indicative of these divisions are the results of a 2016 Plebiscite in which the government asked Colombian voters to support the Peace Agreement signed with FARC. By a mere 0.4% it was rejected (Fattal 2019). The Agreement was later modified and approved by the Congress (ibid.). Those who rejected the Agreement would most likely also reject new transitional justice initiatives that shed light on the perpetrators of armed conflict such as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Truth Commission.2 The conclusions reached in the Commission’s final report, due in 2021, are nevertheless to be taken into account by the MMC, thus the need of our proactively developing effective strategies to foster constructive discourse on the issue of assigning responsibility for armed conflict and the devastation it has inflicted. The first iteration of the storyline of the MMC 2018 inaugural temporary exhibition Voices for the Transformation of Colombia (Voces Para Transformar a Colombia) struggled to assign culpability to the various parties that have supported and benefited from violence inflicted upon the civil population. The fact that legal actors participated widely in the armed conflict raised a host of questions as to if and how to portray them in the exhibition.The push to selfcensor emerged from the need to negotiate representations of guilt with the Public Forces

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while maintaining autonomy and independence. Pressures to self-censor equally arose from the need to rely on the results of legal proceedings to verify culpability in a climate where judicial sentences against civilians who participated in the armed conflict are scarce and relevant cases are often entangled in protracted legal battles. In my analysis, I will draw from discussions with ex-combatants of illegal armies concerning their expectations of being represented in the Museum as well as from encounters with representatives from the Public Forces. I will also explore conversations that took place among MMC staff that led to the decision to focus the narrative of this first exhibition on victims’ voices, hence excluding a discussion of perpetrators. Finally, I will reflect upon what was lost by not representing perpetrators and the impact of this silencing. A reflective practice in regard to self-censorship is essential to the work of transitional justice institutions such as the MMC. Any armed conflict, civil war or traumatic historical event has to be considered not only from the perspective of its victims but also in relation to the actors responsible for sponsoring, enabling and even benefitting from the violence inflicted. Negotiating the multiple pressures that arise and acknowledging if and when self-censorship is appropriate are integral to the curatorial work of developing complex narratives around systematic violations of human rights in armed conflict and of contributing to a culture of non-recurrence.

All the voices The exhibition Voices for the Transformation of Colombia was an ambitious staging of a huge museum without walls created through a collaboration among hundreds of academics, artists, volunteers and staff from other organizations (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2018b). Measuring 1,450 square meters, this “living museum,”3 as people called it, was composed of ephemeral architecture by a team with experience in theatrical design, fair stands and events. It was conceptualized as a traveling exhibition and inaugurated at the 2018 Book Fair in Bogotá. It received around 70,000 visitors in 14 days and another 20,000 when it thereafter traveled to Medellín. In addition to exhibition galleries, the project encompassed an ambitious series of spaces that prioritized engagement. These included a commemorative hall, a discussion forum and a house which served as a symbol for what is built and what is lost in armed conflict; on a mezzanine level stood a library, a radio station producing live broadcasts and a set of augmented reality devices by which to explore memorial initiatives developed by victims in different territories. It also included a workshop space used by educators to develop activities with visiting school groups. In this space, students shared their thoughts on the exhibition with their peers using “whisperer” cardboard tubes (Figure 10.1). Museum staff designed bespoke programming for these diverse spaces, including theater, music performances, rituals and conversations between visitors and more than 100 eyewitnesses (mostly victims) from around the country about their experiences of life amidst conflict. As head of the curatorial and education teams, I led the overall development of the project. Voices was not simply a makeshift device to introduce the work of MMC to the public before the Museum’s permanent building was completed. We recognized from the very beginning that the exhibition was a starting point and a learning experience for the Museum; hence, we focused on the process of constructing a narrative, rather than fashioning

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space in Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018.

FIGURE 10.1 Workshop

Source: Photograph © Juan Vargas/Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica.

a definitive product. To facilitate our learning, we carried out robust audience research in both the Bogotá and Medellín venues (Gómez and Monroy 2018). We planned to use the data generated to inform continued work on the storyline for the Museum once it opened in its permanent home. The narrative of Voices was divided into three themes – earth, body and water – and, to provide viewers with choices in how they wanted to experience the exhibition, there were multiple pathways to circulate through it. We constructed the section on body to examine stigmatization, intolerance and the suppression of difference and political dissent that have characterized conflict in Colombia; we established the theme of earth to interrogate the political and economic interests that have fueled armed conflict in Colombia, thus shedding light on its intentional and institutionalized foundations. Finally, we construed the zone of water to express the immeasurable costs of war, emphasizing that nothing can justify the violation of human rights (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017). All three themes focused on specific cases studies, each of which concerned a different problem based on a specific locale, explored through stories of individuals and communities. The voices of victims were given priority and spoke through very different media, including graphic novels, paintings, everyday objects, video, audio, interactive maps and photographs. The premise of the curatorial team was to show that the perpetrator’s attempt at dehumanizing the victim through violent acts remained an unfulfilled objective (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017); we thus chose cases that dignified the lives of victims through a wealth of experiences arising from conflict, not only those concerning violence inflicted.

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It was also our belief that, to do justice to the stories of the victims, we would need to develop a multilayered representation of the perpetrators of violence. In fact, in research conducted about internal displacement, many victims explained that their own neighbors and peers belonged to the armed groups that attacked them (Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2016). Thus, in Colombia, representing combatants is not about creating “monsters” but, rather showing people “like us,” as we all stem from the same society. This idea runs counter to the way museums in Colombia and around the world have traditionally represented perpetrators as particular and distinct from both victims and (projected) visitors (Holtschneider 2007). Of the three exhibition themes, it was that of the body that raised the most challenging ethical questions for us, given that bodies that perpetrate violence are normalized in Colombia because of the thousands of men and women who have joined legal and illegal armies. When developing this narrative, the curatorial team consulted with diverse experts, both outside and inside the National Center for Historical Memory, who had studied the experiences and actions of perpetrators.4 With access to this knowledge, we were able to engage in productive conversations about how we might embed perpetrators’ testimonies and experiences into the exhibition. The result of our consultations with experts was a field that grew increasingly complex as we explored the lives of the people who join illegal armed groups. While recognizing that individuals have agency and make choices, we believed it essential to consider the contexts that support violence (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017): patriarchy, the celebration of martyrdom, child abuse, poverty and the high degree of normalcy with which many Colombians join illegal armed groups, either voluntarily or by force, having grown up in areas long controlled by them. We had also planned to examine perpetrators’ transition to civil society – a difficult process in which the past is often silenced (Fattal 2019). Women ex-combatants are expected to fit traditional roles unrelated to what they have experienced previously. Warlike bodies that were celebrated become useless. Stigmatization and rejection are common and some individuals will transition into other armed groups.

Exclusions One problem that we faced concerned accounting for how particular contexts and practices shape the bodies of these warriors before, during and after being part of an armed structure, without justifying their actions; for instance, the need to understand the contexts and reasons for voluntary enrollment in illegal armies, as well as how particular experiences in different groups configure the lives of these combatants. With less than a year for project development and many other challenges still to respond to, the curatorial team did not think they had the resources necessary to adequately represent the lives of such individuals in a way that would differentiate the choices these perpetrators made from those who were victimized. We therefore decided to exclude the stories of ordinary people who become combatants. We considered this decision responsible but, at the same time, in contradiction with our wider mission to involve visitors in reflecting on the actions of ordinary people and to unsettle the perception of perpetrators as “others.” However, we deliberately engaged in self-censorship in regard to portraying the lives and culpability of the wider range of perpetrators such as state actors, politicians and civil economic actors even though we received strong support for the need to represent perpetrators from the many victims of and witnesses to Colombian armed conflict. For instance, in the

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“Behind the scenes” panel discussion during the exhibition, which featured several victims, a question about why perpetrators were not named in the exhibition elicited strong feelings from the panelists. The audience member asked: WE READ:  political elites, we read: third party, without a face, and I feel that in these processes

of resignifying [violent events] and denouncing, it is important to mention the specific actor . . . who is this person? so that others know who to attribute [the crime] to. (Detrás de Cámaras 2018) One of the panelists, a woman who organizes an annual festival as a measure of resistance against violence, responded that historical memory exercises should always have victims at their center but agreed with the audience member that assigning culpability is important (ibid.). Another panelist, who experienced the assassination of her father, a prominent judge, and who had to go into exile as a result, argued that, in the short term, we sometimes cannot name perpetrators: not because we lack information but because it is too dangerous; at the same time, she underscored that, in the long run, it is critical that we divulge the truth to future generations (ibid.). We gained further understanding from a focus group of ex-combatants representing both left- and right-wing illegal groups convened at the Medellín venue of the exhibition. Medellín is the capital of Antioquia which has witnessed a great deal of the conflict, making the focus group participants well-placed to help us understand how and why we should include their voices in the Museum. Many of the participants had joined armed groups at an early age with the belief that this could be a way to promote change in a country struck with deep inequalities (Grupo focal excombatientes 2018). Several of the participants declared that the exhibition had been so affecting that it had prompted them to relive their guilt. Others asserted that it had inspired them to hope for social, cultural, political and economic transformation without weapons. One among them highlighted the need for both legal and illegal combatants to acknowledge their deeds so that solutions could be reached collectively. Others emphasized the importance of recognizing the role of the state in generating the conditions for violence to take place. All of the participants expressed optimism based on the fact that teachers and students were visiting the show; the focus group deemed it important for children, especially, to understand conflict so that they could resist recruitment. They also highlighted the importance of understanding the country across the dividing line between victims and perpetrators, as well as recognizing the historical conditions that have determined the choices made. Representing this shared sentiment, one participant stated: “We are neither bad nor good; we do things that are good and things that are bad. And circumstances placed us there” (ibid.). Yet, despite the conviction of the curatorial team, bolstered by our conversations with victims and perpetrators, that representing the stories of those responsible was essential to meeting the goals of the project, the testimonies of ex-combatants appeared only marginally in the exhibition. We were very much aware of and perhaps too keen to cater to the often competing needs and interests of our diverse network of stakeholders, including victims, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, researchers, government, media and visitors. In retrospect, I see that negotiating the complex challenges of self-censorship stemming from the realities of armed conflict required more research, analysis and discussion than we had built into our developmental processes for the exhibition.

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Silences There were many justifications for the silencing of the voices and experiences of perpetrators in the exhibition. Primary among these was the powerful argument made by National Center for Historical Memory staff, and by other organizations and academics, that victims should be the first to be recognized and dignified. Equally persuasive was the assertion that representing the testimonies of perpetrators may pose potential dangers because some visitors may use these to justify horrible actions in the name of the battle against subversive guerrilla groups. Ex-combatants and victims cannot always speak freely, particularly in the context of ongoing armed conflict. Moreover, some culpable parties are still running illegal and violent enterprises. A lack of historical distance was also cited, given that responsibilities have not been fully adjudicated and conflict remains ongoing.The Museum staff considered as well the timing of the exhibition, given that it coincided with a tense period just after the Plebiscite had rejected the Peace Agreement with FARC. According to researchers from the NCHM, for instance, Colombian society was not ready to hear the testimonies of perpetrators because the guilty parties were still inappropriately defending their actions and manipulating discourse. Informing many of these justifications were deeply ingrained historical prejudices and stigmatization of perpetrators. One especially thorny issue concerned the fact that judicial proceedings regarding the responsibility of perpetrators were ongoing. The Museum can neither assign guilt nor implicate individuals that the law has not found guilty, although it can tell stories using testimonies of affected parties who have made public charges or accusations regarding the responsibility of different actors. In a case study within the earth theme, for legal reasons, we referred to suspected perpetrators through abstract categories such as the type of armed group they belonged to or the kind of work they performed, rather than identifying them by name, unless they had been convicted. Most civil economic actors involved in armed conflict have not been convicted (Michalowski et al. 2018); hence, we silenced the names of individuals who had been accused by victims or identified in research conducted by NGOs. We instead described actors by category, such as “public servant,” “elite” and “politician,” and by role, as in “notary” or “land institute civil servant.” We introduced innovative visuals in the exhibition to map the complex web of overlapping relationships among parties embroiled in conflict. One such element (Figure 10.2) employed dozens of strands of color-coded thread sown into a cloth banner printed with relevant categories and roles to map the relationships between individuals who play a part in land dispossession and benefit from this crime and those who cooperate and make the restitution of land possible. In this way, we conveyed the wide array of civilian groups affected. Moreover, this approach discouraged blaming others (over “there”) and encouraged looking at one’s own responsibility, including voting for and supporting suspect political parties. Our solution did not, however, account for the different degrees of culpability represented by unnamed perpetrators: decision-makers carry heavier responsibility than combatants, for instance, or those who financed these groups. In fact, it was virtually impossible to capture the complexities of culpability, given the dynamic and protracted legal wrangling taking place. At the heart of our struggle was the question of how to adequately differentiate the representation of victims and perpetrators when the boundaries that separate them are blurred and actors can straddle these positions. The concept of perpetrator, according to some researchers, including those of the Nazi past, should be widened to include those who “benefitted from, facilitated and supported crimes” (Kleinmann 2015: 472). In nuancing the notion of

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(detail), Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018. Indigenous leader Gil Farekatde stands in front of the piece that represents responsible parties in land dispossession as well as those involved in land restitution.

FIGURE 10.2 Installation

Source: Photograph © Daniel Sarmiento/Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica.

perpetrator, we wished to encompass the idea that responsibilities should be differentiated and the hope that visitors will question their own role and work toward a new future. Museum guidelines embrace the notion that “Recognition is acceptance of how silence, indifference and stigmatization become mechanisms for complicity with impunity. It proclaims visitors as agents for non-recurrence” (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2017: 32). Ultimately, however, our navigating of the pressures of self-censorship rested on the Museum’s tolerance of risk. We feared pushing the boundaries of what the Colombian public would accept versus what would spark a controversy – such as the toalla affair – which could prove counterproductive to the ongoing peace process; at the same time, we worried that our approach would be interpreted as too “soft” and apologetic. We were also aware that meeting the expectations of stakeholders in regard to how we privileged the voices of victims in our inaugural exhibition would prove crucial to future developments.

Heroes, perpetrators, victims Among the most problematic stakeholder group to navigate in relation to issues of victimhood and culpability were the agents of the state. Yet this was a critically important group. Local research and judicial sentences as well as international courts have recognized that agents of the state in Colombia have been responsible for committing crimes, overlooking the violence perpetrated by others, building alliances with political or economic groups to

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defend particular interests and complying with the demands of paramilitary groups (Grupo de Memoria Histórica 2016). These actions are particularly grave because the state comprises the institutions that should be defending human rights, not violating them. However, there was strong opposition among members of the Ministry of Defense and the Public Forces to the ways in which the National Center for Historical Memory had portrayed their actions in its reports.5 Because we drew from the reports in our exhibition narrative, it was urgent for us to understand the concerns of these state parties and to reach some measure of consensus without losing independence over content. The participation of agents of the state in armed conflict poses a unique problem because of the shifting and contradictory roles played by the actors involved: some are victims, others are perpetrators and many are both. To complicate matters further, the Public Forces are a key contingent in the peace process (Fattal 2019). In fact, the men and women who serve in the Public Forces are “like us.” As movingly captured in the Colombian documentary Nueve Disparos (“Nine Gunshots”) (2017), directed by soldier-victim Jorge Andrés Giraldo, low-ranking forces are composed primarily of disenfranchised young men who aspire toward social mobility – to save money for a house or to study. In order to gain insight into the concerns of the Public Forces, a series of forums and workshops were sponsored by the Swiss government in 2017. Museum staff listened to state parties’ observations on representations of armed conflict and presented the overall narrative strategy (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2018c).6 The perspective of state parties was strongly influenced by the model provided by a commemorative gallery in the Military Museum of Colombia. Inaugurated in 2015, this gallery represents a museological initiative led by the Public Forces appropriating the language of human rights. It is a homage to members of the Public Forces and their families who have been affected by human rights violations (Museo Militar 2015).The display focuses on martyrdom, sacrifice and victimhood. It features a memorial embellished with images, names and the personal effects of Public Forces’ members, who were victims of armed conflict, as well as a multimedia timeline marking 22 events in which guerrillas infringed upon their human rights. There are clear gaps in the narrative, including a lack of information regarding confrontations with paramilitary groups. With this model as their primary frame of reference, state parties were reticent to see more critically engaged representations of the roles played by the Public Forces in the MMC.7 In our series of meetings, Public Forces members argued vociferously that their “errors” should be assigned to individuals, rather than attributed to systemic failings, for the latter risked being read as a negative critique of state policies. Similar to the situation of representing such violence in Peruvian museums, however (Milton 2018: 155), state parties did agree, on some level, to the depiction of their role in perpetrating abuses. In assigning culpability to individuals, however, state parties insisted that the Museum rely on evidence from judicial investigations and sentences in order to privilege accuracy. Moreover, they argued that, so as to portray the complexities of being a soldier in Colombia, the Museum should not represent the Public Forces as the sole responsible party in human rights violations and that their achievements and sacrifices be recognized alongside their misdeeds (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2018c). At the conclusion of the meetings, the MMC agreed to identify individual perpetrators with as much information as could be found, to differentiate between legal and illegal armies, to recognize the diversity of roles played by the Public Forces and to make visible how the Forces have been victimized; we also consented to employing legal proof in representing cases

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of Public Forces members allying with illegal groups or committing crimes, to offer diverse evidence and clarify the sources (such as victim’s testimonies) when claims of such nature were made and to acknowledge the wider context in which the Public Forces acted. These accommodations were required in the short term to build trust and establish relationships so that, in the longer term, issues regarding Public Forces participation could be interrogated in greater depth. Ultimately, the Museum chose to portray the lives and impact of the Public Forces in this first iterative exhibition through three stories in the section on the body: one concerns Eduardo, a professional soldier, victim of antipersonnel mines; another recounts the ordeals of Johan Stiven, the surviving son of Sargeant Libio José Martínez who was kidnapped and held captive for 14 years and then assassinated by FARC; the third story, placed directly next to that of Martínez, recounts the experience of Fair Leonardo Porras, a victim of “false positives,” the Public Forces’ execution of young innocent men presented as “positives” (guerrilla members) so that soldiers could be rewarded. Fair Leonardo’s mother, Luz Marina Bernal, and Johan Stiven participated actively in the making of the installation, which included objects and a video that registered a conversation between most of the participating victims in this section (Plate 11). The “false positives” case is a particularly sensitive topic for the Public Forces. We represented it through the experience of an individual, rather than as a systematic phenomenon, because the assassination of young men is still under study by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Semana 2019a). Members of the Public Forces who have told the truth about wrongful executions of innocent people have been gravely threatened (ibid.). The total number of victims is still unknown but approximately 2,000 cases have been documented by the NCHM. Given this situation, one can understand the difficulties involved in challenging the silence over the responsibility of state agents. Our emphasis on victims’ stories and avoidance of focusing on responsible parties speaks to the pressures we faced. However, we worked to counter these omissions by treating all victims in the same way, without heroizing any of them, including Eduardo and Johan Stiven. Some members of the Public Forces who visited the exhibition were dissatisfied; many expressed the opinion that the exhibition was too soft on the guerrillas and too harsh on state agents (Gómez and Monroy 2018).

Facing ongoing pressures Representing the responsibilities of perpetrators in armed conflict is an important task not only in Colombia but also in memorial and human rights museums across the world. Exploring the complexity of conditions and contexts of those who participate in fueling violence is essential if transformation is desired. The memory of the victims has to be honored, but museum practitioners must also work toward contributing to conditions in which violations of human rights can be resisted. Yet in Colombia, despite the many reports and independent research available analyzing armed conflict, as a society we still have much to learn concerning responsibility on all sides, including that of the civil sector. We would be wrong to think that just a few individuals made key decisions and that, if we untangle this knot of powerful individuals, we can deliver transformation. As an adviser to the National Center for Historical Memory declared, “War is like a chess board, but there is more than one queen and one king. There are a multitude of actors and each one has distinct levels of power” (Wills 2019).

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The Museum of Memory of Colombia opened its inaugural exhibition with the knowledge that, as a result of various pressures and considerations, we had self-censored the representation of armed (legal and illegal) and civil actors responsible for violations of human rights. Nevertheless, the Museum refused to build a narrative solely around victimhood and suffering. With Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, MMC began the difficult process of negotiating responsibility, even if this first iteration was overly cautious. Confronting the pressures of self-censorship is of paramount importance for memorial and human rights museums but requires time and the concurrent actions of many other organizations, most importantly, transitional justice institutions. In Colombia today, despite great progress toward the end of armed conflict, community leaders, beneficiaries of land restitution and human rights defenders continue to be assassinated (Semana 2019b).The government has not, to date, developed an effective plan to protect them or to properly identify and intercept the groups that threaten them. Paramilitarism, which saw its main structures disappear a decade ago, is still alive in certain parts of the country, recycled under different operational formats (El Espectador 2019). FARC dissident groups also continue to endure (Fundación Ideas para la Paz 2018), as well as the guerrilla movement ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional), which ended peace talks by placing a bomb in a Bogotá cadet school that killed and injured dozens (Molano 2019). In this milieu, where transitional justice measures are ongoing, and where much remains unresolved, small steps forward are significant. Even more important is the self-reflective practice that helps us to recognize how and why we self-censor and to better negotiate self-censorship in the years to come.

Notes 1 In 2011, the Colombian Congress signed the “Law for Victims and Land Restitution.”The key beneficiaries of the law are victims of armed conflict, both individuals and collectives.The term “survivor” is not widely used in Colombia, hence I chose to use the legal term in this chapter. 2 The Special Jurisdiction for Peace administers justice focused on the gravest crimes committed by FARC, members of the Public Forces (military forces and police) and other agents of the state, as well as civilians, although this last group is not under obligation to participate (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz 2018). The Truth Commission, in contrast, is defined by its extrajudicial functions. The Truth Commission aims to contribute to the historical understanding of the complexity of armed conflict; the recognition of victims as political subjects; the voluntary assumption of individual and collective responsibility and the promotion of peaceful coexistence among Colombia’s diverse territories through dialogue and recognition of truth (Comisión de la Verdad 2018). 3 This expression was used by some of the victims and witnesses who visited the exhibition and was heard in informal conversations with them. 4 The Center provided unparalleled access to these experts and the documentation that informs their research, particularly through its Truth Accords Division which is responsible for recording, classifying, analyzing and preserving some 18,000 testimonies of paramilitary groups which demobilized between 2003 and 2006 (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2014). These testimonies, as well as a small collection of objects donated to the Museum, belong to men and women who committed minor crimes and thus were eligible to receive a certificate for their contribution to the truth (Congress of the Republic of Colombia 2010).The Division employs these testimonies to produce reports on paramilitary structures that look to explain the relationship between illegal and legal armed actors, politicians and the civil population (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2016). The purpose of the reports is to identify the mechanisms that favor the emergence and sustainability of these groups and to trace the impact of paramilitary forces (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2014). 5 In 2013, the Ministry of Defense sent a letter to the National Center for Historical Memory with a list of grievances that summarized their discontent with the ways in which a particular national report represented the Public Forces.They questioned sources and affirmations of responsibility made

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without court rulings, as well as precision in the text when claiming the use of violence and repression by its networks, and as not highlighting victims of the Public Forces (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica 2018c: 13).The Center responded that historical memory research is determined not only by judicial decisions but also by the revision and rigorous contrast of sources, that there is no implication of institutional use of violence and repression (i.e., individuals are to be held responsible) and that there was indeed a debt in the recognition of state victims (ibid.: 19–20). Unfortunately, some people in the defense sector were openly hostile to the Center´s work. Nevertheless, the Center continued to build bridges. Questions remained as to how to challenge understanding of the past that categorized actors as either good or evil, terrorists or patriots (ibid.: 25). 6 Tensions between the Center and the Public Forces were smoothed over after a meeting sponsored by the Swiss government and an agreement was reached in 2015 to develop a suite of five collaborative projects. One of these specified a series of encounters to discuss representations of the members of the Public Forces in the Museum. Others included constructing memories and symbolic reparation of victims of the Public Forces, exchanging databases and information and establishing a pedagogy and methodology for historical memory research. 7 In 2019, Law 1979 was passed by the Congress for the benefit of veterans of the Public Forces. Article 9 on the “Preservation of Historical Memory” adjudicates a physical space in the Museum destined for the life stories of the veterans, “exalting their courageous actions, their sacrifice and contribution to general well-being.” This Law has yet to be approved by the Constitutional Court.

References Bejarano, B. (2001) “El Poder de la Toalla” (“The Power of the Towel”), El Tiempo. 15 February. Online. www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-622709 Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2014) “Acuerdos de la Verdad (Truth Accords).” Online. www. centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/areas-trabajo/acuerdos-de-la-verdad Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2016) “Informes de Estructura” (“Structure Reports”). Online. www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/fr/areas-trabajo/acuerdos-de-la-verdad/informesde-estructura Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2017) Museo Nacional de la Memoria: un Lugar Para el encuentro. Lineamientos Conceptuales y Guion Museológico (National Museum of Memory: A Place for Encounters. Conceptual Guidelines and Museological Storyline), Bogotá: CNMH. Online. museodememoria.gov.co/ wp-content/uploads/2018/04/MNM-Lineamientos.pdf Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2018a) “262.197 Muertos Dejó el Conflicto Armado” (“Armed Conflict Left a Death Toll of 262,197 People”). Online. www.centrodememoriahistorica. gov.co/noticias/noticias-cmh/262-197-muertos-dejo-el-conflicto-armado Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2018b) “Voces Para Transformar a Colombia” (“Voices for the Transformation of Colombia”). Online. museodememoria.gov.co/voces-para-transformar/ visitantes-del-museo/ Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (2018c) Conversaciones Inéditas Entre la Fuerza Pública y el Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. Aprendizaje de Una Experiencia (2012–2017) (Unpublished Conversations Between the Public Forces and the National Center for Historical Memory. Learning from Experience (2012–2017)). Online. www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/de/noticias/noticias-cmh/ conversaciones-ineditas-entre-la-fuerza-publica-y-el-cnmh Comisión de la Verdad (2018) “Mandato y Funciones” (“Mandate and Functions”). Online. comisiondelaverdad.co/la-comision/mandato-y-funciones Congress of the Republic of Colombia (2010) “Ley 1424 de 2010” (“Law 1424 of 2010”). Online wp.presidencia.gov.co/sitios/normativa/leyes/Documents/Juridica/Ley%201424%20de%20 2010.pdf Congress of the Republic of Colombia (2011) “Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras (Ley 1448)” (“Law for Victims and Restitution of Land [Law 1448 of 2011]”). Online. www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/descargas/ley_victimas/ley_victimas_completa_web.pdf Cuervo, E. (2019) Conversation with Author. 3 July.

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“Detrás de Cámaras del Museo de Memoria Histórica de Colombia” (“Behind the Scenes at the MMHC”) (2018) Unpublished Transcription, International Book Fair, Museo de Memoria Histórica de Colombia, Bogotá. 26 April. El Espectador (2019) “El orden, Control y Cultura Paramilitary Siguen Vigentes en el País: Comisión Colombiana de Juristas” (“Paramilitary Order, Control and Culture Remain in Force in the Country: Colombian Commission of Jurists”). 8 February. Online. www.elespectador.com/colombia2020/ pais/el-orden-control-y-cultura-paramilitar-siguen-vigentes-en-el-pais-comision-colombiana-dejuristas-articulo-857622 El Tiempo (2001) “Continúa Debate Sobre la Toalla de Tirofijo” (“The Debate Over Tirofijo’s Towel Continues”). 4 March. www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-599277 El Tiempo (2010) “El Fracaso de los Diálogos de Paz” (“The Failure of Peace Dialogues”). 23 November. Online. www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-8430440 El Tiempo (2016) “63 mil Personas se han Desmovilizado en Colombia” (“63 Thousand People Have Demobilized in Colombia”). 27 October. Online. www.eltiempo.com/especiales/cifrasde-desmovilizados-en-colombia-49334 Fattal, A. (2019) Guerrilla Marketing: Contrainsurgencia y Capitalismo en Colombia (Guerrilla Marketing: Counterinsurgency and Capitalism in Colombia), Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario. Fundación Ideas para la Paz (2018) “Las Disidencias de las FARC: un Problema en Auge” (“FARC Dissidents: A Booming Problem”). Online. www.ideaspaz.org/publications/posts/1662 Giraldo, J.A. (dir.) (2017) Nueve Disparos (Nine Gunshots), Colombia: Universidad Javeriana Cali. Gómez, D. and Monroy, S. (2018) “Primer Informe Analítico del Componente Etnográfico a Partir de los Hallazgos en la Exposición ‘Voces para Transformar a Colombia’ en la Feria Internacional del Libro de Bogotá” (“First Analytical Report of the Ethnographic Component Based on the Findings in the Exhibition ‘Voices for the Transformation of Colombia’ at the Bogotá International Book Fair”), Unpublished report, Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica and USAID, Bogotá. Grupo de Memoria Histórica (2016) “BASTA YA! Colombia: Memories of War and Dignity: General Report Historical Memory Group.” Online. centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/descargas/ informes2016/basta-ya-ingles/BASTA-YA-ingles.pdf “Grupo focal excombatientes” (“Focus Group with Excombatants”) (2018) Unpublished transcription, Museo de Memoria Histórica de Colombia, Medellín. 9 September. Holtschneider, K.H. (2007) “Victims, Perpetrators, Bystanders? Witnessing, Remembering and the Ethics of Representation in Museums of the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies, 13(1): 82–102. Jurisdicción Especial Para la Paz (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) (2018) Online. www.jep.gov.co/Pagi nas/JEP/Jurisdiccion-Especial-para-la-Paz.aspx Kleinmann, S. (2015) “The Representation of Nazi Perpetrators in Exhibitions in Germany: An Underexposed Part of Memory Policies’,” The Journal of Social Policy Studies, 13(3): 465–476. Michalowski, S., León, N.C., Sánchez López, D., Marín Ospina, A., Jiménez Carrillo, H., Martínez Mazhari, V., Mazhari, D. and Arroyave Velásquez, L.M. (2018) Entre Coacción y Colaboración. Verdad judicial, Actores Económicos y Conflicto Armado en Colombia (Between Coercion and Collaboration: Judicial Truth, Economic Actors and Armed Conflict in Colombia), Bogotá: Dejusticia. Milton, C.E. (2018) Conflicted Memory: Military Cultural Interventions and the Human Rights Era in Perú, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Molano, A. (2019) “Punto Final a los Diálogos con el ELN” (“End-Point to Dialogues with the ELN”), El Espectador. 18 January. Online. www.elespectador.com/colombia2020/pais/puntofinal-los-dialogos-con-el-eln-articulo-857564 Museo Militar (2015) “Sala de la Memoria y la Dignidad. SP. Libio José Martínez Estrada” (“Hall of Memory and Dignity. SP Libio José Martínez Estrada”). Online. www.museomilitarcol.com/ sala-memoria/ Museo Nacional de Colombia (2003) Tiempos de Paz. Acuerdos en Colombia 1902–1994 (Times of Peace: Agreements in Colombia 1902–1994), Bogotá: Museo Nacional de Colombia, Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá and Instituto Distrital de Cultura y Deporte.

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Segura, M. (1995) Itinerario del Museo Nacional de Colombia 1823–1994 (Itinerary of the National Museum of Colombia 1823–1994), Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, Museo Nacional de Colombia. Semana (2019a) “Operación Silencio” (“Operation Silence”), 23 June. Online. www.semana.com/ nacion/articulo/operacion-silencio-amenazas-y-presiones-sobre-los-militares-que-hablan-de-fal sos-positivos-en-la-jep/620661 Semana (2019b) “Líderes Sociales ¿Quién Podrá Defenderlos?” (“Social Leaders. Who Can Defend Them?). Online. especiales.semana.com/lideres-sociales-asesinados/index.html Verdad Abierta (2012) “Proceso de Negociación del Caguán 1998–2002” (“Caguán Negotiation Process 1998–2002”). 18 November. Online. verdadabierta.com/proceso-de-negociacion-del-caguan1998-2002/ Wills, M.E. (2019) Conversation with Author. 22 August.

11 EXPERIMENTAL CURATORSHIP IN RUSSIA Beyond contemporary art institutions Nadia Plungian

Curator versus artist: the Soviet legacy The history of curating in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods is a field of research that has received little attention to date in academia or in practice. An objective account of the dynamics of this history requires an awareness of the systems of control exercised by the party over art, artists and artists’ unions in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Reconstructing the way that mechanisms of control affected postmodern art institutions of the 1990s–2000s helps understand the specifics of interactions between artists and curators in contemporary Russia. In 1932, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a resolution “On the restructuring of literary and artistic organizations,” which forcibly liquidated all independent artistic organizations in the USSR. They were replaced by party-controlled unions of artists, writers, composers and architects intended as platforms for developing “socialist realism,” based on a system of total censorship. Postwar criticism of this system resulted in a split of the artistic community into two camps of “official” and “unofficial” art (Morozov 1995; Manin 1999). This division has continued into the post-Soviet period. The Union of Soviet Artists has not been dismantled. It remains an archaic structure, neither carrying out the proper functions of a trade union nor bearing any political influence. Leading positions in Russian art have been occupied by several generations of artists and theorists stemming from the “unofficial” circles and the Moscow conceptual school, but their activities continue to be censored. A pivotal event in the history of this censorship was the trial of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Social Center after it opened the 2003 exhibition Caution, Religion! The Museum’s director and another administrator were found guilty of “inciting religious hatred” and fined 100,000 roubles each (Sellar 2006). Charges against most of the participating artists were quickly dropped, but artist Anna Alchuck was put on trial for five months before she was acquitted. She took her own life three years later. The trial delineated the boundaries of the legitimate; it decisively affirmed the prohibition on discussing sensitive social and political issues in Russian galleries and museums (Bernstein 2014).

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The artistic consciousness formed under these conditions was encapsulated in the vague term, Aktualnoe izkustvo, which can be translated as “relevant art” or art of current interest. Gaining circulation in Russia at the turn of the millennium and differentiating itself from the general field of contemporary art, Aktualnoe izkustvo stood for the newest artistic phenomena associated with postmodernism and demanded that the aim of art should be “maximum social functionality as a guarantor of historical and social consistency” (Osmolovsky 1997). As a term, Aktualnoe iskuztvo retained all the markers of a party label: it considered art to be a political tool (because a phenomenon can only be relevant in connection with a specific aim); it was repressive (implying the existence of ne aktualnoe or “irrelevant art”); and finally, it was impersonal, just like socialist realism which focused on political agenda and narrowed the space of discussion between artists. By the early 2000s, the emphasis on the importance of ideology and concept became embodied in a telling conflict between the tropes of the “unruly artist” and the “controlling curator.” The growing significance of the new figure of gallery curator as intellectual, theoretician and generator of concepts paradoxically merged with the memory of the Soviet meaning of the term “curator”: a KGB officer appointed from above to control a particular social group. In contrast stood the stereotype of the dumb, uncontrollable artist – pouncing and barking at the public, as parodied in a series of performances by Oleg Kulik, naked, as a chained dog, attacking and even biting gallery visitors in the 1990s (Kravtsova 2014).1 The development of this opposition between curatorial and artistic work most probably stemmed from the Soviet legacy. At the beginning of the twentieth century, most of the major Russian art theorists combined their activities as publishers, organizers of key exhibitions and critics with their professional practice in the fields of literature and painting. Alexander Benois’ World of Art (Mir Iskuztva) association based its work precisely on these activities, as did the Russian Symbolists and their successors – the artists and art workers of the early Soviet period (Bowlt 1973). By the end of the 1930s, however, under state management of culture, expressions of an artist’s own theories, personal style or life experience were regarded as evidence of disloyalty to the party and could become a threat not only to the artist’s career but even to their life. It was precisely those artist-theoreticians who expressed their ideas in writing that fell victim to the merciless abattoir of the “struggle against formalism” campaign under Stalin and became the objects of vilification by party art critics (Anon. 1937).The halferased memory of these events resounded in the late Soviet period, when contemporary art was largely perceived as a suspect and socially fraught occupation. This attitude engendered the “double life” phenomenon in which contemporary art became an informal profession or (rarely) a hidden source of income (Andreeva 2012). I was born in 1983 and, as a child, I clearly remember my parents’ indignation when I attempted to doodle in my children’s books, presumably wanting to add to the imagery within: later this denouncement of creative interference transferred to their view of my career choice. Both my parents being academics, they genuinely thought art professions a disgrace, a guarantee of poverty, so they forbade me to pursue an art education. After school, I had to choose art history as the shortest permissible route that would allow me to interfere with the text of official culture, while continuing my artistic pursuits privately. Coincidentally, the same route had been adopted in the two generations prior to mine, by the illustrators of those very children’s books I had been forbidden to deface. In the 1930s–1960s, Vladimir Konashevich, and, in the 1970s–1980s, Ilya Kabakov, Viktor Pivovarov and Eric Bulatov managed to disentangle themselves from the Soviet system to preserve their independent identity as

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artist-researchers (Konashevich 1965; Bulatov 2013; Pivovarov 2019). However, the contribution of their research is not yet fully recognized in Russia. This chapter is not so much an academic analysis of the problems of self-censorship in Russian museums and galleries but instead functions as a manifesto of individual strategies that I, as a curator practicing in Russia, have developed over the last decade. The exhibitions I will discuss were made under different types of pressure with minimal financing and strong resistance from art institutions. Each of them, in their own way, prompted the Russian art community to change, asking practitioners, funders, audiences and other stakeholders to think critically and to engage in debate. My curatorial strategies are built on a combination of artistic research, academic work and political action. I am confident that the blurring of boundaries between art and independent curation will eventually become a laboratory for creating a new visual tradition which is formed through the intertwining of the tasks of the artist, historian, archivist and director in curatorial work. This optics enables practitioners to convey a political message within the exhibition, informed equally by documentation, curatorial commentary and visual language, where historical and contemporary artworks are juxtaposed.

The museum as a space of activism: “New Moscow,” 2007 My curatorial biography began when, in 2007, I joined the “New Moscow” interdisciplinary seminar at the apartment-museum of Mikhail Bulgakov in Moscow (unlike state museums with an official brief and a large staff, apartment-museums provided alternative spaces, although they received little funding and often relied on the efforts of volunteers). “New Moscow” was organized by architectural historian Alexandra Selivanova and art historian Alexei Petukhov with the help of several other colleagues of our generation. The seminar was an open working group for young academics and anyone else interested in the everyday culture of the USSR in the 1920s–1930s. The aim was to exchange knowledge and compare existing methodologies in various areas of research on Soviet culture – the history of music, art, architecture, sculpture, transport and theater. We wanted to overcome the evident fragmentation of our professional field in the post-Soviet era and eventually form a broad academic platform. At the Bulgakov apartment-museum, we held free lectures, tours and discussions and also ran parallel exhibitions, most of which were conceived by Selivanova. A practicing artist and architect, she joined the apartment-museum as a volunteer in the early 2000s, developing a new concept for it and fully renovating the rooms, returning the historical appearance to the early Soviet years.The museum received stable, albeit small, funding from the city council and was interested in attracting visitors: for us, it became an experimental platform for educational and artistic projects. In 2008, I curated for the Bulgakov museum a small exhibition of Vladimir Favorsky’s 1929 series of colored woodcuts, The Seven Wonders – one of the rare color series by this master of printmaking and well-known art theorist of 1920–1950s. The engravings were displayed in the 1920s communal kitchen interior of the Bulgakov apartment which had been restored by Selivanova in a manner reminiscent of a modernist installation. The accompanying wall text was dedicated to the prewar urban environment, children’s books of the post-constructivist era and social sensitivity in Soviet graphic art. Correlating Favorsky’s still life prints with kitchen objects of the 1920s, familiar to us from family photos or the everyday life of older relatives, we designed the exhibition to foster audience engagement

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concerning the private dimensions of life during the Soviet era, specifically the issue of repression and its far-reaching impact, even today, which remains largely unacknowledged in Russian society. It was my curatorial premise that only by recognizing the dynamics of repression within Soviet and post-Soviet families over generations can we begin to understand and grapple with self-censorship, both in and beyond the domain of art. The positive reception the project received from visitors prompted me to reevaluate the exhibition space as a platform for political expression.

Deploying curation to rethink the history of social exclusion: Queerfest, 2013 As my next step, I conceived a challenging exhibition for a human rights organization that would generate a multifaceted and intensive discussion about Soviet society at its turning point in the 1930s, on the eve of the purges of the Great Terror, and give voice to one of its most invisible social groups – queer and non-binary people. After the Caution, Religion! exhibition, this project would not have passed the internal censorship processes of museums and galleries because of the so-called “Gay Propaganda Law” (the Russian federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values”), signed by Vladimir Putin in June 2013 (Russian Federal Law No. 135-FZ 2013). But the project still could be supported by a non-commercial human rights organization, so I proposed it to the St. Petersburg-based LGBT organization Vykhod (Coming Out) which was keen to develop innovative exhibitions for the city’s annual Queerfest. Vykhod did not have its own exhibition space; thus, every year, they rented a large hall in the center of St. Petersburg for festival events and exhibitions; this venue promised to attract high attendance to the project. For Queerfest 2013, I suggested a retrospective exhibition of LGBT+ history in Russia, coinciding with the 20-year anniversary of the repeal of Article 121 of the Russian Criminal Code (criminalizing sodomy). The show was executed with the support of Vykhod and the invaluable help of exhibition organizer Sasha Semenova. It consisted of ten sections exploring the history of various Russian and Soviet queer communities and subcultures over 100 years. Many of these groups, for instance, asexual individuals in the USSR; interwar lesbian circles; Soviet queer cultures of the 1960s and intersex people in the Russian Empire, were revealed to a wide public for the first time. Historian Ira Roldugina and I put together a detailed booklet-catalog to accompany the show, containing documentary materials, including the first published archival photographs of a Petrograd homosexual house party made during a police raid in 1921 (Plungian and Roldugina 2014). The show had a very small budget and consisted only of prints, but I designed it to look rich and plentiful due to the variety of material on display: contemporary artists’ films; archival photos from the 1910s to1960s; posters; collections of hand-drawn samizdat (self-published dissident literature) book covers from the post-Soviet period; enlarged citations from medical books and assorted documents. Each section of the exhibition, organized by decade, was accompanied by my detailed historical commentary and by the direct voices of queer people, including those repressed in the 1930s, such as the jazz singer Vadim Kozin and the poet Anna Barkova, as well as our contemporaries. The aim was to create a polyphony of gender identities that would inspire audiences to engage with LGBT+ rights issues. Although the human rights focus of the project distinguished it from the more familiar terrain of exhibitions with

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an aesthetic prerogative and there were no reviews of the exhibition, the show was widely discussed among activists and social networks and the booklet-catalog was quickly distributed. Unfortunately, public access to the show was made very difficult. At first, the organization from which Queerfest rented the hall asked me to dismantle the exhibition for one day because of an event that could be attended by children, although there was nothing unsuitable for young people in the exhibition materials – only Soviet posters, book covers and historical photos. Then the deputy of the St. Petersburg legislative assembly,Vitaly Milonov, known for his homophobic position, tried to prevent the exhibition from opening (comingoutspb 2013). With his staff and his own press officers, Milonov approached the exhibit before the opening and insulted the collaborators, viewers and employees of Vykhod. This act attracted negative attention from residents of the quarter and prompted the introduction of regulations limiting audiences: only those who submitted in advance to a special registration procedure on the organization’s website could attend and, even after successfully registering, all attendees faced control at the entrance. Not surprisingly, the number of visitors decreased markedly.

From art activism to social movement: Feminist Pencil (2012–2014) In parallel to historical and human rights exhibitions, I thought about the strategies for working with Russian contemporary art and received a proposal for a joint project from artist Victoria (Vika) Lomasko. Working as a team of artist and critic, we decided to make the first exhibition of feminist graphic art by women artists in Russia which we called Feminist Pencil. The title refers to the well-known War Pencil (Boevoi Karandash), creative association of Leningrad artists who produced propaganda posters and collections of satirical drawings during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941–1944 (Matafonov et al. 1977). I knew Vika from her sharp, politically astute series of graphic reports and an ingenious hand-drawn book, Forbidden Art, about the trial of the curator and museum director behind the aforementioned Moscow exhibition Caution, Religion! which was sabotaged by Orthodox activists in 2003. In other drawings, Lomasko examined the life of adolescents in Russian juvenile prisons and documented the 2010s anti-Putin street protests (Lomasko 2017). At the time that we joined forces to curate Feminist Pencil, however, Lomasko had never before positioned herself as a feminist. She became interested in feminism after a former (male) coauthor tried to oust her from the professional art community and claimed authorship to her drawings. Working together became a reason for us to challenge gender inequality in Russian contemporary art, which was clearly built on hardened patriarchal models of interaction with male curators and gallery owners. Produced on a shoestring budget, the exhibition was held in 2012 in a private hostel called Fabrika and included just six participants (Dmitryk 2016: 163). Then, in 2013, with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, we were able to organize a more ambitious exhibition – Feminist Pencil 2 – that included 35 artists from different cities in Russia, as well as Belarus, Ukraine, Germany and Sweden. Our aim through the works was to explore social concerns of women in regard to migration, sex work, domestic violence, homophobia, disability and maternal work. We brought together diverse graphic media – including street stencils, comics, artists’ books, posters, watercolor, drypoint, documentary reportage, manga, digital art and murals – in order to demonstrate the quality and diversity of feminist activist art in Russia and elsewhere.

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The exhibition took place at the activist art space MediaImpact2 and was accompanied by a series of open discussions and workshops led by women artists and researchers. The catalog, which was published in both Russian and English, contained a curatorial manifesto and detailed texts by the participants in which they discussed their personal experience of resistance to male curators and directors in established art spheres. We received condemning reviews from the press (Kolesnikov 2013; Napreenko and Novozhenova 2013; Tolstova 2013) and a flurry of both negative and positive visitor comments posted on Facebook and Livejournal (outloudmag 2013). Indignant that the exhibition showed works only by women artists, journalists were clearly uncomfortable when confronted with their own prejudices. Some critics, reflecting the commonly held belief in Russian art circles that an artist (and certainly a woman artist) can’t organize an exhibition, did not even credit Lomasko as a co-curator.3 Several acts of vandalism at the exhibition illuminated the strange parallels between extreme right and left-wing Russian activists in terms of their tactics. Neo-Nazis tore up a poster of non-binary artist Hagra, dedicated to women’s self-defense, while the Moscow artist Alexandra Galkina, a member of Aktualnoe Izkustvo and also close to the Pussy Riot circles, drew penises in black marker under every work, protesting against feminism as “oppressing biological men” (Mitenko 2013). Galkina’s gesture, which supporters of Aktualnoe Izkustvo called a terrifically liberating performance, much more interesting than the Feminist Pencil (Soglyadatay 2013), shows the extremely hostile attitude of Russian leftists toward the gender-specific social issues raised by the exhibition and the feminist curatorial lens that we deployed. For example, two very well-known leftist art critics accused Feminist Pencil of domination and arrogance toward male artists: “The problem is that, having locked themselves in the safe space of their exhibition, empathy and sisterhood turn into dominant discourse, repressively acting in relation to outsiders” (Napreenko and Novozhenova 2013). This left-wing activist rejection of the exhibition’s feminist perspectives as irrelevant to contemporary Russian art is symptomatic of a larger trend to dismiss these issues in exhibition spaces and art magazines across Russia (Briukhovets’ka 2013; Plungian 2013; Solomatina 2013;Vasil’eva 2013; Plungian 2016) which, in effect, functions as a kind of veiled censorship. Yet, despite this hostile environment, creative strategies can be developed to foster freedom of expression. In our project, although the pressures of censorship prevented us from receiving any support or participation from Russian art institutions, we accomplished our political task of holding a resonant and accessible feminist event. Looking back, we can say that the project noticeably touched diverse parts of the art community and inspired productive conversations (Ledenev 2013; Soglyadatay 2013; Rossman 2015). For example, referring to Galkina’s black marker vandalism, Ukrainian artist and exhibition participant Oxana Briukhovets’ka declared that: The image of the penis was used here as a symbol of hatred and aggression, which corresponds to the extreme expressions of patriarchal power. At the same time, it is obvious that, apart from the body, the painted penis is reminiscent of castration, especially when it is a sign of war. (Briukhovets’ka 2013)

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Briukhovets’ka’s comment insightfully placed Galkina’s abusive defacement of the works on display within a wider context reflecting the fears of disempowerment.

Synthesis of the arts as a form of political dialogue Post-Soviet Cassandras (2015) In March 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in the Donbass region, Russian galleries mounted a wave of conservative exhibitions on “women’s issues.”4 This was intended to signal the appearance of a “legitimate,” i.e., apolitical, feminist art, deflecting attention from the artistic commentary on war, colonialism and gender violence. In Moscow, in feminist circles such as Moscow Feminist Group (Moskovskaya Feministskaya Gruppa) (MFG) (Sperling 2015: 248–251), we discussed this trend as a banalization of feminist art in Russia, which, by this time, was represented by a very narrow segment of “private” subject matter – like a ghetto of specific sanctioned “feminine” subjects. The title of a 2015 collective exhibition of women artists in Vladivostok, “HER [life/dreams/family/husband/ work/love/children/relatives/priorities/views/feelings/hat/problems/anxiety/joy],” captures this reductive, essentialist approach. As the exhibition curator Oksana Sarkisian noted, the exhibition invited viewers to “the world of a woman that curators view without any ideology” (Berchanskaya 2015). For Lomasko and me, this banalization of feminist subjects in art made our work seem even more urgent. But while organizing feminist exhibitions in big public museums and galleries had long been impossible because of political censorship, now, after the aggression of the leftist community against Feminist Pencil, it became virtually impossible for us to find a single activist independent platform within Russia willing to take on our next curatorial statement. The main obstacle was self-censorship within an artistic community that actively shut down discourse at the intersection of feminist art and politics.Thus, we decided to stage our project, which brought together artists from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, outside of the country, in Berlin, where we would have the curatorial freedom necessary to pursue our agenda (Plungian 2016: 203–214). The exhibition was held at Berlin’s Kornerpark Gallery and organized together with Berlin-based curators Antje Weisel and Dorothee Bienert. Our idea was to perform at a higher professional level, so we were glad to work with the support of a well-known gallery rather than an activist space. We titled the exhibition Post-Soviet Cassandras to convey its primary themes; the phrase “post-Soviet” suggests the independence of artists from the state and its institutions while the reference to Cassandra, the ancient Greek mythological figure who spoke prophecies which were true but which no one believed, alludes to the silenced and discredited “artistic prophecies” of feminist artists. Lomasko and I acted as both curators and artists, inviting four other artists to take part: Anatoly Belov (Kiev), Shifra Kazhdan (Moscow), Marina Naprushkina (Minsk–Berlin) and the graffiti group Gandhi (Omsk–St. Petersburg). Our goal was to create a point of dialogue between feminist artists of the three countries in the context of the annexation of Crimea; Post-Soviet Cassandras was conceived as a cross section of socially sensitive art in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, created in the face of a military crisis and a patriarchal turn in politics. Together, we explored the topics of migration, neo-Nazism, homophobia and the growing movement to ban abortion. To do so, we juxtaposed diverse media: political banners made of silk and brocade, video art, musical film, original drawings, street stickers, handprinted stencil series, artists’ books and murals. The result was bright, busy

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and highly decorative. As with Feminist Pencil, artists provided a political commentary of their work through wall texts to help place issues of identity at the center of the exhibition. Despite their distinct points of entry, works in the exhibition were united in interrogating the impact of political repression on personal identity. For example, in her video work Whose Red Is It? (2014), queer artist Shifra Kazhdan represented the discovery of her own gender identity through the prism of 1970’s childhood ideology – specifically, the image of a Soviet pioneer. Lomasko exhibited, among other works, a new piece about closeted lesbian communities in the post-Soviet space. And Anatoly Belov showed a series of his giant almost 2-meter high street stickers, originally created in 2010 and affixed onto the walls of Kiev streets; depicting men and women balancing precariously on fantastic platforms made of household items and juxtaposed with wolf-headed people on the run, suggesting masculine aggression, Belov’s stickers speak to the fragile balance of social role and gender identity. Because the exhibition took place in Berlin, not Moscow, its development and reception were comparatively very straightforward. The success of the project, however, highlighted to me more than ever the urgency of continuing my work to counter self-censorship among artistic communities within Russia itself, regardless of the risks that this entailed.

The strategy of the “research exhibition” Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks (2017); Implicit Modernism (2017–2018) Despite the difficulties of exhibiting contemporary socially purposeful art in Russia, I therefore chose to return there in my next project to work with Soviet material as a means to illuminate the present through the past. In the late 2010s I curated several exhibitions which offered unexpected and sometimes radical views on the Soviet art archive. Among them was another collaboration with Alexandra Selivanova dedicated to the reception of surrealism in Soviet painting, design and sculpture of the 1930s and 1940s, Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks, 2017, held at Na Shabolovke Gallery in Moscow, where Selivanova was the chief curator. The title of the show referred to a well-known 1924 comedy film by Soviet director Lev Kuleshov, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, bringing a tone of irony to the examination of Soviet narratives. The main objective of this exhibition was the critique and deconstruction of ideas about Soviet art which had endured in both Russian and Western scholarship since the 1930s. The common understanding of Soviet artistic life, which still exerts an influence in academia and in national museum exhibitions in Russia, is as a “struggle of realism against modernism” (Grigoriev 1965, 1968). In the post-Soviet years, another dominant cliché persisted – the idea of Soviet art as a confrontation between two similarly nominal and generalized art historical constructions: the Russian avant-garde and socialist realism. All this has served to greatly delay any concrete discussion about the mutual influences of Western and Soviet artistic processes. Considering that these binary oppositions obscure the complex processes of making that took place in Soviet art and the multilayered resonance of the resulting work, we tried to distance ourselves from the legacy of Soviet and post-Soviet art historical literature that had clung to the dialectic approach. Instead, we designed a research exhibition method founded on immersion into original sources, including working actively with the family archives of the artists that were our focus. Through looking freshly at original documents and materials, this research exhibition method enabled us to move beyond conventional binary oppositions to explore the nuances in the field.

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Contemporary studies of Soviet art suggest that surrealism was a typically European movement, unimaginable in Soviet contexts. Our exhibition refuted these judgments, explaining how experimentation with surrealism among theater artists, illustrators, photographers, architects and sculptors of Soviet Russia reflected their opposition to growing political pressure. The documents and quotations presented in the exhibition’s wall texts showed that, already, by the early 1930s, interest in paradox, absurdity and inversion was perceived by Soviet cultural ideologists as an enemy attack on the neoclassical form. The exhibition received good reviews and was successful in the circles of both art historians and collectors and among the wider public. My next work, Implicit Modernism (2017–2018), was a large-scale, highly visible two-part research exhibition of Soviet paintings that I developed at the same time as the surrealist project; it took place at one of the central Moscow institutions, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In this case, however, the research was conducted through the well-known (but never fully exhibited before) Moscow private collection of Roman Babichev. Post-Soviet private collections have become a strong and vital force, exerting influence over museum policy. In these collections, Soviet art has been appreciated and interpreted outside party hierarchies and politics and this context provided an uncensored space for my collaborators and me to work. I acted as the key organizer of this project and formed a curatorial group of like-minded art historians – Alexandra Selivanova, Maria Silina,Valentin Dyakonov, Olga Davydova and Alexandra Strukova – many of whom had worked on the New Moscow. Babichev amassed his collection over the last 25 years and today it holds more than 4,000 Russian and Soviet paintings, works on paper and sculptures from the twentieth century, all of them little known to the general public. We called the exhibition Implicit Modernism because the main focus of Babichev’s collection concerns the interconnections among the marginalized post–avant-garde artistic communities of Russia after 1932, whose political declarations were not set in text but expressed implicitly through the language of art. Rejecting the linear, progressivist approach to the Soviet legacy, built on the idea of changing “manifestist” tendencies (from avant-garde to socialist realism and then to non-conformism), our curatorial team, instead, presented Soviet art as a space of continuous and stable modernist experimentation. This view allowed us to look beyond the facade of ideological juxtapositions, tracing the complex dynamics of artistic currents and inscribing Soviet art into the international context of the twentieth century. Each of the two parts of the exhibition was chronologically divided into 14 large spaces, and works from the Babichev collection were framed by curatorial texts. Accompanying the project was a complete catalog of the collection, published in five volumes, dedicated to the different stages in the history of Russian art from the fin de siècle to the 1960s and 1970s (Babichev et al. 2017). The exhibition was quite well received in Moscow and St. Petersburg, not only in the professional community of art historians and collectors but also among the general public. It was nominated for the Innovation Award (2017, supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture) and for the People’s Choice of the Sixth Art Newspaper Russia Award (2018), where it competed with the projects of two leading state museums – the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow Manege. The fact that Implicit Modernism turned out to be comparable in popularity and attendance with projects supported by the state shows the Russian public’s strong desire to learn about long-obscured aspects of Soviet culture and the complexities and contradictions behind the facade of socialist realism.

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As for my future as an independent curator, this successful two-part exhibition brought me increased recognition in the professional community but, at the same time, made any further collaborations with state institutions in Russia impossible; in fact, the project has led to the collapse of my career as an art historian and practitioner. In December 2018, I was forced to resign from the State Institute of Art History, where I had worked for 10 years as a Senior Researcher, after my new monograph, Socialism and Woman in Visual Art: 1917–1939, was not accepted by the Institute. Their justification was that the book was an “unscientific” work of “a poor quality,” but, in fact, the destructive criticism of my senior colleagues was largely the result of my work on the analysis of Soviet modernism within the contexts of international art. I received accusations that I was “overly” interested in sociology and politics; that my research was inadequate; and that I lacked an understanding of the art history fundamentals, which they defined through an iconological approach to art, in contrast to my method, which they characterized as an attempt to make the artwork a “witness” to some discrimination. At the moment – as after each exhibition described in this article – I am not sure that I can continue my work in Russia as a curator.

Conclusion In my independent curating, I have deployed many strategies to negotiate the pressures of self-censorship, including seeing the museum as a space of activism; curating exhibitions in collaboration with activist groups and other feminist practitioners; engaging art as a bridge to activism and broad-based social movements; working outside of Russia to explore ideas censored within Russia; challenging art historical constructions through new archival research; and working with private collections rather than state museums. These strategies reflect my processes of creating various parallel platforms necessary for the development of independent artistic thought. In contemporary Russia, where creativity is hampered by political pressure and rigid systems of institutional control inherited from the Soviet era, such strategies help to generate an independent scientific and artistic field outside institutions. They help unite researchers and artists of my generation working with often suppressed social, political and historical issues. The development of this field requires a deconstruction and rethinking of the opposition between artists and curators, which I consider to be the cementing element of post-Soviet cultural policy.

Notes 1 See, for example, Mad Dog or Last Taboo (with Alexander Brener), which took place in front of the M. Guelman Gallery, Moscow, on 23 November 1994 and Reservoir Dog performed at Kunsthaus, Zurich on 30 March 1995. 2 In a somewhat reduced form, we also showed the project in St. Petersburg (Borey Art Gallery) and in Oslo, under the title Heroine of Our Time (Lufthavn Gallery) as part of the First Supper Symposium in 2014. 3 For example, when interviewing me on the well-known Russian television show Shkola Zlosloviya (“The School for Scandal”), hosts Avdotya Smirnova and Tatyana Tolstaya at first tried to introduce me as the sole curator of the exhibition (Smirnova and Tolstaya 2014). 4 See, for instance, Women’s Suffering, Part I, St. Petersburg, 2014, curated by Petr Shvetsov; Golden Shower, Moscow, 2014, curated by Vladimir Smirnov and Konstantin Sorokin Art Foundation; Feminist Kitchen, Moscow, 2014, curated by Oksana Sarkisian and Vika Begal’skaia; Kitchen, Moscow, 2014, curated by Mika Ela and Marina Vinnik; MAMMA, Moscow, 2015, curated by Veronica RudyevaRiazantseva; Mommy Loves You, St. Petersburg, 2015, curated by Zhanna Nagorianskaia.

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Outloudmag.eu (2013) “Online Timeline of the Queerfest-2013 Opening in St. Petersburg,” Outloudmag.eu. 18 September. Online. outloudmag.eu/events/item/147-onlayn-chronika-kvirfest-2013v-sankt-peterburge Pivovarov,V. (2019) The Agent in Love, Garage: Moscow. Plungian, N. (2011) “Gendernye Zerkala Sovremennogo Iskusstva: Mezhdu Soprotivleniem i Dedovshchinoi” (“The Gender Mirrors of Contemporary Art: Between Resistance and Hazing”), Neprikosnovennyi Zapas (Debates on Politics and Culture). Online. www.intelros.ru/readroom/nz/ neprikosnovennyj-zapas-76-22011/9939-gendernye-zerkala-sovremennogo-iskusstva-mezhdusoprotivleniem-i-dedovshhinoj.html Plungian, N. (2013) Feministskoe Iskuztvo v Rossii: Nekotorye Perspektivy (Feminist Art in Russia: Several Perspectives), Mezhdunarodnyi Zhenskii Den. Feminizm: Ot Avangarda Do Nashykh Dnei (International Women’s Day. Feminism from the Avant-Garde to the Present Day), Moscow: MVO “Manezh.” Plungian, N. (2016) “Feminist Art in Russia in 2014–15: The Problem of the ‘Turn to the Right’,” Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 2(1): 181–223. Plungian, N. and Roldugina, I. (2014) Queerfest 2013. 20 Years Since the Repeal of Article 121 from the Soviet Criminal Code, St. Petersburg:Vykhod. Online. comingoutspb.com/upload/iblock/547/54749a48e4 fceef4ac5ef611cbae1a13.pdf Rossman, E. (2015) “Perevod s Feministskogo na Feministskii” (“Translation from Feminist to Feminist”), Openleft. 5 November. Online. openleft.ru/?p=7176 Russian Federal Law No. 135-FZ (2013) “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating the Denial of Traditional Family Values.” 29 June. Sellar, T. (2006) “Up Front: Caution! Religion! Exhibit at the Sakharov,” Theater, 36(1): 1–3. Smirnova, A. and Tolstaya, T. (2014) “Schkola Zlosloviya” (“The School for Scandal”) [television broadcast on NTV channel]. 27 April. Online. www.ntv.ru/peredacha/shkola/m543/o244436/video/ Soglyadatay (pseud. of Victoria Lomasko) (2013) “Pressa ‘Feministskogo Karandasha-2’ i Razlichnye Mneniia o Vystavke v Sotsial’nykh Setiakh” (“Press Coverage of ‘Feminist Pencil-2’ and Various Social Media Opinions on the Exhibition”), LiveJournal.com. 20 December. Online. soglyadatay.live journal.com/151564.html Solomatina, I. (2013) “Feministskii Karandash-2” (“Feminist Pencil-2”), Gendernyi Marshrut. November. Online. gender-route.org/articles/feminism/feministskij_karandash-ii/ Sperling,V. (2015) Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia, New York: Oxford University Press. Tchermalykh, N. (2013) “Vziat’ na Karandash” (“To Take on a Pencil”), Korydor. 13 November. Online. old.korydor.in.ua/reviews/1507-wzyat-na-karandash Tolstova, A. (2013) “Udarniki Sotsial’nogo Truda. MediaUdar v ‘Artplay’ ” (“Social Shockworkers. MediaImpact at ‘Artplay’ ”), Kommersant. 31 October. Online. kommersant.ru/doc/2331927 Vasil’eva, P. (2013) “Chto Risuet Feministskii Karandash?” (“What Does a Feminist Pencil Draw?”), Anticapitalist. 30 October. Online. anticapitalist.ru/archive/kultura/chto_risuet_feministskij_karan dash.html

12 FROM CARBON SINK TO WASTE LAND A case study in navigating controversy Susan Moldenhauer

Wyoming lies in the northern Rocky Mountains, a unique place of incredible beauty that prides itself on the idea of rugged independence. Known primarily for its Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, Wyoming is politically conservative and economically dependent on its extraordinary mineral resources and their extraction. Driven by national and global forces, its economy is one of “boom and bust” cycles. With fewer than 600,000 people across 97,914 square miles, this least populated state in the continental United States has been colloquially described as “one small town with long streets.”1 Its one four-year public university was founded in Laramie in 1886 as a land-grant institution and is led by a 12-member Board of Trustees appointed by the Governor. Wyoming’s constitution (2009) states attendance at the University is to “be as nearly free as possible” which requires substantial and continual funding from the Wyoming State Legislature. Supported by state funds, corporate donations, grants and private philanthropy, governed by the University of Wyoming (UW) Trustees, and operating with an active National Advisory Board, the Art Museum is housed in a striking contemporary building designed by Antoine Predock. The Museum (n.d.), according to its mission statement, “collects, preserves, exhibits and interprets visual art from around the world to challenge, inspire and educate the people of Wyoming and beyond, and serves as a gathering place for interdisciplinary discourse, dialogue and community interaction.” In its commitment to this mission, the Art Museum offers an ambitious exhibition program of contemporary art by recognized national and international artists. In this chapter, I will reflect upon two very different experiences in curating artists’ projects at the Art Museum that dealt with controversy. My analysis is based on my work as Director and Chief Curator at the Museum during this time. The first concerns a site-specific sculpture, Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink:What Goes Around Comes Around, an aesthetically beautiful work that aligned the regional pine-beetle epidemic, which was at its peak at the time, to the long coal trains passing through Laramie daily. Commissioned by the Art Museum, the work was installed in 2011 and, following significant blowback from the mining industry and Wyoming legislators, removed in 2012. The second concerns the development of WASTE LAND: A Survey of Works by Brandon Ballengée, 1996–2016, a major exhibition that took place

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four years later. I will explain how, despite early indications of another potential controversy, the Art Museum strategized to navigate successfully through the curatorial pressures of censorship to present this project.

CARBON SINK: What Goes Around Comes Around, 2011 Concept CARBON SINK:  A forest, ocean, or

other natural environment viewed in terms of its ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (Oxford English Dictionary 2019).

From this definition the reader might deduce that a carbon sink is something positive in the natural order of things; the phrase “what goes around comes around” might suggest a cyclical pattern of life and does indeed reference the fact that downed trees under pressure and over time become coal. Created by British artist Chris Drury (b. 1948) for the University of Wyoming campus, Carbon Sink (Figures 12.1 and 12.2) consisted of a monumental scale vortex form, 36 feet in diameter set into the ground, that was composed of beetle-killed pine logs from the nearby Medicine Bow National Forest and Wyoming coal which was placed between the logs. Drury’s (2019a) modus operandi is to “make connections between

Drury, Carbon Sink:What Goes Around Comes Around, University of Wyoming, 2011, installation view.

FIGURE 12.1 Chris

Source: Courtesy of Chris Drury.

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FIGURE 12.2 Chris

Drury, Sketch of Carbon Sink and Its References (Spores, Eye,Vortex), 2011.

Source: Courtesy of Chris Drury.

different phenomena in the world,” more specifically, between the natural world and our human impact on it, with the intent to inspire conversation and discussion. The idea to commission a site-specific work was an effort to expand Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational (2008), a curated group exhibition of outdoor sculpture planned by the Art Museum as its galleries were temporarily closed for renovations. Sculpture provided a way for the Museum to sustain its exhibition and education programs, which were exhibition-based, while simultaneously responding to increasing interest in public art, both on campus and in the surrounding Laramie community. Though the project was originally intended to be temporary (one year), its popularity led to an extension of the original exhibition – in fact, several of the sculptures remain on view – and an effort to continue it by rotating in new work; Carbon Sink was part of that effort. The concept and process for Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitation was established with the University’s Office of the President along the following parameters: the Museum’s Director and Chief Curator would curate the exhibition, an exhibition advisory committee would review and recommend the individual artists’ projects and their locations and the Office of the President would have final approval. The overarching curatorial concept was to introduce new approaches, concepts and materials artists were using as related to the landscape, a theme that many Wyomingites could readily relate to. The committee included representatives from the UW Art Museum National Advisory Board, University faculty, administration and student body. Working under the auspices of the Museum Director, the Advisory Committee met with each of the artists during the latter’s site visit; the Committee learned about the artist and his/her proposal, reviewed

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the proposed location for the work and made a recommendation concerning approval that the Director would send to the President. A separate Laramie Community Committee reviewed the works proposed for off-campus sites, of which there were five.2 The Drury project followed the same process of review as other public sculptures. Drury was invited to create a new iteration of his “cloud chambers” – stone structures for which he is known and that are large enough to enter and view, through a small aperture, the sky overhead as a projection on the floor (Drury 2019b). During his site visit, Drury met with faculty and students, gave a public lecture on his practice, explored options for installation locations on campus and met with the Sculpture Exhibition Advisory Committee. During the site visit, a faculty member remarked to Drury that no one makes the connection between rust-colored forests of beetle-killed pine in the distant mountains and the mile-long coal trains from Wyoming’s coal-rich northeastern region that pass through Laramie daily. This sparked a new direction for Drury and his proposal for an installation, one that would reference his earlier vortex-related installations made from locally collected materials, including coal. As the Museum Director, I expressed a concern that the work could cause trouble with the coal industry, a comment that went unheeded as Drury presented both the original concept and his new idea to the Advisory Exhibitions Committee. The committee was intrigued by the Carbon Sink proposal and encouraged its placement in the prominent place near the University’s historic first building, Old Main, now its primary administrative center, in an area known as the “hollows.” This highly visible site on the core campus offered a flat ground surface and surrounding views from slightly higher elevations. The work was planned to remain in place for at least two years.3 Following his visit, Drury submitted the final proposal for Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around, which was reviewed by the Advisory Exhibition Committee, presented to the National Advisory Board of the UW Art Museum and approved by the University President. Stakeholder discussions around the proposal did not produce cause for concern or anticipate an adverse response.

Installation and removal Drury returned to the University of Wyoming on 10 July 2011 to create Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around. A press release (University of Wyoming News Service 2011) distributed through the university press office announced that he was on campus and informed the public that they could visit the site during the installation process. Three days after Drury’s arrival and weeks before the installation was complete, the Casper Star Tribune, the state’s most widely read newspaper, ran a front page feature story with the headline, “University of Wyoming sculpture blasts fossil fuels” (Pelzer 2011: 1). The article included a quote by Drury capturing the expressive content of the piece: “I just wanted to make that connection between the burning of coal and the dying of trees, . . . but I also wanted to make a very beautiful object that pulls you in, as it were,” he states (ibid.). It also included a quote from the Executive Director of the Wyoming Mining Association criticizing the University for commissioning the sculpture while benefitting financially from the mining industry through the Wyoming State Legislature: They [the University of Wyoming] get millions of dollars in royalties from oil, gas, and coal to run the university, and then they put up a monument attacking me, demonizing

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the industry. . . . I understand academic freedom, and we’re very supportive of it, but it’s still disappointing. . . . [M]aybe they’ll put up a sculpture commending the affordable, reliable electricity that comes from coal on the other end of Prexy’s Pasture [an open area on the University’s central campus]. (ibid.) The Star Tribune article incited numerous responses by politicians and corporate leaders critical of Drury’s sculpture and the University’s role in commissioning it. Several of these responses acknowledged yet dismissed academic freedom while threatening to defund the University, as in this quote from Wyoming’s Gillette News Record: While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget – I’m a great supporter of the University of Wyoming – every now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from. (Hancock 2011) Other responses were more direct; the President of the Petroleum Association of Wyoming sent an e-mail to energy company officials and major University donors suggesting they reconsider supporting the University: The next time the University of Wyoming is asking for donations it might be helpful to remind them of this and other things they have done to the industries that feed them before you donate. . . .They always hide behind academic freedom but their policies and actions can change if they so choose. (Fugleberg 2012: 1) Drury completed Carbon Sink in two weeks, although controversy over the work did not end there. The timing of the media’s original story coincided with the University administration being without a Public Relations Director. The job of handling the crisis was given to the VP of Government and Community Relations, a position that held the interests of the energy industry and the legislature above those of the artist’s work, the Art Museum or even the interests of the University. There was no plan on how to handle a public relations crisis, no knowledge of how to manage the story with the press or respond in a timely manner to the allegations against the University. The Art Museum and its board were not informed about how to proceed or what measures (if any) had been put in place to stabilize the situation. Most who complained never saw the installation in person. Carbon Sink became a political football. The pressures on the University President endured, leading to an e-mail on 10 April 2012 in which the Museum Director stated that it was time for the sculpture to come down. Carbon Sink was removed by the University without announcement in mid-May 2012 after the completion of the academic year, when most faculty and students were gone. Official University communications stated that the work was removed due to water damage from a burst pipe in the campus irrigation system. An investigation initiated by a public records request from Wyoming Public Radio and shared with the Casper Star Tribune conveyed that, on 22 May 2012, the Director for Governmental and Community Affairs notified various

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stakeholders – essential UW alumni, legislators and industry leaders – that Carbon Sink had been removed (Fugleberg 2012). There was no indication that water damage was the cause. The impact of the Carbon Sink controversy has had long-term effects that continue even now. A proposed $2,000,000 increase to the corpus of the Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund, which had contributed funding to Carbon Sink, was eliminated by the legislature (Zhorov 2012); scheduled legislative support for phase two of a renovation and expansion of the future University of Wyoming performing arts center was eliminated and eventually only partially restored; an oversight committee comprised of the Governor and the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources Board (primarily energy industry executives) was established to approve future art on campus; legislative investments to support Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) initiatives were redirected from other programs; and support for the arts and humanities at the University of Wyoming declined substantially. Impacts directly to the Art Museum included a small decline in membership support. The National Advisory Board remained intact (no one resigned). On campus, the Art Museum was “in the penalty box”4 as relations with other arts and humanities departments cooled and the President, energy-supported departments and the University Foundation worked to smooth over major donor upset. Years later, the arts and humanities continue to struggle in the development arena on campus. In the larger perspective, the reputation of the University was again questioned as summed up in an op-ed by the editorial board of the Casper Star Tribune (2012): What the university should have said when critics came calling: The display of any artwork, even a commissioned piece, doesn’t mean an endorsement of an idea. Meanwhile, as the university rushed to smooth any hurt energy company feelings, it also stopped another key process of free speech. Certainly, there was a good chance that some larger coal producers could have stopped or turned down university pledges or donations as a sign of protest. That’s their right and it’s a form of expression no less powerful than speech.We can’t blame energy companies which may stop donating. After all, not many businesses want to give millions to those who they feel antagonize them. No business would do that. Instead, by cowering before the whims of potential donors, the university has sent a very dangerous and disturbing message: Its position can be bought. Or, conversely, it will succumb to any pressure if a donation of any size hangs in the balance. . . . After “Carbon Sink” sank, what can the university do to restore the credibility of this great institution?

WASTE LAND: a survey of works by Brandon Ballengée, 1996–2016 Concept In 2014, two years after Carbon Sink was removed from the University of Wyoming campus, the redirected focus and funding for STEM subjects inspired the Art Museum to explore exhibition ideas that would expand an awareness of the arts and sciences with an intention of initiating Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics (STEAM) on campus. The American environmental artist Brandon Ballengée came to the Art Museum’s attention

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through several recommendations, including that of the then Director of the University’s Biodiversity Institute. Ballengée is not only an artist but also a biologist with international recognition in both fields. In his scientific endeavors, Ballengée works methodically to create research that other scientists can replicate. In his artistic practice, he works across media, using photography, painting, mixed media and video to express his concern for our planet’s changing biodiversity. “When I am creating art, I can explore a more emotive side, a side of self-expression, and allowing me to speculate,” Ballengée (2017) explains. Ballengée is one of the few environmental artists who produces the scientific data that inspires his artwork; others rely on scientific research of others. Ballengée (2019b) also initiates what he calls “eco-actions,” community-based explorations grounded on the model of citizen science and through which he engages the public in activities that encompass observation, curiosity and discovery as an experiential method of advocating for our environment and its future. Over the next year, the Art Museum developed a proposal for a major 20-year survey exhibition (Ballengée’s first in the United States) to open in the fall of 2016, filling all but a few of the museum’s nine galleries and its lobby, encompassing altogether approximately 9,000 square feet. In addition, the proposal included a commission for Ballengée to create an outdoor installation in Laramie’s downtown Depot Park. Titled Love Motel for Insects: Laramie Depot Park Variation, it was scheduled to open three months before the museum exhibition. The site-specific work would transform the historic Union Pacific Railroad cars in Laramie’s downtown Depot Park into an artwork that attracted nocturnal insects. The site would be the anchor point for presenting educational programs and events for all ages related to local biodiversity of insects. If fully implemented, the project would be one of the most ambitious programs presented by the Art Museum, financially, logistically and programmatically. Its projected budget of $200,000 was considerable for a museum with an annual budget of $1.4 million and required considerable external grant funding. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts were among the numerous funding agencies in the development plan for the project. One work on the exhibition checklist was Ballengée’s monumental installation Collapse. This work represents Ballengée’s response to the collective history of the rich biodiversity of the Gulf of Mexico, as impacted by the British Petroleum (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Conceptually, Collapse is a sculptural sketch of the food chain in the Gulf of Mexico. Built in the form of a pyramid, it is composed of dozens of gallon jars arranged on six stacked plates of glass and filled with preserved specimens collected after the oil spill (Plate 12). Ballengée placed the bottom row with jars with species that represent the bottom feeders, the next row with specimens of producers which transform sunlight to energy, the middle rows with smaller fish and crustaceans and the top rows with the alpha predators. Empty jars throughout symbolize declining or lost species. Several jars contain tar balls. The Art Museum was not anticipating any major controversy over the Ballengée project, primarily because none of the work in the exhibition was specific to Wyoming (unlike Carbon Sink). Given the experience with Carbon Sink, however, the Art Museum employed a proactive strategy of introducing the project to the Vice President for Academic Affairs (VPAA) to discuss potential adverse responses and explore connections to academic departments, especially in the sciences. A short conceptual and strategic overview was presented to the Art Museum’s National Advisory Board at their summer 2015 meeting, although it

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was during the following September meeting that an extensive update on the project was shared.This included visuals of key works and the funding plan. Most of the board members responded negatively, saying that the exhibition was “dark,” “one-sided,” “depressing” and “negative.”They were particularly concerned with the working title, WASTE LAND, a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, and with Collapse (National Advisory Board, University of Wyoming Art Museum 2015). It was not the aesthetic merit of Collapse or its collection of specimens that was difficult; rather, it was the assumed condemnation of BP that was garnered from the interpretive texts. BP has significant holdings in Wyoming and many members of the board worried that the company’s work in Wyoming would come under attack if the installation were to be included in the exhibition. By the end of the meeting, many members of the Board expressed surprise and deep concern that the Art Museum was contemplating the exhibition; a few spoke in complete support of moving forward. Shortly after the meeting, several board members privately conveyed their trepidation about the project to friends in Wyoming’s energy sector and legislature. Others viewed Ballengée’s (2019a) website where his self-identification as an “artist, scientist, and environmental activist” seemed to confirm their worst fears. Calls began to come into the Office of the President.

Strategy At about the same time, the Andy Warhol Foundation called to convey their interest in funding the project but asked, given the removal of Carbon Sink, how the Museum was strategizing to alleviate potential difficulties should they occur again. At their suggestion, the Museum sought guidance from the National Coalition Against Censorship. A strategy was then advanced that would address the current situation before it escalated further and that would prepare the Museum and the University for negotiating controversy that might erupt when the project was implemented. This included: • • • • • • •

effectively messaging the rationale for the project so that stakeholders could recognize its value within the wider agenda of the Art Museum and the University, developing a clear communications strategy driven by transparency to counter potential misconceptions, partnering with university departments and community groups to create a robust base of support, conducting advocacy work with key decision-makers to make a compelling argument for approving the project, holding meetings between the artist and key constituencies at pivotal moments in the project’s development to build trust, negotiating with the artist to find language that would not compromise the integrity of the project but would avoid the “red flags” that might trigger potential detractors, and designing a strong community engagement program so that it would be presented before the exhibition’s opening to build familiarity with and understanding of the project.

Through these efforts, the Art Museum and the University were prepared to respond to any controversy over WASTE LAND, should it arise.

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Implementation Foremost in the Museum’s planning process was that of aligning stakeholder discussions with the Art Museum’s original interest in the Ballengée project: to build on the University’s commitment to STEM subjects but, in the process, to demonstrate the value of transforming this commitment to STEAM (the “A” representing Art). The Museum was interested in exploring how art can enhance the study of science, technology, engineering and math and, in so doing, to underscore how the Art Museum contributes significantly to the academic goals of the University. Communications with the National Advisory Board and University administration offered this rationale in a clear and consistent way, reinforcing the idea that the Art Museum had a responsibility to respond to shifting initiatives of the University and has an important role to play for students and faculty. Discussions with the VP for Government and Community Relations and the University’s Director of Marketing and Public Relations were initiated to reintroduce the project’s purpose and ensure that a communications and response plan was in place, if needed. Strategies were shared with the National Advisory Board and the Art Museum staff, aligning all the key players into a cohesive communications plan. Partnerships were formed for a variety of academic programs, including the Biodiversity Institute and the Museum of Vertebrates for the development and implementation of the exhibitions and numerous faculty across campus for academic engagement opportunities with students and the public. Community partners included the Laramie Main Street Alliance, Laramie Public Art Coalition, Laramie Gardening Club and others for the off-campus installation and related event and education programming activities built around the Love Motel for Insects: Laramie Depot Variation. By introducing Ballengée and his eco-actions events prior to the museum exhibition, the community would have direct involvement with the artist and his work before the more difficult museum exhibition, thus creating a supportive cross-community voice.5 With calls coming into the President’s Office, a meeting was convened between the Art Museum Director,VPAA and President of the University. The VPAA fully embraced the project and shared his support with the President; the latter was harder to convince. After presenting the concept and purpose outlining academic and community partnerships and strategies for potential negative public reaction, he agreed that the project should proceed but required the full Museum’s National Advisory Board vote of support. The period between the fall 2015 and winter 2016 was one of focused advocacy with Advisory Board members: the Advisory Board president and I held one-to-one meetings with Board members who had voiced the loudest concerns; the UW Vice President of Marketing spoke with the Board to explain the new communications plan; and Ballengée himself met with the Board twice to listen to and respond to their concerns, taking extra time from his busy schedule to return to Laramie in one case and Skyping in on another. Hearing from the artist directly enabled open and productive discussions and helped the Board to understand Ballengee’s intent and the importance of the project to engaging the campus in arts and humanities initiatives. The Museum’s advocacy and the Board’s willingness to listen resulted in a unanimous vote to proceed. In the wider spirit of transparency, the Board President and several others invited representatives of BP to lunch with them so that they would be informed about the project. Although this invitation was not accepted, the communications between the Board President and BP were productive.

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Ballengée showed the same generosity in his discussions with the Museum in addressing issues of concern as he did in engaging the Board with their worries; for example, discussions evolved about the title of the exhibition, the reference to BP in Collapse and the inclusion of Collapse. Outcomes included retaining the WASTE LAND title but including T.S. Eliot’s poem in the exhibition to create context;6 Collapse remaining on the exhibition checklist, given the curatorial importance of this work to the 20-year survey; and choosing to omit the reference to “BP” in the wall texts because the environmental impact of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was not specific to BP or its intent. It was agreed that all public and academic information about the project would refer to Ballengée as an environmental “advocate” rather than “activist” and include his PhD credential after his name. These simple measures went far to minimize the concerns of the Board and help them to understand the purpose of the exhibition was not sensationalist. Finally, the Museum implemented the full complement of planned academic and community engagement programs before and during the museum exhibition. The pre-exhibition public programs were part of the original plan and partly weather-driven, given Laramie’s high plains environment with a short summer season, but also motivated by the goal of fostering familiarity with and support of the project to help mitigate any potential fallout. Key among these programs was a sold-out art-science weeklong camp for children and the planting of a new pollinator garden in the city park adjacent to the Love Motel for Insects. Essential to advancing the STEAM agenda was a two-day program, Re-envisioning the Laboratory: 2016 Sci-Art Symposium, for which Ballengée was the keynote speaker (University of Wyoming Art Museum 2016b).

Results June 2016 witnessed Ballengée’s dramatic transformation of the historic downtown Union Pacific Railroad train cars into the Love Motel for Insects: Laramie Depot Park Variation with Pollinator Garden (Figure 12.3). As planned, the Art Museum worked with Laramie Main Street Alliance, Laramie Depot Board and Laramie Garden Club, along with other volunteers, to install the artwork and plant a new perennial pollinator garden along the 120-feet length of the train. Programs organized around the off-site installation included Pollinator Awareness Week Festival and Planting Day, Bug Boot Camp, Discover Moths: Citizen Science Project and Laramie Farmers Market and After Hours Picnic (University of Wyoming Art Museum 2016a; University of Wyoming Art Museum 2017). UW’s Biodiversity Institute and Laramie Farmer’s Market were collaborators. A few months later the museum exhibition opened and remained on view, unaltered, from 10 September to 17 December 2016. In the end, WASTE LAND: A Survey of Works by Brandon Ballengée, 1996–2016 was profoundly beautiful, sobering, often difficult and highly challenging. An essay by scholar, critic and lecturer Suzaan Boettger (2017) in the exhibition catalog helped frame the project in the larger context of environment art, as did a Museumproduced video of Ballengée discussing the exhibition (Ballengée 2017). Responses to the project were overwhelmingly positive and its impact extended beyond the close of the exhibition.The project has inspired a faculty Sci-Art Committee which develops programs exploring science and art interdisciplinarity; an ongoing partnership with the UW Biodiversity Institute to continue offering the science- and art-based Summer Teaching Institute; and an evolving relationship with other university departments to continue advancing STEAM research and teaching.

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Ballengée, Love Motel for Insects, Laramie Depot Variation, Laramie Depot Park, 2016, day and night installation views.

FIGURE 12.3 Brandon

Source: Photograph by University of Wyoming Art Museum.

Conclusion Given that the initial concerns about WASTE LAND were limited to those of the Board and occurred nearly a year in advance, the Museum had time not only to manage this immediate response but also to prepare for any forthcoming adverse situations that might develop. Several contributing factors were critical to reversing and overcoming alarmed reactions: Ballengée had a clarity of purpose that was essential in framing our conversations with the Board and University administration and he was willing to be fully engaged in responding to them; the artist was open to discussions about perceptions and “red flag” words that were causing concern and was able to work with the Museum to resolve messaging without diminishing the integrity of his work; the administration was willing to work with the Museum without overreacting by calling for a cancellation of the project; and the administration supported establishing a clear communications plan to be prepared in the case of controversy. Lessons learned that may be helpful when considering projects that may cause reaction include: • • • • •

being clear about the intent with which a project is selected and what higher purpose it may achieve for the museum’s mission, selecting an artist who is sensitive to the potential for controversy and willing to work with the museum as a partner to resolve difficulties, developing a plan of action established within both the museum and the larger institution, sharing the project with museum stakeholders and administration to both inform and garner buy-in, and listening, embracing and responding to criticism and establishing open dialogue to engage in a civil resolution.

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In the end, the Art Museum was able to overcome a devastating controversy and address in an open, forward-thinking way issues that came along.The National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts were major funders to the project, a nod to the professionalism of the Art Museum and a signal that the Museum provides value to its constituents that was recognized in the greater museum field.

Notes 1 This is a commonly used phrase to describe Wyoming. 2 The primary approval agency for off-campus works was the City of Laramie Parks & Recreation Board with the exception of one sculpture that was created by the clients of ARK, a live in facility for physically or mentally challenged adults, for their entryway. 3 The artist has stated that he thought it was agreed that the work would remain in place until it decayed. 4 A comment made by the Art Museum’s Development Officer. 5 Ballengée is an open, engaging, upbeat yet astute artist, scientist and personality who readily connects with his audiences, characteristics that work to his advantage in garnering recognition and support for this work. 6 Ballengée incorporated a number of quotes and poems throughout the exhibition that added context to his work.

Bibliography Ballengée, B. (2017) “Waste Land: A Survey of   Works by Brandon Ballengée, 1996–2016,” Exhibition Video, University of Wyoming Art Museum. Online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbSUiFT-SrQ&t=697s Ballengée, B. (2019a) “Brandon Ballengée.” Online. brandonballengee.com/ Ballengée, B. (2019b) “Eco-Actions,” Brandon Ballengée. Online. brandonballengee.com/eco-actions/ Boettger, S. (2017) “Brandon Ballengée: Amphibious.” In Waste Land: A Survey of Works by Brandon Ballengée, 1997–2016, Laramie: University of Wyoming Art Museum, pp. 9–15. Casper Star Tribune Editorial Board (2012) “UW’s ‘Carbon Sink’ Fiasco Marked by Lies, Censorship,” Casper Star Tribune. 22 October. Online. trib.com/opinion/editorial/uw-s-carbon-sink-fiascomarked-by-lies-censorship/article_0b8b9b0d-7657-528a-9123-28df69ae25f4.html Drury, C. (2019a) “Chris Drury: Artist Statement.” Online. chrisdrury.co.uk/about/artist-statement/ Drury, C. (2019b) “Chris Dury: Cloud Chambers.” Online. chrisdrury.co.uk/category/works_outside/ cloud_chambers/ Fugleberg, J. (2012) “Emails: University of Wyoming Officials Sped Up, Touted Removal of Anti-Coal Sculpture,” Casper Star Tribune. 14 October. Online. billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/ wyoming/emails-university-of-wyoming-officials-sped-up-touted-removal-of/article_68e9f7a376fb-5378-9ca3-0f0170e0bbc5.html Hancock, L. (2011) “Criticism of ‘Carbon Sink’ Art at UW Generates Heat,” Gillette News Record. 13 July. Online. www.gillettenewsrecord.com/news/local/article_4f1d1324-85c0-55e1-bc82-88095a1ae37a. html National Advisory Board, University of Wyoming Art Museum (2015) Minutes of the Advisory Board Meeting. 12 September. Oxford English Dictionary (2019) Online. en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/carbon_sink Pelzer, J. (2011) “University of Wyoming Sculpture Blasts Fossil Fuels,” Casper Star Tribune, 13 July. p. 1. University of Wyoming Art Museum (2016a) “Love Motel for Insects: Laramie Depot Park Variation and Pollinator Garden by Brandon Ballengée, PhD,” Exhibition Video, University of Wyoming Art Museum. Online. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYdAt6wlKQ0 University of Wyoming Art Museum (2016b) “Re-Envisioning the Laboratory: Sci-Art Symposium,” Exhibition Video, University of Wyoming. Online. www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum/learn/symposia/sciart-symposium/index.html

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University of Wyoming Art Museum (n.d.) “Our Mission.” Online. www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum/ about_us/ University of Wyoming News Service (2011) “Outdoor Sculpture Being Installed at UW.” 14 July. Online. www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2011/07/outdoor-sculpture-being-installed-at-uw.html Wyoming Secretary of State (2009) “Constitution of the State of Wyoming.” Article 7, Sec. 16. Online. soswy.state.wy.us/Forms/Publications/09WYConstitution.pdf Zhorov, I. (2012) “Documents Show Artwork Removed Early Due to Pressure.” 28 September. Online. www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/post/documents-show-artwork-removed-early-due-pressure

13 THE BIGGER PICTURE Rethinking curatorial approaches to photographs of childhood Ceciel Brouwer

In 1996, Art Monthly reported on the censorship of three photographs exhibited at Keele University Art Gallery in the UK (Frascina and Harris 1996a, 1996b). The photographs were part of a series on family and included two images depicting the partly naked child of the photographer, Jonathan Harris, during a holiday. The Art Monthly account, written jointly by the photographer and Francis Frascina, a Keele professor, described how police removed the artworks after receiving a complaint from a student. The piece warned of the adverse effects that such acts of censorship create; in Harris’ estimate, self-censorship too easily becomes a pervasive response to the looming threat of legal repercussions directed toward artists and institutions negotiating the display, collection and interpretation of photographs of children. Institutional or police censorship, Harris explained, “could lead to artists abandoning work in areas concerned with, for example, family relationships, sexual and social identity, adolescence and conventions of dress and demeanour” (Frascina and Harris 1996b: 41). The essay inspired a response by writer and photographer Valerie Reardon. In Whose Image Is It Anyway: A Reply, Reardon (1996: 45) critiqued the wholesale condemnation of censorship. Reardon held that photography’s inherently voyeuristic qualities necessitate the prohibition of children’s participation in photographs with the potential to render them vulnerable. At the same time, she made a persuasive argument to shift the focus from censorship toward a more fundamental consideration of the ethical and moral complexities of representation. Unfortunately, the solution she offered – self-censorship – seems little accommodating of such a dialogue. Her rejoinder called for artists and “those in positions of power” to counter “the erosion of boundaries between adult and child sexuality” by keeping images like those of Harris’s children off display: Although I oppose the anti-censorship argument, I am not calling for state control and refuse the position of religious fundamentalist or moral pressure group apologists. Instead, I encourage the concept of self-censorship motivated by the irrational, intuitive sensor of moral constraint, which I believe each of us to possess. (ibid.: 45)

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Universalizing moral constraint, the solution that Reardon suggests, omits the professional and institutional transparency that is needed for an ongoing dialogue about the diffuse boundaries between political pressures, social anxieties and economic threats that seek to restrain freedom of speech, on the one hand, and the constantly shifting territory of moral responsibilities and accountability, on the other. Over 20 years later, the conflicting perspectives of Harris and Reardon epitomize the dialectic dominating ethics discourse on artists’ photographs of young people in North America, the UK, Australia and Western Europe. Lamenting the threats to a thriving civil society posed by the intrusions of censorship and the constraints of self-censorship, as Harris does, numerous scholars and activists have championed the concept of free expression while examining the legal challenges that museums face when exhibiting these artworks (Adler 2001; Williams 2004; Atkins and Mintcheva 2006; Higonnet 2009; Petley 2013). They point out that moral constraint exercised through self-censorship, as emblematic of Reardon’s position, is frequently endorsed by conservative voices during short bursts of controversy over specific high-profile cases. These advocates of free expression have produced a robust trajectory that provides specialized legal advice, case studies and a network of support (National Coalition Against Censorship; Index on Censorship 2015); nonetheless, the ethical complexities that images of young people provoke within the institutional context of the museum require new approaches. A few lone voices have added significantly to the discourse by questioning the role of consent and children’s ability to oversee the consequences of modeling naked (Zurbriggen et al. 2003; White 2008; Isaacs and Isaacs 2010; Grealy 2013). However, the gradually emerging awareness of the scale, damage and historical aversion to recognizing and taking action concerning child sexual abuse has inspired a profound struggle for museum practitioners negotiating the acquisition, exhibition and interpretation of artistic representations of children that the literature does not yet adequately address. This struggle is particularly fraught when the images in question are photographs that express a bodily awareness: a marker of the transition from childhood to adulthood that viewers can perceive as evoking sexuality but can equally be understood as an opportunity for selfrealization. In psychology and phenomenology, bodily awareness is commonly understood as a mode of self-consciousness linked to introspection, a sense of agency and ownership (Bermúdez 2011; de Vignemont 2013; Fulkerson 2014). In artists’ photographs of youth expressing bodily awareness, we find reflected the shifting of identity through the oft-conflicting liberties and constraints placed on childhood. Images such as Richard Prince’s Spiritual America, an appropriated photograph of a child-actress originally produced for a Playboy publication, show how the young female body can at once be an object of desire as well as in need of adult protection. Prince’s appropriation intended to critique this duality but also revealed the radically changed social context in which the image is understood today. Photographs, in particular among the visual arts, “activate” their viewer by posing questions on the circumstances under which they were made, as the artist Charlie White (2008: 179) notes. Photographs of young subjects expose the complex relationship between photography and its context for “to consider the complexities of photographing a minor is to consider photography’s inherent power as well as the forces external to photography, which can use this power for cultural and political manipulation” (ibid.: 179). The museums that exhibit photographers’ contested works of childhood face a backlash of media commentary and, at times, serious legal threats. Nevertheless, direct censorship is

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not exercised often; there have only been a handful of occasions in which UK institutions are known to have omitted or de-installed work after legal, governmental or other external pressure. Spiritual America (1983) was taken off display at Tate Modern in 2009 after police informed staff that the work could be considered indecent (Farrington 2013). A Nan Goldin photograph, Edda and Klara Belly Dancing (1998), which depicts two girls playfully immersed in their own version of hip shimmying, one of them naked and the other partially dressed, was removed from an exhibition at the Baltic Arts Centre in Gateshead in 2007 after a complaint (Petley 2013). Goldin’s anti-aesthetic makes the image appear unstaged and intimate, although the work was later deemed not to be indecent, according to the Crown Prosecution Service (Siddique 2007). Other incidents involved images from Sally Mann who photographed her three young children in the environs of their home in rural Virginia. The Immediate Family (1992) series was investigated by police even before the work went on display at the Photographers Gallery, London, although no charges were brought and the gallery mounted the exhibition successfully (Index on Censorship 2015). Likewise, two photographs by Tierney Gearon were threatened with seizure by London police in 2001 for showing her naked children sporting theatrical masks while playing on a sun-drenched beach. The Saatchi Gallery, where they were displayed, defended the artist against vicious media attacks and refused to censor the work (Travis and Hopkins 2001). Despite their infrequency, each of these events has had a profound effect on the museum sector, reflecting a phenomenon in which active censorship or the threat of repercussions does not have to occur often to have strong impact. In my research on curating photographs of childhood, which involved 23 interviews with practitioners, artists and scholars in the North America, UK and Western Europe, including three that were conducted under terms of confidentiality, I have identified a troubling pattern to curb risk-taking, which often goes unchallenged and remains elusive. Many of the practitioners I spoke with told me that they had repeatedly encountered internal (for instance, from supervisors) and external (for example, from funders) barriers that discouraged them from displaying imagery of childhood from established as well as emerging photographers. Such barriers were often implicit but they demonstrate the modus operandi of self-censorship; the fear of potentially causing conflict within one’s organization or with funding bodies dissuaded the majority of these curators from pressing forward. Some practitioners also indicated fallout that proved even more damaging in the long term – potential legal implications had eroded their professional confidence to engage with the challenging contemporary questions underpinning these photographs. The research found that a number of curators took an alternative tack which sidestepped both the pressures to self-censor and the ethical concerns of exhibiting the photographs by relying on an aesthetic rationale and/or the widely recognized place of the artist within the art historical canon. This approach was more often an unconscious rather than a conscious one, taken by default rather than as an intentional strategy of evasion, and was a phenomenon that I, rather than my informants, identified. No matter how the curators in my study handled the issues, however, taken together, their stories reveal an environment of ethical paralysis within the institution which has, to date, remained behind a veil of silence. What also became clear from my interviews is that the current civic discourse on censorship, consent and child protection, which focuses on the juridical, does not yet adequately capture and address the ethical challenges with which museum curators, educators, directors and other practitioners engage regularly when dealing with photographs of children. If addressing ethics at all, these debates engage with the ethics of the artist and neglect those of

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the curator. Crucially, the questions that define curatorial practice are not only legal but also concern the role of children and young people in the institutional process of negotiating representations. How can collections policies embrace change if the consent of the child shifts? When is self-censorship a valid and justified strategy? And how are the debates, narratives and representations about children – or the lack thereof – affecting and affected by children? To combat a persistent pattern of self-censorship, and to take up the ethical questions of care, practitioners need a discursive debate that both engages with what is already out there – literature on child protection as well as censorship – and confidently addresses the issues located in the gray zone between the two seemingly radically opposed viewpoints of Harris and Reardon. In order for museum practitioners to effectively address these issues, a more dynamic ethics discourse is necessary. This chapter aims to help foster such a discourse through the new museum ethics, which critiques an overreliance on codes as a default response, encouraging instead a proactive approach in which values/principles and case studies are considered, along with codes, in everyday practice, to more effectively acknowledge and analyze the complexities of ethical issues (Marstine, Dodd and Jones 2015: 74). Firmly grounded in dialogue, ethics discourse recognizes the insights of practitioners as a source of guidance. The UK Museums Association embraced the approach in 2015 in its new code of ethics. The code is embedded in ethical principles, linked to case studies and respects the agency of those employing the guidance. The reflexive nature of this model encourages invigorated ethical deliberation to inform decision-making processes as an alternative to the risk management and aesthetic justifications that so often take precedence when museums attempt to curb heated debates. In this chapter, I explore the ethical strategies that one particular institution has successfully employed to empower themselves to show images of young people expressing bodily awareness in ways that draw out the significance of the works and support the agency of children represented by these museum narratives. The North Carolina Museum of Art’s (NCMA) exhibition The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood in the NCMA’s Photography Collection (26 September 2015 to 3 April 2016) adopts a radically novel agency-driven interpretive approach. Experimental in nature, the exhibition forms a testing ground that helps us to imagine how new curatorial approaches, which are ethically informed and inclusive, can reconcile artistic freedom with the collection, interpretation and display of photographs of children expressing a bodily awareness.

Negotiating the terms upon which children’s bodies are represented at the North Carolina Museum of Art As part of the socially sensitive climate in which museums operate, it is increasingly difficult for curators to govern confidently the narratives around the photographs of children they collect, interpret and display. The lack of control that leads curators to self-censor is, indeed, symptomatic of the blurry boundaries of the law with which museums grapple (McClean 2016) and the social anxiety through which images addressing childhood are perceived (Adler 2001; Lumby 2010). In addition, as wide sections of the public engage with the complex photographs museums display exclusively online, even carefully thought-through interpretation and juxtaposition are not always fully appreciated in the court of public opinion. Easily reproduced, manipulated and appropriated by those advocating either children’s protection or freedom of speech, artistic photographs of children are often understood as part of a diffuse

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digital image landscape that merges sexualized commercial representations of children, pornography and artistic reflections. Without the much-needed contemplative framing that the physicality of the art gallery produces (Hinkson 2009; Faulkner 2011), digital spaces do not often accommodate the complex narratives that artistic images of this nature demand. But it is not just curators and artists who exercise diminishing control over the terms upon which artistic photographs of children are understood. Children themselves remain markedly absent from debates around sexuality, adolescence and representations of the body. In the last few decades, children and young people have been granted a sophisticated set of rights by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1990 (Office of the High Commissioner Human Rights n.d.). The convention conceptualizes the right to protection as well as the right to actively participate, represent and express oneself, most notably in Article 12, the right of children to express themselves, and Article 31, which recognizes the right of children “to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.” In practice, however, the freedoms granted by the UNCRC are not always recognized and acted on by adults (Lundy 2007; Mai and Gibson 2011). Especially in Western countries, children’s lives today are increasingly controlled and shielded (Prout 2000: 304). Research has shown that a persistent understanding of children as innocent and incapable permeates their lives through the public policies and popular narratives that affect them (Critcher 2002; Robinson 2008; Kehily 2009, 2012). In debates around contemporary photography expressing a bodily awareness, “the welfare of children is either defended. . ., or dismissed as irrelevant to the issue,” argues sociologist Kylie Valentine (2008). In response to questions around issues of consent, control and bodily autonomy, notes Valentine, children’s rights can be leveraged in multiple ways. Child protection activists emphasize young people’s “particular vulnerabilities.” In this view, the right to protection is given more weight than the right to participate. It results in a blanket prohibition on children’s participation in images and debates about sexuality and representation. As opposed to a quick dismissal of children’s rights altogether, or their right to participation, a more nuanced response toward both children’s “universal capacities” and their “particular vulnerabilities” could lead to a decidedly more complex conclusion (Valentine 2008). As Valentine (2008) comments: One response advocates, in the name of protection, banishing children from the arena of public visibility. The other, which is far messier and unknown, would make children publicly visible and active in new ways. It would take, it seems to me, an extraordinarily cynical view of participation to argue that the former has greater emancipatory potential. Valentine illustrates how contested this arena of children’s rights is, but her insights also suggest that museums’ active engagement with the social relevance of images of childhood can facilitate a new kind of participation that allows children to redress and transform the ways in which adults think about adolescence, sexuality and representation. The Energy of Youth at the NCMA provides a case study demonstrating the potential of this new kind of participation. The project deploys a series of alternative interpretative strategies to negotiate the difficult social, legal and digital terrain – adopting a methodology that accepts risk by shifting the emphasis from aesthetics to the social and political resonance of images of childhood expressing a bodily awareness. It pilots curatorial approaches which lay the groundwork for an ethical discourse that dismantles the multiple barriers museums encounter when displaying sensitive

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photographs of children and, as I will argue in the second part of this article, engages children and adults in debates about children’s agency. The NCMA has collected contemporary photography since 2004 and shows its growing collection in rotating collection displays that comprise its entire photography gallery. The institution’s strategy is to collect and exhibit pieces that are among the most nuanced in the oeuvres of both local and internationally known photographers depicting childhood. It then encourages a dialogue between those works and the histories, politics, cultural and social contexts in which the museum is situated. As with all museums, staff at the NCMA negotiate institutional structures that require prudence and a familiarity with social and political pressures. Located in the northern region of the southeastern United States, North Carolina has both a strong conservative core, mainly in rural areas, and a growing liberal, urban base, which means it operates in a context that is politically fluid and increasingly diverse (Fausset 2014). Because the state has witnessed a huge influx of new residents over the last few years, its political climate is undergoing rapid change (Adamy and Overberg 2016). At the time of my research, ideological tensions manifested during debates on the “bathroom bill,” legislation passed in 2016 to regulate transgender bathroom access. Portions of the bill were repealed after national protest (Barnett et al. 2018). The NCMA finds itself at the very heart of American contemporary politics of representation; North Carolina is in many ways representative of much larger trends in the rest of the country but here, because of the complex and dynamic political arena, they are played out with “more intensity” (Zengerle 2017). In response to this unsettled landscape, the NCMA is wary of addressing politics directly through its exhibitions so as to avoid the risk of being perceived as biased. As the only state museum in North Carolina, the NCMA is frequently perceived by its audiences as entirely publicly funded (though, in fact, it relies primarily on philanthropy and earned revenue), adding another dimension to an already strong sense of accountability (North Carolina Museum of Art n.d.). What the conflicting accountabilities of the NCMA mean in reality is that the institution is expected to assume a neutral stance on contemporary political issues. Nonetheless, its larger exhibition trajectory and programming are purposeful and committed to what is at play in its surroundings, often providing vital context for addressing and engaging intimately with socially, politically and culturally relevant debates. The way they do so is largely informal and dynamic but pronounced, for example, in its decade-long commitment to move both African-American and African art from the margins to the center of its work. In 2011, the NCMA staged what was then the largest exhibition to date of work by contemporary African-American artists, the title of which was a political statement in itself – 30 Americans (Inge 2011). Today, the NCMA embeds the work of contemporary African-American artists throughout the permanent collection. In 2017, informed by ideas of community focus groups, the museum re-envisioned its African Galleries, tripling them in size and commissioning new, critically engaged work for them (Howe 2017; Perrill et al. 2017). This approach, which fosters a conversation between historical and contemporary works that evokes their relevance in multiple contexts, is part of a wider move toward ethically engaged curatorship within museums. Curators concerned with the mobility of their permanent collections explore how alternative ways of interpreting objects can elicit new kinds of knowledge, moving away from the traditional narratives embraced by art museums. Irene Campolmi (2017) has observed how a generation of art institutions, including London’s Tate and New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), have begun to reinterpret their collections

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by displaying them thematically, asking how fixed collections can be organized in ways that are relevant to the needs and interests of current audiences. By prioritizing the social, political and cultural knowledge of their publics over the aesthetic and art historical knowledge of their curators, these institutions “invite perspectives and interpretations of artworks that had until recently been left unexplored,” as Campolmi (2017: 78) argues. The Energy of Youth, as I will illustrate here, adopts this strategy and demonstrates critical possibilities for curators to address sensitive topics and invite divergent views. Curated by the NCMA’s Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Jennifer Dasal, The Energy of Youth, as both a title and an exhibition, serves as a metaphor for the multiplicity of childhood. Including 28 images acquired by or gifted to the institution, the display adopts a nuanced perspective on what it means to be a child, advocating “that there is no one way, no universal aspect of what childhood can be or is” (Dasal 2016). Dasal’s aim was to counter essentialist representations of young people while simultaneously depicting the oftoverlooked challenges underpinning young people’s lives.The museum’s photography collection addresses childhood through mostly familiar, everyday scenes that depict the oft-difficult social landscape of which children are part, touching on economic inequality, race, migration, adolescence and representations of the body. The works are complex and nuanced, requiring active engagement, as Dasal (2016) asserts: “some people expect there to be heavier, larger issues at play but I think that is possibly a quick dismissal, because they are not looking closely enough.” This subtle and critically engaged approach to photography is evident in the work on display in The Energy of Youth. For instance, Titus Brooks Heagins’ vivid oversized portraits of African Americans, Fabienne (2009) and Devonte (2008), invite a conversation on otherness and common humanity between sitter and viewer (Heagins 2010); Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s Untitled (1959), eerily obscuring his young sitter’s identity with an old man’s mask, examines age and mortality, family and seclusion, intimacy and distance. A critical eye is evident, too, in Sally Mann’s Shiva at Whistle Creek (1992). Mann’s work has frequently been the object of conflict in both the UK and the United States, evoking divergent reactions mostly, although not exclusively, from conservative voices, on the one hand, who accuse her of sexualizing her own children, and those sympathetic to art, on the other, who laud Mann’s technical skill and maternal eye. The photographer’s vocal advocacy of her position as a mother and artist was met with stiff criticism when her children were young and her primary subjects but her now-adult offspring have defended their mother’s collaborative way of working and the benefits of engaging in art at a young age. Mann’s most debated images expose the tension between adults’ perceptions of children as innocent and the messy truth about childhood’s conflicts, contradictions and awkwardness. The photograph on display in The Energy of Youth, Shiva at Whistle Creek is certainly not one of Mann’s most boundary-pushing works (Apter 1997; Parsons 2008). It is, instead, exemplary of a trajectory in Mann’s work that is subtle in the way it depicts childhood as multifaceted and unconstrained through seemingly candid photographs of her children at play, dirty and sometimes naked. Shiva is an introspective portrait of one of Mann’s daughters, crouching in a stream with her hands folded in front of her. Her apparent nudity adds to the image’s spiritual reference. Despite the varied oeuvre of which Shiva is part, the high-profile controversy that erupted with the exhibition of Mann’s earlier work continues to shape her reputation: many of the curators I interviewed at institutions in North America, the UK and Western Europe suggested the photographer’s entire body of work is frequently the subject of policing, external and internal disputes and self-censorship.

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The striking innovation of The Energy of Youth stems from its ability to gently encourage viewers to confront and unpack the adult assumptions and cultural sensibilities of childhood that this collection of works explores. Without dismissing outright the controversial histories and previous interpretations of the individual photographs, the exhibition emphasizes the place of these images within an important trajectory of photography recounting the stories of marginalized young people. Jennifer Dasal, the exhibition’s curator, enables multiple viewpoints by choosing not to deploy extensive or prescriptive curatorial interpretation; Dasal (2016) explains that there is “not necessarily one angle, direction or explanation for the images” and that “we can all come into them differently based on our experiences.” At the same time, however, she redresses essentialist and overly simplistic public narratives in which young people rarely have a distinct voice through a concise introductory text for the exhibition that articulates a clear objective in support of children’s agency.The text summons viewers to embrace children’s muted perspectives while making meaning of the adult-generated images on display. It reads: This collection of images demonstrates that there is no universal experience of childhood and instead challenges viewers to consider the unique experience of each child as deserving compassion and understanding. Many of the works ask us to consider the development of identity and to recognize how aspects of gender, ethnicity, race, or class begin to affect our lives from a very young age. These photographs also ask us to think critically about how a society might value, learn from, and support its youngest members. (Dasal 2015) As the text conveys, Dasal adopts the values of respect and compassion to introduce a relational reading of childhood that is – as an ethical framework – unequivocally supportive of a perspective of children as active social agents. It is also distinctly feminist in its embrace of care and understanding as critical concepts in the approach to interpreting the experiences and emotions of children, as captured by the photographs. In doing so, Dasal’s succinct, nuanced text not only makes the case for a more empowering view of children but also exposes the silences, gaps and muted perspectives created by the absence of children’s own voices in narratives about them and the topics that concern them.

Redressing the absence of children’s voices The critical distance assumed by Dasal in The Energy of Youth encourages audiences and museum staff to explore how a view of children as active holders of rights could wield new knowledge of the photographs on display. In their work on the representation of disability in museums, Richard Sandell and Jocelyn Dodd (2010) note that projects engaging with rights often hinge on the museum’s ability to employ multiple interpretive approaches, in which the curator’s voice performs a role as mediator. The most successful of these efforts prioritize the authentic experiences of those affected by the museum’s inadequate and biased representations of them (ibid.: 16). From a similar perspective, Karen Kelly, Senior Editor at the NCMA and responsible for interpretive strategies, recognized The Energy of Youth as an opportunity to include children at the very heart of the NCMA’s practice.

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Kelly’s own career trajectory is shaped by children’s museums, many of which engage children in what is often thought of as mature subject matter and find creative and critically engaged ways in which to do so. The Boston Children’s Museum, at which Kelly was previously employed, models its child-focused galleries after Michael Spock’s vision to create a world away from the adult-centered reality in which young people live (Frankel 1999). It strives to give children ownership over museums by empowering them as audiences, participants and representational subjects (Mayfield 2005; Enseki 2007). Drawing on this ethos, Kelly and the NCMA’s editorial team (in line with their exhibition development and audience engagement focus) initiated a small-scale innovative collaboration with a child to create an audio interpretation for the NCMA’s online spaces, voicing a young person’s response to five of the most resonant works on display in The Energy of Youth. The audio files were published on the museum’s blog, a platform staff employ to offer alternative perspectives and engage hard-to-reach communities. Functioning as a digital intervention, the project was situated outside what are often perceived as the more risk-averse spaces of the physical gallery. Kelly selected then 8-year old and art-savvy Leo to develop the online audio interpretation (Kelly 2016). Being an avid participant in the museum’s art summer camps, Leo was selected as someone to whom the NCMA’s collections, staff and spaces were already familiar and who found the museum “invigorating,” according to his father1 who works at the museum (Leo’s Father 2016b). The project was initially set up to involve multiple children but, with a uniquely complex set of ethical demands and a tight deadline, staff eventually resolved to collaborate exclusively with Leo. Because he was a relative “insider,” Leo’s participation may have, to some degree, compromised the alternative spirit of the project; however, it also created a context through which the museum could set conditions for Leo to be both protected, as a minor, and empowered to speak with an authentic voice. In the last two decades, participatory practice in the domain of children’s rights has assumed an array of realizations (Clark 2006), all of which invite “the direct involvement of children in decision-making about matters that affect their lives, whether individually or collectively” (Hill et al. 2004: 83). Not all of these practices enable the equal exchange of power between adults and young people. Some museum scholars have drawn on what Nancy Fraser (1992: 147) aptly termed “invited spaces” to illustrate how an inability or unwillingness to share control undermines the value of participatory practice (Lynch 2011; Kidd et al. 2014). At NCMA, however, staff exercised a degree of control not to limit Leo’s agency but, instead, to enable the project to unfold, taking into account the intense political, social and cultural anxieties at the doorstep of museums negotiating contemporary photographs of children expressing a bodily awareness. While conceptualizing Leo as a competent social actor, NCMA staff entering into this knotted territory recognized that the project demanded care and self-reflexivity. Carefully navigating the boundaries of dependency and empowerment, the editorial team set a series of conditions that dismantled some of the traditional barriers imposed on children and their participation in museums. For instance, by closely involving Leo’s parent, staff were able to sensitively negotiate the subtleties of power between adults and children, staff and collaborators. Leo’s father provided support, guidance and consent, generating joint ownership with his son over the project and establishing an environment in which Leo could speak freely and confidently. To solicit the interpretation, Kelly assembled a list of guiding questions for Leo’s father to ask him. These were intended as a starting point rather than a directive toward

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a predetermined outcome. Leo and his dad engaged in a fluid and lively conversation, “talking about what he [Leo] thought about a bunch of pictures for an afternoon” (Leo’s Father 2016a). With a tender and affecting high-pitched tonality that articulates intelligence, enthusiasm and the lived experiences of childhood, Leo’s fresh readings of very complex works challenge adults listening to him to reconsider common assumptions both about photographs of children expressing bodily awareness and about the agency of young people to engage with difficult topics.

Rewriting the story The NCMA’s experiment constitutes an exploration of how children enter and exercise agency in debates around the terms at which they and their bodies are represented – and how museums might begin to act on this. As opposed to describing the photographs, Leo’s interpretations are primarily narrative-based and adopt pathways into the imagery distinctive from those typical of adults; Kelly (2016) asserts: he wasn’t describing what he was seeing symbolically. It seemed to me that [his interpretation] was more story based. The story might have symbolic elements in it, but he wasn’t making equations the way adults make equations and this is pertinent to the topic that we’re interested in, I think. Rather than drawing on a political or socio-contextual framework to understand the works, Leo constructs narratives that deploy humor and personal experience to explain the actions and emotions of the sitter. This is evident in his brilliantly astute response to Sally Mann’s Shiva: I think that this goes down so she’s getting ready to either, one, make a cannonball [jump into the water] or just positioning her legs to just go down. . . . Is she wearing a bathing suit? It’s either she’s wild, which is a pretty good chance, or she is taking a shower in the lake. (quoted in Evans 2015) Leo’s voice, as Kelly suggests, underscores the creative power of the image and demonstrates that the sexualized body is a distinctly adult problem. While drawing on the personal, his analysis remarkably also sheds new light on the scholarly discourse. Indeed, curators have long pointed out that Mann’s work often shows children in possession of a “feral quality” (Hammer 2007), akin to the adjective “wild” that Leo uses but, where curators are at risk of eroticizing the naked body through aesthetic judgments made through art historical jargon, Leo’s childhood perspective provides different readings that resist objectification. Picking up on the ambiguous and moody atmosphere in many of the photographs, Leo aptly articulates what visual clues they provide and how those elements make him feel. This is a productive interpretive response to work that is difficult to read or confusing, such as the highly experimental photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s distinctive black and white images of children, their faces and limbs obscured through haunting masks, dolls and doll parts, often provoke the darkest corners of the imagination; as one journalist comments,“their outrageous gruesomeness unlocks a Pandora’s Box of interpretations” (Gallagher

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2011). In discussing Meatyard’s Untitled, however, Leo contributes his own innovative understanding, which emphasizes the importance of empathy: I think he’s holding the doll – don’t cry because this might be a little sad – I think he is holding the doll because he was married to somebody and they had a baby. But then the child died, and he wants to remember that child. He’s just sitting in the corner, just trying to have some deep thoughts and also, a lot of people sit in corners while they are sad or have emotional feelings – and you can even tell by his mask. (quoted in Evans 2015) Leo’s focus on the feelings of the sitter, as well as the viewer, provides a potent corrective to the ways that aesthetic discourse distances us from the personal. Leo’s reliance on affect encourages viewers to identify with the sitter, even when the sitter might seem far removed or unfamiliar. The small shirtless boy at the center of Titus Brooks Heagins’ oversized portrait Devonte meets his viewer with a defiant gaze that is typical of the photographer’s subjects; the boy’s exposed chest and belly, however, convey the vulnerability of his age, as they evidence the remnants of “baby fat.” Heagins’ visual narratives give voice to those outside and marginalized by hegemonic cultures, exposing uneasy truths to his viewer: “Heagin’s insistence on placing them [his subjects] squarely in front of us as declarations of their common humanity calls into question our own capacity for tolerance and openness in the face of difference” (Porter 2010: 10). Leo helps the viewer approach Devonte through care and understanding: He’s probably thinking, what is going on and where in the woods am I going to be going? I think he was climbing over that rock over there. Maybe his shirt got caught on a branch and it just ripped off and he can’t get it off. . . . How old is he? (quoted in Evans 2015) Leo’s eagerness to understand the circumstances of the sitter suggests that he sees him as a friend and that, perhaps, we should too. The exploratory approach toward collaboration with young people that the NCMA adopts through the channeling of Leo’s stories reveals how shifting the focus from protection to participatory rights by embracing the views of children provides a novel way for museums to address the social, ethical and political significance of contemporary photographs of children, as well as their art historical impact. Indeed, the model that Leo establishes to engage in a respectful and considered way, unclouded by judgment, with Devonte and the other individuals in these photographs, on their own terms, serves as an ethical intervention. It reveals the problematic nature of adult assumptions in reading contemporary photographs of children, not only in relation to sexuality but also across a much broader spectrum of what it means to be a child. As a testament to the significance of his role, Leo’s Father (2016a) is perhaps best able to articulate how an interpretative strategy that embraces a child’s perspective can be a meaningful alternative to self-censorship by offering meaningful engagement with the direct experience of childhood: Hearing a child’s perspective may be a disarming, gently inviting gesture to experience what may be a confusing picture, one where a curatorial voice of authority may be

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stifling, or even seem confrontational. I also feel that any story or narrative that can be shared to allow someone to enter into an artwork is valuable, and when missing, can keep our general audience at arm’s length from challenging work. Leo offers a way into the photographs that a curatorial voice alone cannot. The NCMA’s move toward more a democratic and ethically engaged practice is an urgent and compelling project. The command of Leo’s voice and his distinct perspectives on the humanity of the sitters in The Energy of Youth call into question the limitations and restrictions museums currently impose on how children exercise agency. What opportunities are denied by censoring the work that testifies to young people’s most complicated state of being? And how does participation enable children to define and defend themselves against adult assumptions? These questions firmly locate participation in a children’s rights framework: recognizing children’s cultural citizenship means museums must engage critically with children’s potential to participate in the subjects that concern them, even if these subjects are considered “difficult” by adults. In this view, inviting children to contribute is not simply a choice but an ethically informed imperative.

Conclusion The interpretive project for The Energy of Youth is perhaps best understood as an experiment into the ways in which children can subvert adult interpretations of childhood. The NCMA’s approach toward its images of childhood is not necessarily pioneering in the methods it employs to collaborate – museum practitioners have developed more radical ways for children to effect change in institutions – but represents innovation in its appeal for a bolder and richer understanding of children’s capabilities outside the overtly “safe” limits of participatory territory. Marking a significant museological inroad toward the process of advancing children’s agency, as well as toward overcoming the polarized discourse pitching freedom of expression against censorship, the project’s negotiation of participatory and protection rights demonstrates one way that museums can take initiative in advancing children’s rights beyond policies, conventions and legal instruments and resisting the pressures of self-censorship. As shown by the small but significant steps of the NCMA, art museums have the potential to attend to children’s agency more effectively than they do today. Projects that seek to amplify young voices validate children’s power to exercise and preserve their right to be heard. Rewriting narratives according to their experiences, stories and perspectives gives children an opportunity to shape their own rights as part of a system that has traditionally excluded them from the spheres of influence. As Patricia Holland (2004) suggests: Over history, children have been the objects of imagery, very rarely its makers.Their voices have had only limited access to the channels that produce public meanings, and even then the tools that are available to them have been inevitably honed by adults. Like all groups without power, they suffer the indignity of being unable to present themselves as they would want to be seen or, indeed, of even considering how they might want to be seen. (ibid.: 20) Recognizing the inequalities inherent in any art depicting childhood involves not only granting children the right to self-representation but also affording them the power to inform public opinion.

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The NCMA case opens up possibilities through which museums might continue to explore what agency means. Alongside an increasing need to explore the terms at which museums represent childhood is an inevitable demand for institutions to rethink the way children’s contributions, rights and autonomy are governed, for example, in relation to the sitter’s consent and the role curators might play in respecting that consent. The politicized debates about consent that surround high-profile public controversies have not only stifled the collecting and exhibiting practices of institutions but also render the sitter of the photograph voiceless (Valentine 2008). In an institutional context, taking on a duty of care might not always involve returning to the source (the artist, child or parents), which is often not possible or desirable in practice; other, more productive ways forward can be explored through an ethics discourse in support of museums and children. This includes reconceptualizing what it means to consent to ensure that children maintain a degree of control over images once they enter into collections or exhibitions. Treating the negotiation of authorship as a fluid and ongoing process, rather than a momentary transfer of rights, can inform curatorial interpretation of the work and recognize children as holders of rights. Addressing persistent ethical concerns such as the issue of consent, in addition to the lack of agency that children currently enjoy in debates about themselves, can help practitioners make considered, confident decisions about whether and how to collect, exhibit and interpret photos of children expressing bodily awareness in the face of extreme pressure to self-censor. Perhaps more so than any other public institution, museums are well-placed to negotiate what remains an almost irresolvable subject through understanding and compassion. The Energy of Youth is a gesture (Marstine 2017) with significance beyond its small scale. With this project, the NCMA helps us to imagine the fluidity of what it means to be a child, a fluidity so profound that it can be reshaped by the very subjects on which it is imposed.The NCMA’s approach evidences that museums can swap a strategy of self-censorship for something that is much more valuable to children’s lives.

Acknowledgments The research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the Midlands­ 4Cities Doctoral Training Programme. The author would like to acknowledge and thank Jennifer Dasal and her colleagues at the North Carolina Museum of Art for their support in the research. The author would also like to thank the editors for their thoughtful suggestions and careful reading of this chapter.

Note 1 To respect Leo’s confidentiality, I have not provided the name of his father.

Bibliography Adamy, J. and Overberg, P. (2016) “North Carolina’s New Residents Reshape Its Election Landscape,” The Wall Street Journal. 9 August. Online. www.wsj.com/articles/north-carolinas-new-residentsreshape-its-election-landscape-1470764212 Adler, A. (2001) “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography,” Columbia Law Review, 101(2): 209–273. Apter, E. (1997) “Just Because You’re a Man: Emily Apter on Maternal Fetishism, Mike Ketfey, Mary Kelly and Sally Mann,” Make: The Magazine of Women’s Art, 75 (April/May): 3–8.

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Atkins, R. and Mintcheva, S. (eds.) (2006) Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression, New York: The New Press. Barnett, B.S., Nesbit, A.E. and Sorrentino, R.M. (2018) “The Transgender Bathroom Debate at the Intersection of Politics, Law, Ethics, and Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 46(2): 232–241. Bermúdez, J.L. (2011) “Bodily Awareness and Self-Consciousness.” In Gallagher, S. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–179. Campolmi, I. (2017) “Institutional Engagement and the Growing Role of Ethics in Contemporary Curatorial Practice,” Museum International, 68(271–272): 68–83. Clark, A. (2006) “Listening to and Involving Young Children: A Review of Research and Practice,” Early Child Development and Care, 175(6): 489–505. Critcher, C. (2002) “Media, Government and Moral Panic: The Politics of Paedophilia in Britain 2000– 1,” Journalism Studies, 3(4): 521–535. Dasal, J. (2015) “The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood in the NCMA’s Photography Collection,” Exhibition Label, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, 26 September 2015–3 April 2016. Dasal, J. (2016) Interview with the Author. 29 March. De Vignemont, F. (2013) “The Mark of Bodily Ownership,” Analysis, 73(4): 643–651. Enseki, C. (2007) “Let’s Go to MY Museum: Inspiring Confident Learners and Museum Explorers at Children’s Museums,” Curator:The Museum Journal, 50(1): 33–40. Evans, L. (2015) “A Child Responds to Images of Youth,” Circa: The NCMA Blog. Online. www.ncart museum.org/blog/view/the_energy_of_youth Farrington, J. (2013) “Taking the Offence: Defending Artistic Freedom of Expression in the UK,” Conference Report, Southbank Centre, Index on Censorship, London, May 2013. Faulkner, J. (2011) “Vulnerability and the Passing of Childhood in Bill Henson: Innocence in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Parrhesia, 11: 44–55. Fausset, R. (2014) “North Carolina, in Political Flux, Battles for its Identity,” The New York Times. 23 September. Online. www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/us/north-carolina-in-political-flux-battles-forits-identity.html Frankel, D. (1999) “Museums and a Learning Community.” In Pitman, B. (ed.) Presence of Mind: Museums and the Spirit of Learning, Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, pp. 161–166. Frascina, F. and Harris, J. (1996a) “Social Control and Permissibility: A Case History,” Art Monthly, 194: 40–41. Frascina, F. and Harris, J. (1996b) “Power and Responsibility,” Art Monthly, 197: 46. Fraser, N. (1992) “Rethinking the Public Sphere:A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” In Calhoun, C. (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 109–142. Fulkerson, M. (2014) The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of Human Touch, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gallagher, L. (2011) “Meatyard’s Gruesome Images Provoke Varied Interpretation,” San Francisco Examiner. 15 December. Online. www.sfexaminer.com/meatyards-gruesome-images-provoke-variedinterpretation/ Grealy, L. (2013) “Reorienting the Henson Debate: Child Pornography, Consent and the Masturbating Adolescent,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 27(1): 67–79. Hammer, M. (2007) The Naked Portrait (ex. cat.), Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Heagins, T. (2010) “Desire and Otherness: Artist’s Statement.” In Desire and Otherness (ex. cat.), Raleigh: Frankie G. Weems Art Gallery, pp. 8–9. Higonnet, A. (2009) “Pretty Babies,” Index on Censorship, 38(1): 105–116. Hill, M., Davis, J., Prout, A. and Tisdall, K. (2004) “Moving the Participation Agenda Forward,” Children and Society, 18(2): 77–96. Hinkson, M. (2009) “Australia’s Bill Henson Scandal: Notes on the New Cultural Attitude to Images,” Visual Studies, 24(3): 202–213. Holland, P. (2004) Picturing Childhood:The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery, London: I.B. Tauris. Howe, B. (2017) “The Mingling of Folk and Fine Art in NCMA’s Revamped African Gallery Stirs Sharp Insights and the Usual Anxieties,” Indy Week. 5 July. Online. www.indyweek.com/culture/art/ mingling-folk-fine-art-ncma-s-revamped-african-gallery-stirs-sharp-insights-usual-anxieties/

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14 SMART TACTICS Toward an adaptive curatorial practice Svetlana Mintcheva

How many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue? Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize lecture (Morrison 1993)

In censorship controversies, it is the artists who are remembered. They are the ones that gain heroic status for challenging the pieties of their day. Those who present the work of artists to the public are rarely known.They may be publishers – few know the names of the courageous individuals who first dared publish James Joyce’s Ulysses. They may be curators and museum directors – like the director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center who took the risk of showing the groundbreaking Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, The Perfect Moment, when nobody else would. Or they may be the founders of small art spaces – like The Sanctuary in Buffalo, New York – serving as laboratories for artists to develop cutting-edge work and giving it a home when larger institutions shut it down. And yet, those who present controversial art to an audience are often more vulnerable than the artists who made the work. In the early twentieth century, publishers faced jail terms and fines that could bankrupt them for publishing the likes of Theodore Dreiser or James Joyce (Boyer 2002). And even in our supposedly more enlightened century, alternative art spaces (like The Sanctuary) have been shut down on the pretext of minor code infractions but really because of the work they hosted (Crowe 2012).The last few years have added a different kind of pressure: ethical scrutiny. This results in calls for the blacklisting of artists because of their personal moral transgressions or removal of work because of its alleged insensitivity to how it may affect marginalized groups. Curators – and museum directors – may find themselves in the center of a public relations crisis; in court, as happened with Dennis Barrie, the director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center (Parachini 1990); or out of a job, as happened with Olga Viso, the director of the Walker Art Center, after a controversy over a public artwork (Chow 2017). As a result, the pressure on curators to self-censor and play it safe is high. Not every curator and arts organizer has the determination to stand up to authority or mass pressure (especially that coming from the communities they serve) and take personal risks so as to protect an art

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project. In 2019, Patrick Charpenel, the newly appointed director of El Museo del Barrio in New York, canceled a long planned Alejandro Jodorowski retrospective at the last minute after community discord built up over the Chilean-born filmmaker’s well-known, provocative – though subsequently retracted – 1972 claim of having raped an actress while filming El Topo (Moynihan 2019). Charpenel’s decision may have been a smart move in view of the fact that, less than a year before the El Museo cancellation, María Inés Rodríguez, who curated the traveling Jodorowski show for Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (CAPC), had been fired from her position as director of the museum. The reason given was that her artistic program was “too demanding” (Rea 2018). Most decisions to self-censor remain invisible as the calculation of risk happens early on in the curatorial process and often blends with the legitimate and necessary process of curatorial selection and decision-making. Yet the two are different: while there may be many reasons to include or exclude a specific work or a particular artist in the programing of an institution, self-censorship can be defined as the decision to cancel a show or exclude a work or an artist solely because of (potential) external pressure and the fear of controversy or repercussions. Curatorial self-censorship has broad ramifications. As art critic Jason Farago (2019) notes, since the middle of the twentieth century, when the curated exhibition became the principal launch pad of contemporary art (taking over from the salon, the dealership and the independent show), the curator has combined the exhibition development once done by artists and collectors with the analytical work of the historian and the critic; it is now the curator who assigns “meaning and importance to new art.” This expanded role of the curator makes their work essential to cultural life and the public sphere in general. Artists may freely create, they may even sell their work and be part of private collections but, if the public has no access to diverse and radical work through a solid infrastructure of venues, that work is unlikely to have an impact in the world at large. The developing neoliberal cultural ecosphere in the United States is one where noble statements of support for free speech are often shadowed by the less noble demands of funding needs, as well as by community and special interest pressures and, ultimately, by fear of controversy. This ecosystem fosters a kind of constitutional – or structural – pre-censorship that constrains the ability of the art to offer unexpected or dissonant perspectives on political and social reality. The arts in the United States have been in the crosshairs of cultural, political and economic debate for some 30 years – starting with the Culture Wars over public funding in the late 1980s. But, as I argue here, the much more recent growth of social media and an exacerbated sense of political crisis have multiplied the pressures faced by art institutions.The plans for any exhibition in America today must start with the joint questions of “can I show this?” and “at what cost – reputational, financial, relational – to myself and the institution?” The response to these necessary questions precisely maps the boundaries of what cannot be done, the outer limits of artistic freedom. This process of boundary exploration – which is at the same time boundary formation – is what I call structural (pre)censorship. Structural (pre)censorship is continuous with self-censorship but not identical to it: while self-censorship entails an initial curatorial decision that is being reconsidered in view of particular fears and pressures, structural (pre)censorship defines boundaries beyond which a curator would not even venture to think: these are the boundaries of cultural taboo, of what counts as art, of the very protocols and economics of exhibition programming within cultural institutions.

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How can curators and art organizers resist the various pressures and challenges they face internally and externally? How can they dare pursue their vision, yet not have to fear for their livelihood? How can they respond to ethical imperatives without resorting to what Carole Talon-Hugon (2018) has called “ethical censorship,” a policing based on a rigid binary of good and bad actors, acceptable and inacceptable ideas? Recognizing the urgency of these questions today, as part of my work with the Arts Advocacy Project at the New York-based National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), I have been working proactively with curators over several years in the context of responding to censorship incidents, including conducting curatorial workshops and interviews. I have sought behind-the-scenes clarification of the pressures curators face and inquired about creative ways they have met and negotiated these challenges. In 2016–2017, the Arts Advocacy Project surveyed 200 curators nationally and internationally on the pressures they face and how they have responded to these pressures (National Coalition Against Censorship 2018). This chapter draws on the survey, as well as on my work on specific cases of controversy over the last 20 years, to identify the power vectors at play in current challenges and examine some of the most productive ways curators have developed to handle such challenges. As the sociocultural environment continuously mutates, new challenges are sure to emerge. And even in the current environment, there are no one-size-fits-all recipes for success. What I am suggesting here, beyond the details of various curatorial tactics, is a specific approach – what I call an adaptive curatorial practice. As I define it, adaptive curatorial practice is a way of working that is always actively aware of the sociopolitical environment and the interest vectors converging onto art institutions yet succeeds in negotiating the resulting pressures and preserving the integrity of the artist’s and curator’s vision. Adaptive curatorial practice is a new concept that is meant to recognize the elements of an already existing practice, one in which many experienced curators are already engaged. This chapter is roughly divided into two parts: the first looks at pressures to censor and self-censor, starting with a brief history of how some of these pressures have developed in the last 30 years and then focusing on specificity of the present moment of political turmoil and technological transformation. The second part – based on the assumption that the openness of our public sphere depends, to an extent rarely recognized, on the ability of curators to negotiate these pressures – analyzes various strategies and advocates for tactical approaches to dealing with sensitive and potentially controversial subject matter. While much of what I identify as pressures in the art ecosystem in the United States can also be found in other neoliberal societies, and while curators worldwide share many of the tactics deployed in adaptive curating, my analysis is grounded in the specifics of political history and current context in the United States.

Pressures Learning to fear To get the full picture of the fears plaguing US art institutions today, one needs to look back into the last decades of the twentieth century. Several decades ago, museums and other large art institutions started opening their doors to programs showing contemporary art in varied new experimental mediums (Atkins 2006). Politically and socially engaged experimental artwork broke out

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of alternative spaces into the mainstream. Established arts institutions began showing work, inspired by the feminist and gay liberation movements, which often frankly explored sexuality, as well as work irreverent toward religious taboo.1 In publicly supported alternative spaces, artists introduced work about the AIDS crisis, expressing outrage at government indifference to it in exhibitions like the 1989 Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space Gallery in New York. Politically and religiously conservative groups saw this development as a challenge to “traditional” values (which was true) and hence an opportunity to rally their constituencies. Fiscal conservatives, though not necessarily ideologically aligned with the religious right, also saw an opportunity: to cut public funding for the arts, which was, to them, an unnecessary waste of taxpayer money. Thus, the arts provided an opportunity for different sections of the political right to unite in the common cause of cutting federal funding for the arts (Mintcheva 2014). Some 10 years of high profile controversies over public funding of the arts followed – known as the Culture Wars. The main object of attack, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the federal agency providing arts funding, survived, although not unscathed: its funding was drastically diminished (Koch 1998). But the Culture Wars left a much more insidious legacy to the arsenal of censorship: the argument that taxpayers should not be “paying for offensive art.” Art institutions also learned just how all-encompassing and exhausting controversy can be for museum staff and they became more fearful. The experience of the Culture Wars gives deep resonance to every new vague threat of funding cuts. Anxiety about future retaliation through funding decisions can force an institution to censor itself. Outright censorship – which is difficult in the United States as it conflicts with First Amendment free speech protections – becomes unnecessary. In 2010, for instance, C.Wayne Clough, the then Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, ordered a video to be removed from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, hours after the exhibition was criticized by US Republican Congressional Representative John A. Boehner, the incoming House Speaker, and incoming Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Gopnik 2010). Boehner strongly suggested that the Institution’s funding would be at risk if the work were not removed, stating “Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January when the new majority in the House moves to end the jobkilling spending spree in Washington” (quoted in Somander 2010). For a museum director to take a firm position standing up to government officials may mean risking major financial damage to their institution.

Art world in turmoil National attention to art controversies waned after the heated years of the Culture Wars. Local skirmishes continued – and the Arts Advocacy Project at NCAC often heard the claim that taxpayers should not be supporting offensive art. However, with the one exception of the 2010 censorship of Hide/Seek at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, controversies were confined to the town or county where they occurred and did not hit the national news. Then, in 2016, an already polarized nation acquired a polarizing president. The election of Donald Trump was more of a symptom of polarization than its cause. Nevertheless,Trump’s divisive rhetoric reverberated through the sphere of culture, and, possibly, contributed to additionally exacerbating conflicts, especially around work exploring racism, police violence and the political standoff in the Middle East. And conflicts were increasingly

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accompanied by calls for censorship, now coming from the left. Even before 2016, sections of the cultural left had begun to abandon their traditional support of free speech principles in the name of protecting marginalized groups from pain and offense. Advancing the ideals of social justice was no longer just about inclusion and diversity but increasingly about censorship: the excision of certain artworks or artists from the public sphere.2 Left-wing protests against exhibitions and art world inequities are not new. Take, for instance, protests against the exclusion of black artists from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1969 show Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968 or the many 1980s and 1990s actions of the feminist Guerrilla Girls Collective highlighting gender disparities in the art world (Cotter 2015). However, the frequency and influence of such protests, their power to mobilize a cohort of young artists and activists, and, most of all, the expansion of their goals beyond demands for inclusion to demands for the removal and destruction of artwork are creating a sea change in the art world. The defining controversy crystalized around Open Casket, Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till, included in the 2017 Whitney Museum Biennial. Tortured and lynched in 1955 because a white woman claimed he offended her with sexually suggestive remarks, 14-year-old Till became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement after his mother decided to publicly release a photograph of his mutilated corpse in its casket. Schutz’s painting, based on this historic photograph, was included in the Biennial along with many works on race-related issues by artists of color. The curators, Christopher Lew and Mia Locks, both Asian American, intended the high-profile Biennial to reflect the national conversation about race and police violence against black men (Lew and Locks 2017). This was solidly within the tradition of the Whitney Biennial to engage with the issues occupying progressive political thinking. Schutz’s painting, much as it aligned with the theme of the Biennial, provoked a firestorm of calls for removal and destruction: because it was painted by a white woman; because it “appropriated” a painful history that did not belong to her; because it retraumatized viewers (Smith 2017). The Whitney stood by its curatorial decision and responded by opening its space to a discussion program in which a variety of positions were voiced. Poet Claudia Rankine, founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute and a well-respected figure, was invited to curate and lead the event.The role of museum staff, including the two curators of the Biennial, was to listen. Rankine brought in a broad and varied range of participants, some calling for destruction of the work, all recognizing the racial tensions in the art world (Whitney Museum of American Art 2017). Divisions remained though the immediate tension dissipated. There were aftershocks but the brunt in this case fell on Schutz, a leading mid-career US artist. A few months after the Whitney controversy, a group of artists and activists (unsuccessfully) advocated the cancellation of Schutz’ mid-career retrospective at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, solely because of her having created the Emmett Till painting (the work itself was not part of the ICA exhibition) (Halperin 2017). The Biennial curators, perhaps because they are themselves people of color, or perhaps because they took a back seat in the controversy, were not negatively impacted. Two years later, in 2019, Mia Locks became Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A month or so after the Whitney controversy, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis faced questions and then loud protests over a new sculpture to be installed in the large public sculpture park in front of the institution.The design of the sculpture, which looked somewhat like playground equipment, was, in fact, a composite of seven gallows used in executions by

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the US government over the past 200 years. Conceived by socially engaged multimedia artist Sam Durant, the sculpture, titled Scaffold, sought to draw attention to the death penalty and its effects (Eler 2017). What fired up the controversy was the inclusion, among the historically sourced gallows designs, of one modeled after the gallows used in 1862 to execute 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, about 80 miles away from the Walker Art Center. Minnesota has the largest Native American population in the country and, when some Dakota nation members recognized the Mankato gallows in the sculpture, they claimed deep emotional disturbance, the sense of being traumatized by the work (Eler 2017). While the race of the artist (who is white) was not the central issue, the claim to tribal ownership of historical pain and the right to its representation was central to the protests. Just days before the official opening of the sculpture park, the director of the Walker, Olga Viso (2017), issued a lengthy apology for “any pain and disappointment that the sculpture might elicit” and promised to “provoke discussion about how the Walker can strive to be a more sensitive and inclusive institution.” This apology, rather than acting as a bridge for reconciliation, sparked a wave of protests against the work. Just days later, representatives of the city and the Walker met with the artist and with Dakota elders and agreed that the sculpture would be removed and disposed of in any way the Dakota wished. In addition, all intellectual property rights to the work would go to the Dakota so that it would never be recreated anywhere (Eler 2017). Just months later, after a ten-year tenure, Olga Viso stepped down from her position as Director of the Museum. The Whitney and Walker cases brought to light difficult questions regarding content engaging with the history of racism and ethnic violence in America: do white artists have the right to use that disturbing material? Do reminders of painful history only serve to perpetuate historical trauma? Are museums further demonstrating their structural racism by displaying material that is deeply disturbing to traditionally oppressed groups? If they want to be both relevant and committed to social justice and diversity, shouldn’t museums consider their programming through an ethical lens sensitized to the concerns of minority groups and work in partnership with them? Above all, what is the role of art institutions in addressing racism, discrimination, historical violence and social inequality at a time when the country is facing a crisis of legitimacy and trust when it comes to both government and the media? These are all timely questions. However, when the political passion informing them fires up calls for removal and destruction, the situation becomes uncannily reminiscent of the familiar outrage traditionally led by the religious right and conservative politicians. Protests would be counterproductive to activists’ own goals if institutions – fearing backlash – begin to avoid exploratory engagement with difficult political issues and settle for a superficial celebration of diversity. “Multicultural is now marketable,” writes Holland Cotter (2019) in his review of the 2019 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) expansion – which also restructured the Museum’s version of modernist art history to include more women, artists of color and non-Westerners – “To ignore it is to forfeit profit, not to mention critical credibility.” But multiculturalism in the museum should be more than a development seamlessly connected to the neoliberal commodification of difference.To be politically meaningful, multiculturalism needs to face the hard tensions accompanying the deep transformation of democracies that have invariably been homogeneous at the top. And this is both a challenge and an opportunity for art institutions.

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Weighing the risks No matter how a controversy is resolved, the message to the field at large is that particular content can, simply put, cause the institution a major headache – and more, cost a director or curator their position.The long-term effects public censorship controversies have on exhibiting institutions add to the myriad of other political, community or financial pressures these institutions face in the process of preparing an exhibition. In response to those pressures, curators routinely modify exhibitions before they open, change wall texts or add programming. Among the art museum directors and curators whom the Arts Advocacy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship surveyed from 2016 to 2018, over a third expressed some doubt as to whether museums today are the best place to address difficult subject matter (National Coalition Against Censorship 2018: 13). As Lisa Freiman (quoted in ibid.: 9), former director of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art, shared in her interview with NCAC: [s]elf-censorship is one of the main things we encounter in museums because we are thinking of what potentially can go wrong; there is no question that people do censor themselves.The past years in the art world and on university campuses have given many administrators pause about weighing the integrity of programming against the possibility of public outcry. A curator (quoted in ibid.: 8), who asked to remain anonymous, seconded that sentiment: You have to make a decision: is the work important enough? Is it at the heart of your mission and therefore worth it to take on controversy? Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes it’s no. While a large number of respondents repeated the aphorism “museums should be safe spaces for unsafe ideas” and referred to museum mission staples like “democratic dialogue” or “openended conversations” as articles of faith, the picture became more complicated when we insisted that our respondents think not so much about what museums should be, but what they are in practice. To this the usual answer, as formulated by one participant, was “The role of museums is often said to be to ask tough questions, but in practice, this is not quite the case” (quoted in ibid.: 13). Museums vary, of course, but, as Tobias Ostrander, Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida, shared, their determination to attract an ever-broader public is founded upon the assumption that, for this broad public, the museum is a place of entertainment. Insofar as museums also offer sociopolitical critique, this critique is usually framed in very general terms (a critique of consumerism, for instance), rather than engaging in topically controversial or directly political issues (ibid.: 14). In our 2016 interview, Ostrander noted that interest in directly political material has diminished over the last 10 years (ibid.).3

The mixed blessing of social media Social media has dramatically expanded the reach of art institutions but has also created a fertile new breeding ground for controversy. The instantaneous and wide reach of social media

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quickly breaks disciplinary and social boundaries. As a result, debates that once may have been confined to people familiar with the visual arts can now easily spread to online special interest groups and other unexpected participants from different discursive backgrounds. Controversy erupted in 2015 around cultural appropriation and orientalism in a program the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston had, rather unfortunately, called Flirting with the Exotic when the event was announced on social media. The program invited visitors to don replica kimonos while standing before Claude Monet’s La Japonaise. After social media backlash, much of it coming from people who admitted they never saw the show or entered the museum, the program was canceled (Boucher 2015). But there is much more going on in social media than publicity gone awry. Social media, with its unprecedented mobilizing powers, amplifies and gives traction to all kinds of activist campaigns. This is a double-edged development: on the one hand, it gives voice to previously marginalized positions; on the other hand, because cheap speech and the quick-gratification logic of “clicktivism” does not allow for depth of engagement, it gives power to easy and reductive interpretations. Because social media does not allow for the kind of control of interpretation that museums can have within the institution (via layout, wall texts, labels, tours and programming, for example), de-contextualized components of a show can quickly circulate to fuel activist agendas. Individuals or groups protesting an exhibition or program can use social media to rally large numbers of supporters very quickly, making it appear that an institution is facing massive opposition. That may not reflect the true state of affairs, as those signing petitions do not always research the details of the situation. As an example, some of the hundreds of thousands of supporters of a Change.org petition to remove work involving animals from the Guggenheim’s 2017 Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World show did not realize (as the comments accompanying the petition made clear) that, in two of the three works in question (Peng Yu and Sun Yuan’s 2003 performance Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other and Xu Bing’s 1994 A Case Study of Transference), the Guggenheim was presenting video documentation of historical performances, not live reenactments. Nor did they care, in their militant moral righteousness, to understand the rationale behind the use of animals by Chinese artists working in a very different cultural tradition and a repressive environment. The online protest was followed by threats of violence. The Guggenheim’s administration, which had stood firm in the face of the online petition, was unwilling to take the risk or place a heavy police presence in its galleries and decided, in consultation with the show’s three curators,4 to keep blank the video screens on which the documentation was to be projected. The one piece where live animals were to be present – Huang Yong Ping’s 1993 Theater of the World, which was, ironically, also the title piece of the show – was exhibited as an empty structure. Explanatory labels and an artist’s statement by Huang Yong Ping explicitly referred to the censorship. The controversy shifted the conversation around the censored pieces in Theater of the World to contemporary Western concerns over art and cruelty to animals, entirely occluding their original impact in the very different political context of China at the turn of the twenty-first century. In heated social media debates, nuance, experimentation and ambiguity often become liabilities. This creates challenges for curators exhibiting art that strives to comment on the social but doesn’t carry its message upon its sleeve.

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Negotiating controversy and showing difficult content: toward an adaptive curatorial practice If you take on a controversial topic, you have to have a good strategy with the highest impact and least collateral damage. Jill Snyder, Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Cleveland, Ohio (quoted in National Coalition Against Censorship 2008: 22–23) Entirely avoiding controversy is impossible – one can never predict what content will spark opposition. The notorious Sensation show of young British artists, for instance, came to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1998 with a history of previous controversy. However, the work that caused a scandal when the show initially opened at the Royal Academy of Art in London in 1997, Marcus Harvey’s 1995 portrait of child murderer Myra Hindley, went mainly unnoticed at the Brooklyn Museum. A very different work provoked protests and the ire of the then Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York in 1998: Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) (Ellison 1999). Rather than focusing on avoiding controversy, curators need to ensure that, should potential objections arise, the museum’s response is one of productive engagement, rather than a confrontational standoff. In a society where First Amendment law protects the arts from direct government censorship, preemptive self-censorship presents one of the greatest challenges to a truly diverse and lively cultural sphere. Consequently, it is the agility with which curators and museum directors navigate internal and external pressures that determines the openness of the cultural field – much more so than individual controversies. This part of the curator’s work is more important than ever in twenty-first-century multicultural yet polarized societies. But what exactly does such agility entail? In the course of my almost 20 years of work advocating for artistic freedom, as well as through a series of curatorial workshops and many focused interviews with experienced curators, I have identified key components of a practice I call adaptive curating because of its sensitivity and responsiveness to sociocultural context, as well as because of its nimble negotiation of a variety of internal and external pressures. What are the components of an adaptive curatorial practice? First and foremost, to display sensitive content, preparation needs to start long before a show is even conceived and be embedded in the daily operations of an institution and in an individual curator’s professional practice. There are important strategies to be deployed after controversy hits but nothing can compensate for lack of preparation.

Researching context and building networks of support Today, as museum professionals are increasingly mobile, nationally and internationally, a deliberate and focused effort to understand the local environment and build local networks of support is a crucial part of preparing an exhibition. Even before any program or exhibition is planned, curators and museum administrators need to research the institution’s social, political and economic context, find out who the key political actors and local special interest groups are and where the social tensions lie. They should reach out to these groups formally and informally and establish and nurture relationships that could be activated when necessary. Failing to do so could be costly to an institution.

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In 2016, for instance, the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) in St. Louis, Missouri, was hit by a particularly antagonistic controversy over Direct Drive, a solo show of work by Kelley Walker. Walker, a white artist, repeatedly appropriates images related to Black culture and history, including photographs of racial unrest and Civil Rights protests, but also images from the covers of men’s magazine King, featuring scantily clad black women. Walker enlarges and variously overlays the photographs with white, milk and dark chocolate and with white toothpaste. Both the curator and museum director had recently moved from the West Coast to this Midwestern city where racial tensions were high (Boucher 2016). As CAM staff reminded the museum’s Senior Directors, “St. Louis exists as a central location for the contemporary civil rights movement in the aftermath of the unrest in Ferguson” and “black staff members, allies and community members are constantly inundated with the recurring . . . deaths of black people at the hands of police” (Nichols et al. 2016). The result of ignoring this context and, instead, emphasizing the formal aspects of the work (CAM 2016) was a controversy that quickly grew out of hand and eventually led to the resignation of exhibition curator Jeffrey Uslip (Muñoz-Alonso 2016). Being knowledgeable about context is crucial. But it is not enough. When a show with sensitive subject matter is in the planning stages, this knowledge needs to be activated through a deliberate process of building relationships and having preliminary conversations with local stakeholders outside the institution. Such partnerships can help define appropriate educational programs and framing, send the message that the institution is listening and offer credible advocates for the show if controversy arises. The same process applies when traveling a show to different regions, both nationally and internationally. Different political contexts must be thoroughly considered in what are often very tight time frames. This is especially important for exhibitions addressing issues of importance to local minority or special interest groups. The controversy over Sam Durant’s Scaffold, described above, is a case in point – when Olga Viso, the Walker’s executive director, first saw the work, it was installed in Kassel, as part of the large international exhibition documenta (13). In the context of Minneapolis, some 80 miles from where one of the gallows constituting the piece was used in the largest execution in US history, Scaffold had a very different presence. Conversations with Dakota elders in advance of the installation could have changed the fate of the work. Too many times, public conversations are only convened in the aftermath of controversy as a means of damage control. However, consultations with stakeholders should pre-date a potentially controversial show.The 2015 exhibition Zones of Contention: After the Green Line at the Weatherspoon Museum, in Greensboro, North Carolina, explored the concept of borders and featured artists with different perspectives on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. In preparation, curator Xandra Eden (2016) held informal discussions with local Jewish and Arab groups over several months. Though not everybody agreed with every aspect of the programming around the show – that is not necessarily even desirable – community concerns had ample opportunity to be voiced and the exhibition went on smoothly. Open discussions about programming within the institution are just as important as outreach to community groups. Everybody in an institution, from front-of-house staff to trustees, needs to be comfortable talking about the controversial aspects of a show. Gallery attendants are often the institution’s representative face for visiting audiences.Trustees, on the other hand, may be called on to defend exhibition programming in various sociopolitical contexts outside the institution; they should not be taken by surprise. It is the curator’s responsibility to prepare staff, as well as trustees, to answer questions about an exhibition’s purpose within the general mission of the institution.

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Just like outside conversations, discussions within institutions should offer a two-way exchange: listening to what staff members have to say is just as important as preparing them with talking points. At a time of high mobility among museum leadership, the expertise of long-standing staff familiar with the specifics of local context should not be ignored. In the 2015 controversy at CAM St. Louis, for instance, staff members had attempted to alert the director to their concerns around the exhibition in an informal way; had their voices been taken into account, CAM would have prepared more effectively for what came to be a highly divisive exhibition. In a letter addressed to CAM Senior Directors, black administrative staff members and allied colleagues noted their disappointment that the concerns and insights of museum staff, expressed in the period leading to the opening, were not honored and taken into consideration by the curator (Nichols et al. 2016). As CAM’s Director Lisa Melandri (2017) realized, after the fact, structures assuring transparency and dialogue with the entire team need to be established well before a controversial show is conceived. When a project takes place in a university museum or gallery, it can be helpful to get support from other university departments and student groups and work in collaboration with them. In 2018, Ohio University’s Kennedy Museum of Art wavered over a racially sensitive project involving a performance and installation featuring the “lynching” of a confederate flag.The artist, John Sims, was determined to overcome the curatorial fears and administrative opposition that he had repeatedly faced around this work. He succeeded by mobilizing the University’s Black Student Cultural Programming Board, Multicultural Center and Department of African American Studies, as well as off-campus community groups, including the Black Life Action Coalition, United Campus Ministry and Appalachian Peace and Justice Network, among others (Garnett 2017). This broad support made a show containing relevant but extremely volatile material possible. Long term, there is a widely recognized need to bring a broader array of experience into the art institution itself by hiring leadership and curatorial staff of diverse backgrounds.This is an urgent task if art institutions are to retain a position of cultural relevance. It will also help strengthen institutions’ credibility when presenting sensitive subject matter.

Framing and labels Perhaps the most important factor determining reception, especially when an exhibition or program deals with sensitive subject matter, is the framing and contextualization of the work. Framing includes title, exhibition design and arrangement, wall texts (including potential warning labels), programming, publicity and publications. It involves the curatorial, education and marketing departments. With museum audiences more diverse – both generationally and culturally – than ever, and in a context of political tensions and social media distortions, framing an exhibition with interpretative content has an importance that exceeds its ostensible function of fulfilling the educational mission of the institution. It is also a way of maintaining a degree of interpretative control in the face of confrontational and reductive readings, as well as preempting criticism. This is especially true in the case of sensitive subject matter. Indeed, the Whitney Museum’s first response to the Dana Schutz Open Casket controversy was to modify the label and explain, defensively, the artist’s motivation in choosing the subject. After the controversy over the Kelly Walker show at CAM St. Louis erupted, the museum placed a partition wall with additional information about the show, as well as an advisory label (Greenberger 2016).

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When framing is carefully considered in advance so as to take into account political and cultural sensitivities, the potential for negative response diminishes: in The New School Gallery’s Voices of Crisis, a 2014 exhibition about the 1962 race crisis in the United States, for instance, the curator decided against installing an enlarged quote by African-American writer and activist James Baldwin in its front hallway because it contained the word “nigger” (Subramaniam 2015). This was a smart decision in view of the 2019 investigation of New School creative writing professor Laurie Scheck, who faced discrimination complaints for reading and discussing that same quote in her classroom (Flaherty 2019). The importance of framing – be it through wall text or in publicity materials – to the reception of the work, especially when that work is politically or culturally sensitive, sometimes leads to internal tensions. In 2006, curator Chris Gilbert (2006) resigned from the Berkeley Art Museum because the leadership of the institution, together with public relations and audience development staff, rejected his description of an exhibition as being in “solidarity” with the leftist revolutions then in progress in parts of South America. Labels that take an explicit political position can run against an art institution’s commitment to serve a broad audience. However, institutions can be overly cautious about demonstrating a specific political orientation, sometimes almost absurdly so: one anonymous respondent recalled the director of an art institution arguing against the use of Situationists’ texts in a show about the creative misuse of city space because it would be too political (National Coalition Against Censorship 2018: 44). Museums are, of course, not politically neutral spaces. Claims to neutrality, as former Queens Museum director Laura Raicovich and others have argued, deliberately turn a blind eye to an institution’s history and position within the political field (Mintcheva and Raicovich 2020). But is there a distinction to be made between recognizing this history and position and taking a direct political stance on divisive issues? And when museums take active political positions, which audiences are museums taking into consideration? By catering to those audiences may they be alienating others and hence abdicating their role as much-needed open spaces for discussion in a divided society?

Warning signs If we can properly inform the visitor, it’s their choice and if they’re offended it’s their freedom, but we have protected ourselves and been responsible. Steven Matijcio, Curator, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (quoted in National Coalition Against Censorship 2018: 47) I believe very strongly we shouldn’t surprise parents or sensitive viewers, and in my experience the thing that upsets people the most is being surprised. It’s not our place to force that.We will let parents know with signage in the front or in our site guides about sensitive materials. We feel we can tell parents and they can decide. Anonymous curator (quoted in ibid.: 47) Warning signs are a way to protect an institution from visitor objections: if a viewer decides to proceed in spite of a warning, they have, in effect, consented to see something that may potentially disturb or offend them. But warning signs also have the effect

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of prejudicing viewers, reinforcing taboos and framing subject matter as inherently problematic. They also privilege the assumption that there is a right not to be offended – or disturbed. One of the most appropriate placements of a warning sign I have seen was in the lobby of the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center in the early 2000s. The advisory was a general one, warning of the potential to encounter disturbing material on display; it did not single out one show or a specific work. Thus, the advisory satisfied the goal of protecting the institution from complaints without prompting the viewer to look at a specific work or artist as offensive. In Best Practices for Museums Managing Controversy, NCAC (2013), in collaboration with a number of other art service organizations, offers a model statement that art institutions can use to notify audiences of potential discomfort without telling them which pieces should offend and disturb them. The statement reads, in part, “The works this institution exhibits may awe, illuminate, challenge, unsettle, confound, provoke, and, at times, offend.” It leaves the viewers free to have their own interpretative approach, acknowledging the power of art but also implying that the encounter with a work of art is dynamic and unpredictable. Advisory signs are standard practice today and notify audiences about a wide swath of content, anything that may be controversial or contain nudity or violence. But they initially arose out of concerns about children and parental complaints about sexual or violent content. The presence of children remains one of the most important audience-related factors driving signage, as well as decisions about the layout of a show and even, sometimes, content. Indeed, most frequently, signs warn viewers that the subject matter may not be appropriate for children (National Coalition Against Censorship: 46) The question that often comes up before a show is “could you bring a school group in here and design a tour so that a docent could do a tour without engaging with that material?”(ibid.: 45). The most prevalent approach, outside of labeling, is to place sensitive pieces in such a way that you could lead a school group tour through a show without seeing them. Moving an artwork to avoid the chance that children may see it, especially in areas that are open and where disclaimers cannot be added, is sometimes a topic of debate between education and curatorial departments (ibid.: 45). It is not a matter of evaluating what young people are prepared to see, but one of avoiding parental complaints and accommodating school groups. As Jill Snyder, Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, Ohio notes, art institutions are aware that “[t]here are restrictions that teachers and schools have, and you have to respect that” (ibid.: 45). In a country where some school districts are ready to penalize teachers for taking students on a parentapproved trip to a museum because the students are exposed to nudes, as happened to a Texas teacher who took her students to the Dallas Museum of Art, such concerns are not to be taken lightly (Blumenthal 2006).

Social media as framing Exhibitions are also framed by the publicity around them and, increasingly, this is the publicity circulated widely on social media. Such publicity can have a major impact, positive in its broad reach but negative if it fires up opposition. In the 2015 public outrage over Flirting with

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the Exotic at MFA Boston, mentioned earlier, most of those calling for the cancellation were responding to the title and the online publicity and often explicitly stated that they had not seen the show or participated in the kimono project. Similarly, in September 2018 the Greenspon Gallery in New York closed a show – or, rather, never even officially opened it – after outcry and threats followed the initial announcement of the exhibition on social media. The reaction had nothing to do with the works included; it focused solely on a moment in the personal history of one of the artists in the two-person show, Boyd Rice. A musician active in the avant-garde noise scene, Rice had notoriously appeared in a late 1980s photograph next to Bob Heick, the leader of the white supremacist group American Front, and on a public-access cable TV show with the white supremacist Tom Metzger. Rice denied allegations of being a Nazi but these past associations had made him a persona non grata (Greenberger 2018). Nevertheless, his work, much of it abstract, had been previously shown in New York without any high-profile controversy. That was no longer possible in 2018, a year in which deplatforming, i.e., denying a “bad actor” the opportunity to a “legitimizing platform” for their speech – be it a campus auditorium, a literary festival or a gallery – became a widespread tactic of the US liberal left.5 Some of the work in the Greenspon Gallery show, especially that by the other artist, Darja Bajagić, engaged in complex and critical ways with symbols of totalitarian and fascist power and the show could have been productively framed on social media as an examination of currently front-row issues such as white supremacy, the “alt-right” and the meaning of complicity. According to the curator, Chris Viaggio (2019), the goal of the exhibition was, in part, “to engage with the current political hysteria of our moment by complicating and frustrating its stubborn binaries and all-or-nothing ideological currents.” However, the announcement simply stated the names of the artists without acknowledging the controversy around Rice or offering a curatorial statement framing the show and describing the rationale behind it. That omission turned out to be a grave mistake. Rather than complicating binaries, the social media storm and subsequent cancellation of the exhibition ended up activating those binaries and reconfirming polarities.

Conclusion No matter how well-framed a show and how much advance collaboration a curator has done with the community, protests may still materialize. But when they do, being prepared and having allies make all the difference. Speed and reach – both of which require preparation – are key when responding to controversy in the age of social media. NCAC (2013) has outlined, in collaboration with national and international art service organizations, a set of detailed guidelines, Best Practices for Museums Managing Controversy.They spell out specific action items in handling complaints, such as identifying who is behind them and what their platform and underlying purpose is, taking action such as quickly issuing a statement and organizing an offline face-to-face event where grievances can be aired and different positions heard, as well as managing press relations. The Best Practices document emphasizes the importance of initial preparation, from establishing clear selection criteria and engaging stakeholders to preliminary public relations and internal communications: the backbone elements of an adaptive curatorial strategy. Yet, best practices need to be dynamic so as to meet rising challenges. Whether and how to respond to social media campaigns, for instance, requires an informed judgment call. Some

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campaigns can be ignored; some need to be addressed. In either case cultural institutions must stay true to the responsibility of providing an open space for difficult or controversial art while also demonstrating their recognition of the legitimacy and importance of critique and protest. This becomes very difficult when an institution is threatened with violence. Conversation is hardly an option in such cases, which have become much more frequent worldwide in the years since the “Best Practices for Museums” was published in 2013.Threats of violence often succeed in their goal to force institutions to self-censor. New and difficult questions emerge: when faced with such threats, should a museum be intimidated and opt out of opening a show or showing an offending work? Or should the institution disregard threats and potentially put audiences and staff at risk? These questions require careful risk assessment and demand that the institution look beyond its walls and work with law enforcement groups to evaluate the seriousness of the threats and examine options for ensuring safety. In spite of all the challenges I have noted and the tense political atmosphere around art institutions today, it is encouraging that the long-term trend noted by the curators and museum directors we spoke to in our survey is toward embracing more difficult work. One of the reasons for that is the professional formation of today’s curators and museum directors; they have grown up professionally with artists who are also political activists. Many museum directors have cut their professional teeth at artist-run and artist-focused spaces, where they developed an interest in experimental and socially engaged forms of art. Adaptive curatorial strategies can go far in meeting the challenges of our polarized environment, where protest campaigns can quickly and cheaply amass hundreds of thousands of clicks, and where the visibility of art institutions makes them desirable targets in garnering publicity for a cause. More than ever, art institutions need the leadership of prepared risk takers equipped to preserve the complexity of a show and integrity of their vision.

Notes 1 Two of the foundational scandals that launched the Culture Wars concerned well-established public institutions which dared exhibit “offensive” work: the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which hosted a traveling exhibition featuring Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ in 1989, and the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, which took on The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990. 2 While teaching a class on Censorship in America at New York University, a class I had been teaching continuously since 2010, I noted, around 2015, a sharp change in my students’ attitudes: their support for free speech, our subject of study, became increasingly qualified. Simultaneously, NCAC started hearing about more cases of books or plays being challenged because of racial slurs. 1930s murals were being covered and threatened with destruction because of their representation of painful moments in history. A study has yet to be done to quantify and exactly trace the shift in attitudes, but it certainly predated the Trump presidency. 3 That appears to have changed in the years since – years coinciding with the Trump presidency and a politically exacerbated national atmosphere. However, a study of those changes has yet to be conducted. 4 Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, and Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome. 5 Examples abound but the most high-profile deplatforming in the United States involved the cancellation of an appearance of Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist for President Donald Trump, at the New Yorker Festival, where Bannon was to be interviewed by David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker.

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Greenberger, A. (2018) “Greenspon Gallery Cancels Show with Artist Boyd Rice, Alleged Neo-Nazi,” Art News. 6 September. Online. www.artnews.com/2018/09/06/greenspon-gallery-cancels-showartist-boyd-rice-alleged-neo-nazi/ Haines, C. (2015) “Jon Rubin: Conflict Kitchen,” Guernica. 16 January. Online. www.guernicamag.com/ jon-rubin-conflict-kitchen/ Halperin, J. (2017) “ ‘Please Pull the Show’: Dana Schutz Faces Renewed Protest Over Emmett Till Painting at ICA Boston,” Artnet. 26 July. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutzsexhibition-at-the-ica-boston-faces-protest-1033961 Koch, C. (1998) “The Contest for American Culture: A Leadership Case Study on the NEA and NEH Funding Crisis,” Public Talk:The Online Journal of Discourse Leadership. Penn National Commission on Society, Culture and Community. Online. www.upenn.edu/pnc/ptkoch.html Lew, C.Y. and Locks, M. (2017) Whitney Biennial 2017 (ex. cat.), New York:Whitney Museum of American Art. Melandri, L. (2017) “Navigating Public Opposition to Museum Exhibitions,” Untitled Presentation, College Art Association Annual Conference, New York. 15 February. Mintcheva, S. (2014) “Art Censorship Today.” In Alfino, M. and Koltutski, L. (eds.) The Library Juice Press Handbook of Intellectual Freedom: Concepts, Cases, Theories, Sacramento: Library Juice Press, pp. 334–362. Mintcheva, S. (2018) “Between Boycotts and Special Interest Campaigns: The Chilling of Speech on Israel and Palestine,” The Dramatist, 20(3): 11. January–February. Mintcheva, S. and Raicovich, L. (forthcoming 2020) “Afterwords: Svetlana Mintcheva and Laura Raicovich in Conversation.” In Paquette, C., Kleinfelder, K. and Miles, C. (eds.) Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Morrison, T. (1993) “Nobel Lecture,” Nobel Prize [website]. 7 December. Online. www.nobelprize.org/ prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/ Moynihan, C. (2019) “El Museo del Barrio Cancels Jodorowsky Show,” The New York Times. 28 January. Online. www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/arts/design/el-museo-del-barrio-cancels-jodorowskyshow.html Muñoz-Alonso, A. (2016) “Curator Resigns Unexpectedly from Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis After Controversial Show,” Artnet. 11 October. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/ jeffrey-uslip-resigns-cam-st-louis-695564 National Coalition Against Censorship (2013) “Museum Best Practices for Managing Controversy,” National Coalition Against Censorship [website]. Online. ncac.org/resource/museum-bestpractices-for-managing-controversy National Coalition Against Censorship (2018) Smart Tactics: Curating Difficult Content, New York: National Coalition Against Censorship. Nichols, D.A., Barrois Jr., L. and Donaldson, V. (2016) “CAM Staff Letter to CAM Senior Directors,” Hyperallergic. 18 September. Online. hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/SKMBT_ C45416092213521.pdf Parachini, A. (1990) “Victory, but No Relief: Dennis Barrie Tells of the Price he and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center Paid for Displaying Robert Mapplethorpe’s Photos,” The Los Angeles Times. 4 November. Online. www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-04-ca-5339-story.html Rea, N. (2018) “Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Christian Boltanski, and Others Condemn the Firing of a ‘Too Demanding’ Museum Director,” Artnet. 12 March. Online. news.artnet.com/art-world/ art-world-luminaries-condemn-removing-maria-ines-rodriguez-cpac-1242038 Smith, R. (2017) “Should Art That Infuriates Be Removed?” The New York Times. 27 March. Online. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/arts/design/emmett-till-whitney-biennial-schutz.html Somander, T. (2010) “Smithsonian Museum Removes an LGBT Art Exhibit After GOP Threatens to Defund It,” Think Progress. 1 December. Online. thinkprogress.org/smithsonian-museum-removesan-lgbt-art-exhibit-after-gop-threatens-to-defund-it-838c7bbb1486/ Subramaniam, R. (2015) Interview with the Author. 15 November. Talon-Hugon, C. (2018) L’art sous contrôle: Nouvel agenda sociétal et censures militantes (Art Under Control: The New Social Agenda and Militant Censorship), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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INDEX

Abdessemed, A. 51, 54, 55, 63; Coup de Tête 52, 54, 56, 57, 60 – 61, 64, 65, 66; L’âge d’or 55 – 56; Printemps 52, 56, 58 – 60, 61, 65, 66 activism 88, 89, 101; Artistic Rural Reconstruction 104; Feminist Pencil 2 174 – 176; New Rural Reconstruction Movement 101; rural reconstruction 102; Umbrella Movement 15, 16, 17, 148 Adam, G. 63 adaptive curatorial practice 213, 225; researching content and building networks of support 219 – 221; showing difficult content 219 Add Oil: Countdown Machine 17 – 20, 22, 25, 26; Stand by You: Add Oil Machine 17 Adelson S. 75 advisory signs 223 advocacy, Art Museum’s strategy for negotiating controversy over WASTE LAND 190, 191 advocacy organizations 11 aestheticism 81 aestheticization 20 agency 7, 8, 160, 196; of children 200, 204; Radical Moralism 91 Akbank Sanat 129, 133, 134, 135 Aktualnoe izkustvo 171, 175 Al Malki, M. 60 Al Ma’mal Foundation 123 Al Marzouqi, F. 65 Al Tayeb, A. 60 Al Thani, Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65 Al Thani, Hamad bin Khalifa 54 Al Thani, Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali 54, 59 Al Thani, Saud bin Muhammad bin Ali 54

Al Thani, Tamim bin Hamad 53 al-Ali, N. 121 Alat, M. 139 Al-Azzawi, D. 56 Alchuck, A. 170 Alibaba 27 “alien” contemporary art 52, 53, 64, 66; Coup de Tête 56 – 57, 60 – 61; The Miraculous Journey 57 – 58, 61 – 62, 63; Printemps 56, 58 – 60 Alipoor, J. 37 Almagor, G. 75 Along the Edge 152 Altindere, H. 130, 131; Free Kick (Serbest Vurus) 129 Altunok, O. 137 American Alliance of Museums 11 Anadolu Kültür 136 anarchism 101; New Masses 106 – 107 Andrei Sakharov Museum and Social Center 170 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts 188, 189, 193 animal rights, Printemps 56, 58 – 60 Antunes, L. 77 apartment-museums 172 Arab Museum of Modern Art 51, 54, 65; L’âge d’or 52, 54, 55 – 56 Aran, U. 77 Aria,V. 139 armed conflict 158; Colombia 155, 156, 157, 159; culpability 161, 162; “false positives” 165; martyrdom 164; perpetrators 162, 163, 164, 165; representations of 159, 160; silencing of victims 162, 163; victimhood 163, 164, 165; Voices for the Transformation of Colombia panel discussion 161

230 

Arslan, R. 138 “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Speech” 42 art history 7 art institutions 120; Palestinian 123 Art Museum 182, 183, 188, 192, 193; Carbon Sink controversy 185 – 187; Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational 184; STEAM agenda 190, 191; strategy for negotiating controversy over WASTE LAND 189, 190, 191 ARTIST Istanbul Art Fair 129, 138, 139, 140 Artist Regional Exchange (ARX) 146 Artistic Rural Reconstruction 104, 108, 109 artists 8; blacklisting 14; collectives 25 – 26; contractual agreements 63 – 64; “guilty by association” 91; Palestinian 121 – 122; in the Soviet Union 171 – 172, 177; “unruly” 171; see also Abdessemed, A.; Hirst, D. arts, the, public funding 214, 215 Arts Advocacy Project 213, 214, 217 Arts Development Council (ADC) 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 artworks: experimental 213 – 214; “injurious” 90, 91; private collections in Russia 178; taboo 63 Ashkenazi 80 Asia Society 22 – 23 Atkinson, B. 87 Augé, M. 113 authoritarianism 112 Babichev, R. 178 Badiucao 16 Baholo, K. R. 88 Bahrain 53 Baily, B., Exhibit B 36, 38, 39, 39 – 41 Bakçay, E. 135, 138 – 139, 140 Ballengée, B. 187; Collapse 188, 189, 191; Love Motel for Insects: Laramie Depot Park Variation 188, 190, 191; see also Art Museum Barbican 36, 39, 40, 41 Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art 10 Barkova, A. 173 Barrie, D. 211 Bartlett, W. P. 10 Bedouins 72 Belov, A. 177 Benjamin, W. 74, 77, 78, 80, 81 Benois, A. 171 Bernal, L. M. 165 Best Practices for Museums Managing Controversy 223, 224 bioart 11 Birchenall, P. 45 Bishan Bookstore 107 – 108, 109

Bishan Harvestival 105, 108 Bishan Project 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 109, 113; erasure 111 – 112; School of Tillers 109 – 110, 111 Bishan Village 102 Blackburn, M. 88 blacklists 14, 27, 106, 211 bodily awareness 196, 198, 199 Boettger, S. 191 Boston Children’s Museum 203 Bourdieu, P. 109 Bourgeois, L. 54 “Boycott the Human Zoo” 36, 39 Brandon, N. 36, 37, 39, 40 Breitz, C. 94, 95; Rainbow Series 88 British Council 11 British Petroleum (BP) 188, 189, 190, 191 Bruce, K. 10 Brukhovets’ka, O. 175 – 176 B’Tselem 74, 75, 76; see also Israel; Sala, A. Buhlungu, S. 96 building networks of support 219 – 221 Bukantas, A. 21 Bulatov, E. 171 Bulgakov, M. 172 cabianqiu 24 Campolmi, I. 200 cancellations: Exhibit B 39 – 41; Homegrown 47 caricatures 147 Carnegie, E. 20 Catching, R. 25 censorship 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 19, 24, 25, 28, 47, 52, 54, 58, 63, 66, 81, 82, 86, 87, 119, 195, 214 – 215; ambiguous enforcement 146, 147; and “approval” 9, 13, 14, 22, 25 – 26; of artistic discourse 78, 80; avoiding keywords 26; Bakur 131 – 132; Behud 43 – 45; Bishan Harvestival 106; Bishan Project 111 – 112; blacklists 14; B’Tselem radio broadcast 74, 75, 76; Carbon Sink:What Goes Around Comes Around 185 – 187; in China 12; coercion 47; Countdown Machine 16 – 20; Coup de Tête 61; covert 8, 11, 13 – 14; in democracies 11; Depo 136 – 137; “double” 14; in East Asia 145; ethical 213; Exhibit B 39 – 41; Facebook 122 – 123; “fake news” 14 – 15; in Hong Kong 15, 16; images of children 195, 196, 197, 198, 206; June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition 147 – 149; keyword blocking 14; Nakba 122; negotiating 25 – 27; and oppression 121 – 122; Our Lady exhibition 89 – 95, 96; overt 11, 14; of Palestinian art

 

and artists 121 – 122, 123; perpetratorvictim binary 8; political motivations for 13; protecting “public decency” 138 – 140; in Qatar 63 – 64; of representations of homosexuality 7, 173 – 174; San Yuan Li 107; and security 81; in Singapore 146, 147; Siyah Bant 128, 135, 135 – 136; socialist realism 170; state 7, 11; weighing the risks 217; xx 175;Yixian International Photo Festival 106; see also ethics; institutional self-censorship; self-censorship; state censorship; state selfcensorship; structural (pre)censorship Chan, E., Raise the Umbrellas 22 Charpenel, P. 212 Chen, T. 26 children: agency 200, 204; artistic representation of 196; bodily awareness 196, 198, 199; and consent 196, 197, 198, 199, 207; negotiating representations of at the North Carolina Museum of Art 198 – 202; restricting access to adult content 223; rights of 199, 202, 203, 207; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 199 China 9, 11, 12, 19, 21, 23, 24, 100, 150; “50 cent army” 14; advancing projects in 14; Bishan Project 104, 108, 109, 113; Bishan Village 102, 107; blacklists 14, 106; censorship 9; contemporary art 100 – 101; Cultural Revolution 10, 148; “double censorship” 14; “great firewall” 14; journalism 25; Librairie Avant-Garde 107; mechanisms of censorship 13 – 15; museum and gallery industry 12, 13; negotiating censorship and self-censorship 25 – 27; “One Country, Two Systems” policy 3, 6, 8; political motivations for censorship 13; public museums 21 – 22; Rural Reconstruction Movement 101; selfcensorship 10, 21 – 22; social conflict in rural areas 101; social credit system 15; Southern Metropolis Daily 107; state censorship 106; surveillance 106; Tiananmen Square 148; U-theque 107 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 112 Chinski, S. 72, 80 chudifang 105 Chúngara, D. 10 Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center 211 City,The 37 Civil Rights Movement 215, 220 “closed door” events 27 Cockerill, K. 85, 91, 95 coercion: police 47; religious 81 Cohen, N. 77, 78, 80, 81

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collaboration: building networks of support 219 – 221; Qalandiya International 124; with young people 205 collective curatorial models 140 collectives 25 – 26, 138, 139; Artist Regional Exchange (ARX) 146; Guerrilla Girls 215; Union of Soviet Artists 170 Colombia: armed conflict 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 165; historical memory research 156 – 157; Law for Victims and Land Restitution 157, 166n1; silencing of the victims of armed conflict 162, 163; Special Jurisdiction for Peace 166n2; Truth Commission 166n2 communal prayer 78 communes 104 Communist Party of China (CPC) 12, 13, 14, 15, 22 community art 13 Conforming to Vicinity – A Cross-Strait Four Region Artistic Exchange Project 22 – 23 consent 196, 197, 198, 199, 207 contemporary art 74; “alien” 64, 66; Chinese 100, 101; Qatar’s investment in 54; in the Soviet Union 171; see also “alien” contemporary art Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) 220 – 221 Copenhagen, “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Speech” panel discussion 42 Corbett, 86 Core Principles of Policing 38 Corigall, M. 86, 89 Cotter, H. 216 Coup de Tête, Qatar’s reception of 60 – 61 covert censorship 11, 13 – 14; Countdown Machine 18 – 20; in Hong Kong 8, 16 “craftsmanship”: of negotiating self-censorship 8; of resistance 23 – 24, 27 creativity 24, 109, 123 Cuervo de Jaramillo, E. 155, 156 Culture Wars 214, 225n1 “culturicide” 123 curation 7, 8, 11, 86, 87; and activism 85, 89; and ambiguous regulations 145 – 146, 147; Best Practices for Museums Managing Controversy 224; in China 13; contemporary art 66; craftsmanship of negotiating self-censorship 8; craftsmanship of resistance 23 – 24, 27; ‘editing’ 10, 52; framing 221 – 222, 224; fringe and temporary exhibition sites 138 – 140; gamesmanship 24; labels 222; risk taking 151 – 152; in Russia 170; and self-censorship 10, 18, 39; self-reflective 8, 9, 28; strategic alliances 26; strategies for negotiating

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controversy 189, 192; and trust 150; see also adaptive curatorial practice; censorship; museums; self-censorship cyber-bullying 152 – 153 Daniel, 24 daricioglu, l. s. 139 Dasal, J. 201, 202 Davydova, O. 178 Delier, B., Guard 130 Demirel, C. 129; Bakur 131 – 132 democracies: censorship 11, 12; institutional selfcensorship 8, 10 demonstrations 36 – 37; “Boycott the Human Zoo” 36, 39, 40 – 41; Fallism 88 – 89; Israel 77; and social media 38 Depo 129, 136 discriminatory practices 222 diversity politics 11, 20 Dixon, M. 9 Dodd, J. 202 Dogan, Z. 129, 132, 133 Doha 51, 55, 56, 59, 60 Dolman, E. 59 “double censorship” 14 Doujak, I., Not Dressed for Conquering 10 Dreiser, T. 211 Drury, C.: Carbon Sink:What Goes Around Comes Around 182, 183, 184, 185; “cloud chambers” 185 Dubin, S. 87 Duggan, M. 40 Durant, S., Scaffold 216, 220 Durmusoglu, O. 135 Dyakonov,V. 178 East Asia: censorship in 145; see also Hong Kong; Singapore; Taiwan eco-actions 188, 190 Eden, X. 220 Edinburgh Fringe Festival 37, 39 ‘editing’ 10, 52 Egypt 53 El Museo del Barrio 212 El Tiempo 155 Eliot, T.S. 191 El-Khairy, O., Homegrown 47 empathy 205 Engelen, J. P. 57 Entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) 42 Enwezor, O. 88 Erdogan, R. T. 131, 138 Ertan, E. 135 ethical censorship 213

ethical scrutiny 211 ethics 24, 207; images of children 196, 206; of institutional self-censorship 10, 11; photographs of children 197 – 198, 200; and self-censorship 119 – 120 Europe: freedom of expression 12; “human zoos” 39; surrealism 177 – 178 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 38 exhibitions 100, 101; All in a Day’s Eye:The Politics of Innocence 96; approval of 14; Caution, Religion! 170, 173; in China 13; Chinese Civilization Theme Art Project 22; Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong,Taiwan and China 150 – 151; The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood in the NCMA’s Photography Collection 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207; Feminist Pencil 174, 176; Feminist Pencil 2 174 – 176; framing 221 – 222, 224; Gongle 16; Home Truths 91, 97n2; Human Vibrations 17; Implicit Modernism 178; Innovative Women:Ten Contemporary Black Women Artists 86; June Fourth Commemoration 147 – 149; La bestia y el soberano (The Beast and the Sovereign) 10; L’âge d’or 52, 55; Memoir in Southern Anhui 110; Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture 88; No Names No Title 74, 75; Our China 149 – 150; Our Lady 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96; Passion for Freedom 41, 42, 47; Post-Peace 133, 135; Post-Soviet Cassandras 176 – 177; Queerfest 2013 173; Sculpture: A Wyoming Invitational 184; Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks 177; temporary and fringe sites 138 – 140; Timekeepers 110; Times of Peace: Agreements in Colombia 1902 – 1994 156; Voices for the Transformation of Colombia 157 – 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166; WASTE LAND: A Survey of Works by Brandon Ballengée, 1996 – 2016 182 – 183, 189, 190, 191, 192; Zones of Contention: After the Green Line 220; see also curation experimental art 213 – 214 Eye,Y. 106 Facebook 94, 122, 152, 175; “Stop Adel Abdessemed and Mathaf ’s Animal Cruelty” petition 58 – 59 “fake news” 14 – 15 Fallism 88, 89 Farago, J. 212 fatwa 60 Favorsky,V., The Seven Wonders 172 – 173 fear: learning to 213 – 214; and self-censorship 145, 152 – 153, 212, 213 feminism 86; Feminist Pencil 174, 175, 176; PostSoviet Cassandras 176 – 177

 

framing 221 – 222; social media as 224 Frascina, F. 195 freedom of expression 4, 7, 37, 38, 39, 54, 63, 64, 119, 121, 175; “Art and the Law” toolkits 45 – 46; Exhibit B 39 – 41; in Hong Kong 3, 6, 16; Isis Threaten Sylvania 41 – 43; and minority populations 11; in South Africa 89; in Turkey 128, 129, 131, 133, 135 – 136, 140 – 141 freedom of speech 7, 128, 212; in Israel 75 – 76 Freiman, L. 217 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) 155, 156, 157, 162, 165, 166 funding 26 – 27, 67, 123, 145, 212; and the Culture Wars 214; private 133; public 214 – 215 Galkna, A. 175, 176 galleries 8, 10, 21; institutional self-censorship 9 Gamedze, T. 95 gamesmanship 24 Gearon, T. 197 Gemmell, L. 40 gender 86, 87; Guerrilla Girls Collective 215; intersectionality 89, 92 Gilerman, 72 Giraldo, J. A. 164 Glanville, J. 43 Glen, H. 43 – 44, 45 global art economy 119, 120, 121 Godby, M. 91 Goh, C. T. 146 Goldblatt, D. 89 Goldin, N., Edda and Klara Belly Dancing 197 gongshe 104 gongtongti 104 Guerrilla Girls Collective 215 Guggenheim Museum, Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World 218 Giuliani, R. 219 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 51; defamation laws 54 Günal, A. 136 Ha Thuc, C. 17, 18, 19 Haaretz 75 hadata 81, 82n10 Han,Y. 102 Harris, J. 195, 196 Heagins, T. B.: Devonte 201, 205; Fabienne 201 Heal, S. 9 Hirst, D. 51, 54, 63; The Miraculous Journey 52, 54, 57, 58, 61 – 62, 63, 64, 65, 66 historical memory research in Colombia 156 – 157

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Hive Spring 16 Ho, D. 148 Ho, O. 16, 26 Hodes, R. 90, 94 Holland, P. 206 Holquist, 7 homosexuality 7; “Gay Propaganda Law” 173; Queerfest 2013 exhibition 173 – 174; “Through the Spectrum” 122 Hong Kong 6, 8, 9, 21, 24, 25, 28, 101, 150; ARX5 146, 147; censorship 13; Countdown Machine 16 – 20, 22, 25; covert censorship 16; freedom of expression in 3, 6; ICC Tower 16, 17; Liaison Office of the CPC 15; local identity 149; M+ 23; Mainlandization 15, 16; negotiating censorship and self-censorship 25 – 27; overt censorship 16; pro-democracy movement 15; self-censorship 22 – 23; Umbrella Movement 15, 16, 17, 26, 148 Hong Kong Arts Centre 145; Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong,Taiwan and China 150 – 151; June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition 147 – 149; Our China 149 – 150 Hope Chest 90, 91 human rights 4, 63, 128, 137, 158, 164; children 202, 203, 207; Queerfest 2013 exhibition 173 – 174; United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 199; see also freedom of expression “human zoos” 39 ICC Tower 19, 20; see also Countdown Machine identity 87, 177; bodily awareness 196; gender 173; Hongkongers 149, 149 – 150; Hope Chest 90; white representations of black experiences 88 ideology, Soviet 171, 177 images, “guilty by association” 91; see also photography inclusion 20 Index on Censorship 43, 47, 48n8; “Art and the Law” toolkits 45 – 46, 48n9; “Risks, Rights, Reputations – Challenging a Risk Averse Culture” 45; “Taking the Offensive” conference 44 – 45 injurious artworks 90, 91 institutional self-censorship 7, 8, 9, 12, 74; in democracies 8, 9, 10; denial of 9; and ‘editing’ 10; ethics of 10, 11; in Hong Kong 22 – 23; Lee’s Garden 147; Shibli-Gottesdiener incident 72, 73; in Turkey 133; as violation of principle 10 Integrity of Being 152 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 10, 89; ethics code 11

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internet 15, 122; China’s “great firewall” 14, 15 – 16; cyber-bullying 152 – 153; surveillance 26 intersectionality 89, 92 interviews 8 Islam 152; fatwa 60; see also Palestine Israel 74, 77, 81, 82, 123; censorship of artistic discourse 78, 80, 81; censorship of Palestinian art and artists 121 – 122; freedom of speech 75, 76; fundamentalism 78; Gaza war 75; Operation Protective Edge 74; religious politics 78, 80; Shibli-Gottesdiener incident 72, 73; wartime “silencing” 75, 76, 82n4 Iziko South African National Gallery (ISANG) 85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96 Jarrar, K. 122 Jeffries, L. 41 Jerusalem 123; Shafaq 123 – 124 jianghu 27 Jodorowski, A. 212 Jones, 64, 65 journalism, in China 25; see also media Joyce, J. 211 Judaism 77, 78 June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition 147 – 149 Kabakov, I. 171 Kabbalah 78 Kahn, L., Shelter 110 Kamrava, 64 Kanafani, G. 121 Karaca, B. 135 – 136 Karroum, A. 59 Kar-wai, W., Days of Being Wild 16 – 17 Kaur Bhatti, G.: Behud 39, 43 – 45, 45, 47; Behzti 36 – 37, 43, 47 Kavala, O. 137 Kazhdan, S., Whose Red Is It? 177 Kelly, K. 202, 203, 204 keyword blocking 14 Klee, P. 77 Kolek, A. 42, 43 Kollwitz, A. 139 Konashevich,V. 171 Kornerpark Gallery, Post-Soviet Cassandras 176 – 177 Kozin,V. 173 Kozmikova, N., It Was Pouring Out! 138 Krupennikova, K. 133 Kuhn, P. 101 Kukama, D. 96; Chapter Y: Is Survival Not Archival? 95 Kuleshov, L., The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks 177

Kulik, O. 171 Kumalo, N. 86, 96 Kwok, K. C. 147 Kwok, L. 101, 107 La bestia y el soberano (The Beast and the Sovereign) 10 labels 221 – 222 Lam, J. 16, 17 Latif, N. 47 Lee, B. 25 Lee, K.Y. 146, 147 Lee, T. L. 148 Leith, H. 40 Lew, C. 215 Lewis, A. 85 LGBT+ 173 Li, O. 23; Faces of Representatives 22 Liang, S. 101, 102, 107 liberal democracies, censorship 11 Librairie Avant-Garde 107 Liu, C. 110 Liu, H. S. 23 Liu, X. 4, 6 Locks, M. 215 Lomasko,V. 174, 176; Forbidden Art 174 Loock, U. 72 M+ 23 Ma,Ying-Jeou 23 Mabaso, T. 96 Macau 22, 148 MacKinnon, 12 Maclure, W. 113 Macuga, G. 20 Mainlandization 15, 20 Mann, S. 201, 204; Immediate Family 197; Shiva at Whistle Creek 201 Mao, Z. 13 Mapplethorpe, R. 211 Marí, B. 10 Martínez, L. M. 165 martyrdom 164 Mavioglu, E. 129; Bakur 131 – 132 McAndrew, C. 120 Meatyard, R. E. 204; Untitled 201, 205 media 36, 39; avoiding publicity 27; Caspar Star Tribune article on Carbon Sink 185 – 187 Melandri, L. 221 Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem on Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900 – 1968 215 Meyer, 7 Military Museum of Colombia 164

 

Miller, 86 Milonov,V. 174 Mimsy, Isis Threaten Sylvania 37, 39, 41 – 43, 44 minders 21 minorities: freedom of expression 11; “human zoos” 39; and “much ado about nothing” syndrome 37; othering 20 Morgan, D. 40 Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Implicit Modernism 178 Moskovskaya Feministskaya Gruppa 176 Mthethwa, Z. 86, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96; Untitled 90 “much ado about nothing” syndrome 37, 39, 46; Behud 43 – 45; Exhibit B 39 – 41; Isis Threaten Sylvania 41 – 43 Muholi, Z. 86 multiculturalism 216 Murakami, T. 54; Ego 63 Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux (CAPC) 212 Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Flirting with the Exotic 218, 223 – 224 Museum of Islamic Art 51 Museum of Memory of Colombia (MMC) 157; Voices for the Transformation of Colombia 157 – 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166 museums 7, 8, 87; apartment- 172; censorship 7; children’s 203; Chinese 14; contracts 63 – 64; funding 26 – 27; handling controversy 87; institutional self-censorship 9, 11 – 12; multiculturalism 216; neutral stance of 9 – 10, 222; political neutrality 73; risk aversion 10, 73; self-censorship 7; strategic alliances 26; see also institutional self-censorship Museums Association 11, 198 Myers, S. 36, 37, 40 Na Shabolovke Gallery, Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks 177 Nakba 122 Nasser, Moza bint 54 National Center for Historical Memory 157, 160, 162 National Coalition against Censorship 151, 189, 213, 217 National Endowment for the Arts 188, 193, 214 National Gallery of Singapore 146 National Museum of China 22 National Museum of Colombia 156; toalla affair 155 National Museum of Qatar 51, 54 Natural History Museum London 9 neoliberalism 120, 179, 212, 213

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Neshat, S. 54 Netanyahu, B. 73, 75, 77 “networked authoritarianism” 12 neutrality, of museums 9 – 10 New Church Museum, The (TNCM) 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 96 New Masses 106 – 107 “New Moscow” seminar 172 New Rural Reconstruction Movement 101, 112 Ngcobo, G. 96 Nir, A. 75 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 26, 104, 161 non-profit organizations (NPOs) 104 North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) 202, 207; 30 Americans 200; The Energy of Youth: Depicting Childhood in the NCMA’s Photography Collection 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207; representation of children 198 – 202 Obrist, H. 56 Odumlami, S. 40 Ofili,C., The Holy Virgin Mary 219 Ögdül, R. 139 Oguibe, O. 88 Önol, I. 135 oppression 121 – 122 Ostrander, T. 217 othering 20, 88, 160 O’Toole, S. 89 Ou, N.: Meishi Street 100; San Yuan Li 100, 107 overt censorship 11, 14, 16 Palestine 121, 123; Nakba 122; Qalandiya International 124; restrictions on resident movement 123; West Bank 123; Zones of Contention: After the Green Line 220 Paris: Adel Abdessemed: Je suis innocent 56; Charlie Hebdo 46 – 47; Exhibit B 40 – 41 Pather, J. 89 Pau, E. 18, 19, 26 performance art 13 perpetrator-victim binary 8, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166 Petukhov, A. 172 photography 195; images of children 196, 205; negotiating representations of children at the North Carolina Museum of Art 198 – 202 Pierre et Gilles, Homo Erectus 151 – 152 Pinarligil,Y. 139 Pivovarov,V. 171 place-making 113 police intervention 128; ARTIST Istanbul Art Fair 138; Behud 43 – 45; “Boycott the Human

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Zoo” 36; censorship of images of children 197; charging for services 41 – 42, 45; coercion 47; crowd control 46; Exhibit B 39 – 41; Free Kick exhibition 130 – 131; Isis Threaten Sylvania 41 – 43; “much ado about nothing” syndrome 37, 39; Operational Advice Document on Event Policing 46; policing responsibilities 37 – 39; test of necessity 38 politics 15, 51, 128, 156; authoritarianism 112; and censorship 13; Countdown Machine 16 – 20; of curating 52, 53; Israeli 74, 75, 76, 78; June Fourth Commemoration Exhibition 147 – 149; liberalism 21; multiculturalism 216; neutrality 73; Our China exhibition 149 – 150; Qatar 53 – 54; Qatar’s cultural policymaking 64 – 65; and rural reconstruction 102; and selfcensorship 119 – 120; silencing 75, 76, 81 pornography, Homo Erectus 151 – 152 Porras, F. L. 165 postmodernism, Aktualnoe izkustvo 171 power 87, 120; “soft” 11, 53 prayer 78 pressures of self-censorship 9, 10 Prince, R., Spiritual America 196, 197 Printemps, Qatar’s reception of 58 – 60 propaganda 18, 42, 129 protests 39, 215, 216; “Boycott the Human Zoo” 39 – 41; Fallism 88, 89; Gezi Park 136 – 137; and social media 38; see also demonstrations provocative art 37, 38; Behud 43 – 45; Coup de Tête 56 – 57, 60 – 61; Entartete Kunst 42; Exhibit B 39 – 41; Isis Threaten Sylvania 39 – 41; L’âge d’or 55 – 56; The Miraculous Journey 57, 58, 61 – 62, 63; policing 38; Printemps 56; publicity 45 – 46; see also reception of contemporary “alien” artworks public interest 45 – 46 public museums 9, 10; in China 21 – 22; institutional self-censorship 10; neutral stance of 9 – 10; risk aversion 10 publicity 27, 45, 223 – 224; Art Museum’s strategy for negotiating controversy over WASTE LAND 189, 190, 191; building networks of support 219 – 221; Caspar Star Tribune article on Carbon Sink 185 – 187; Exhibit B 36; talking to the police 45 – 46 pushing boundaries 24 – 25, 26, 45 – 46, 120, 121, 122 Putin,V. 173 Qalandiya International 124 Qatar 52, 53, 58; censorship in 63 – 64; cultural policymaking 54 – 55, 59, 64 – 65, 66; museums 51; political system 53; politics 54; reception

of Coup de Tête 60 – 61; reception of Printemps 58 – 60; reception of The Miraculous Journey 61 – 62, 63; social structure 53; state selfcensorship 65; top-down contemporary art programs 65; see also state self-censorship Qatar Museums (QM) 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 63, 66; artist contracts 63 – 64; and Qatar’s cultural policymaking 64 – 65 Qingming Festival 108 Queerfest 2013 173 Quinn, M. 54 Racial Imaginary Institute 215 racism 86, 214 – 215, 221, 222; Exhibit B 39 – 41; in the United States 216; white representations of black experiences 88 Radical Moralism 91 Raicovich, L. 222 Rankine, C. 215 Reardon,V. 196; Whose Image Is It Anyway?: A Reply 195 reception of contemporary “alien” artworks: Coup de Tête 60 – 61; The Miraculous Journey 61 – 62, 63; Printemps 58 – 60 reconstruction 101 reform 102 Regev, Miri 77 Reilly, M. 85 religious coercion 81 removal of artwork 46; Isis Threaten Sylvania 41 – 43 resistance, craftsmanship of 23 – 24 Rhodes, C. 88 #Rhodesmustfall 88, 89 Rice, B. 224 risk aversion 10 Rodríguez, M. I. 212 Roldugina, I. 173 Rossouw, C. 91 Roy, A. 41 Roy, B. 47 rural reconstruction 101, 102; Bishan Project 102, 103, 104, 105, 107 – 108 Rural Reconstruction Movement 112 Rushdie, S., Satanic Verses 46 Russia 179; Aktualnoe izkustvo 171; Feminist Pencil 174, 176; Feminist Pencil 2 174 – 176; “Gay Propaganda Law” 173; Post-Soviet Cassandras 176 – 177; private collections 178; Queerfest 2013 exhibition 173 – 174; trial of the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Social Center 170 sag, belit 133, 134 Sala, A. 73; Names in the Doldrums 74, 75, 76, 77, 81

 

Sanctuary, The 211 Sandell, R. 202 Sansour, L., “Nation Estate” 123 Sarkisian, O. 176 Saudi Arabia 53 Scheck, L. 222 Schell, O., Coal + Ice 106 Scholem, G. 77, 78, 80 Schutz, D., Open Casket 215, 221 Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Mathematics (STEAM) 187, 190, 191 security, and censorship 81 self-censorship 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 18, 20, 25, 28, 45, 47, 63, 76, 81, 82, 86, 88, 111, 112, 121, 128, 130, 145, 172, 173, 177, 179, 195, 196, 212; and “approval” 22; causes of 45; in China 21 – 22; Contemporary Photography from Hong Kong, Taiwan and China 150 – 151; Countdown Machine 18 – 20; ethical considerations 119 – 120; and fear 145, 152 – 153, 212, 213; in Hong Kong 22 – 23; images of children 197, 198, 207; institutional 7; and liberalism 21; negotiating 25 – 27, 179; political considerations 119 – 120; ramifications 212; and shame 10; in Singapore 145 – 146; state 52; toalla affair 155 – 156; University of Cape Town (UCT) 88 – 89; Voices for the Transformation of Colombia 157 – 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163; see also institutional self-censorship; structural (pre)censorship self-reflective curation 8, 9, 28 Selivanova, A. 172, 177 Semenova, S. 173 Senova, B. 134 Shabout, N. 59 Shafaq 123 – 124 Shahid, F. 11 shame, and self-censorship 10 Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art 145, 151 Shibli, A. 72, 73, 81 silencing 75, 76, 81; of victims of Colombia’s armed conflict 162, 163 Silina, M. 178 Sims, J. 221 Singapore: ARX5 146, 147; Media Development Authority 145 – 146 Singapore Art Museum (SAM) 146 Siyah Bant 128, 131, 135, 135 – 136 Skotnes, P. 88 Smith, T. 86, 87 Snyder, J. 223 social justice 215 social media 7, 10, 11 – 12, 38, 122, 138; as breeding ground for controversy 217 – 218;

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Facebook 58 – 59, 94, 152, 175; as framing 224; online petitions 58 – 59; Twitter 60, 61; WeChat 14; Weibo 14 social movements 113 socialist realism 170, 171 “soft power” 11, 53 South Africa 87, 96; #Rhodesmustfall protests 88 – 89; freedom of expression 89; public discussion on censorship 95; representation in 88 South African Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) 90, 91, 93, 94, 96 Soviet Union: “curator” 171; Implicit Modernism exhibition 178; samizdat 173; socialist realism 170, 171; “struggle against formalism” campaign 171; surrealism 177 – 178; Surrealism in the Land of the Bolsheviks 177; War Pencil 174; see also “New Moscow” seminar Spock, M. 203 Stalin, J. 171 state censorship 7, 11, 63, 64; Bishan Harvestival 106; China 12, 13, 14; San Yuan Li 107;Yixian International Photo Festival 106, 107 state self-censorship 52, 63; Qatar 65 Steinbach, H. 77 Stiven, J. 165 strategic alliances 26 Strauss, E., How to Start Your Own Country 112 structural (pre)censorship 212 Strukova, A. 178 student movements 88 Sun, Z. 107 surrealism 177, 178 surveillance 12, 14, 145; in China 106; digital monitoring 14 – 15, 26 Susma Platform 131, 137, 140, 141n3 Swann, R. 45 tableaux vivants 39 Taiwan 22, 23, 148, 150 Talon-Hugon, C. 213 Tancic, M. 110 Tatour, D. 122 Tazzi, P. L. 55, 56 Tel Aviv Museum of Art (TAMOA) 73, 74, 78, 80, 92; Shibli-Gottesdiener incident 72, 73 Tenger, H. 130; I Know People Like This II (Böyle Tanidiklarim Var II ) 129 test of necessity 38 Thomas, S. 40 Till, E. 215 Tirofijo 155 toalla affair 155 – 156, 163 Tosyali, M., Obedience 130

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Trump, D. 214 – 215 trust 150 Turkey 128; Akbank Sanat 129; Akbank Sanat International Curator Competition 133, 134, 135; Anadolu Kültür 136; Anti-Terror Act 131, 132, 133; ARTIST Istanbul Art Fair 129, 138, 139, 140; cancellation of Post-Peace 133 – 134; Depo 129; Free Kick exhibition 130 – 131; freedom of expression in 129, 133, 135 – 136, 140 – 141; Gezi Park protests 136 – 137; institutional self-censorship 133; private funding for contemporary art 133; removal of Bakur from the Istanbul Film Festival 131 – 132; selfcensorship 136; Siyah Bant 131, 135; Susma 131 Tuymans, L. 54 Twitter 59, 60, 61 Ulmann, L. 4 Union of Soviet Artists 170 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) see Soviet Union United Arab Emirates (UAE) 51, 53, 64 United Kingdom 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 23, 24, 41; Belgrade Theatre 43, 44; British Transport Police (BTP) 36, 40; Core Principles of Policing 38; freedom of expression 38; Human Rights Act (1998) 38, 39, 47 – 48n2; institutional self-censorship 9; Museums Association 198; Operational Advice Document on Event Policing 46; racialization of risk in 37; Theatres Act (1968) 42; see also policing United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) 199 United States 25, 65, 155, 212; Culture Wars 214, 225n1; “culture wars” 7; North Carolina 200; pressures in the art ecosystem 213; racism 216; Wyoming 182 University of Cape Town (UCT), #Rhodesmustfall protests 88 – 89 Uslip, J. 220 U-theque 107 utopia 111, 112, 113 Valentine, K. 199 Vanstone, K. 40 Vaults, The 36, 37, 39, 40, 41 Viaggio, C. 224 victimhood 162, 163, 164, 165; “false positives” 165 video art 13, 26; Printemps 56 Video Bureau 26

vigilance 27 – 28 Vilks, L. 42 violence 160 Viso, O. 211, 216, 220 Vykhod 173, 174 Walker, K., Direct Drive 220 Walker Arts Center, Scaffold 215 – 216 Walter Benjamin: Exilic Archives 77 Wang, D. 111 Wang, S. 108 War Pencil 174 warning signs 222 – 223 Warren, A. 93 WeChat 14 Weibo 14 Weiwei, A. 23, 54 Wen, T. 101, 102 West Bank 123 Western democracies, censorship 12 What Next? 9, 10 white representations of black experiences 88 Whitney Museum Biennial 215, 216 women 85, 86; Hope Chest 90; see also feminism; gender Wong, K. 16, 23; I Have No Enemies 3, 4, 6, 25 Wong, S. 16, 17, 18 – 19, 20 Woolcock, P., One Day 37 wordplay 26 Working Men Institute 113 Xi, J. 8, 13, 23, 112 Xingwana, L. 86 Yau, W. 21 Yen, J. 101, 102 Yeo, G. 147 Yixian International Photo Festival 105 – 106, 107 Yoruç, D., Hulk 130 YouTube 122 Yung, D. 149 Zagurly-Orly, R. 74, 77, 78, 80 zakka 110 Zhang, Dejiang 18 Zheng, X. 102 Zhou,Y. 109 Zidane, Z. 56, 60, 61 Zionism 77, 80 Zorn, J. 106 Zunzi, Lee’s Garden 146, 147 Zuo, J. 102, 104, 105, 111

Oil, Countdown Machine, 2016. LED light installation, International Commerce Centre, Hong Kong. Installed 17 May 2016, as part of the exhibition Human Vibrations, curated by Caroline Ha Thuc; switched off 22 May 2016

PLATE 1 Add

PLATE 2 Police

stand guard as protesters with placards gather at the entrance of the Vaults gallery during a protest that led to the closure of Exhibit B by South African artist Brett Bailey. London, 2015

PLATE 3 “Mimsy,” Isis Threaten

PLATE 4 Damien

2013

Sylvania (detail of Picnic), 2015

Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, as unveiled in Doha, Qatar, October

Hirst, The Miraculous Journey, 2005–2013, covered by white tarpaulins, Doha, Qatar, as photographed in February 2015

PLATE 5 Damien

PLATE 6 Anri Sala, Names in the Doldrums, 2014. Altered snare drum, loudspeaker parts, snare stand,

drumsticks, soundtrack (mono), duration: 2′40″, dimensions: 75 cm × 56 cm × 41 cm, edition of 1 + 1 AP

PLATE 7 Bishan

Commune logo, 2011

PLATE 8 Outdoor

PLATE 9 

film screening, Bishan Harvestival, Bishan, China, 2011

The Bishan Bookstore, Bishan, China, 2014

PLATE 10 Hale Tenger, I Know People Like This II, 1992. Cast brass Priapus and three-money statu-

ettes, 700 cm × 9 cm × 140 cm

PLATE 11 Installation (detail), Voices for the Transformation of Colombia, Museum of Historical Memory

of Colombia, International Book Fair, Bogotá, 2018. Luz Marina Bernal, mother of Fair Leonardo Porras, a victim of “false positives,” stands next to a clip of Johan Stiven from the video capturing conversations among victims who contributed to the installation

PLATE 12 Brandon Ballengée, Collapse, University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2016, installation view