Ai Weiwei’s He Xie (2010) consists of thousands of porcelain river crabs. ‘He xie’ sounds like both ‘river crab’ and ‘harmonization’. The title (and subject) refers to censorship, even while sidestepping it.
Art, theatre, music and cinema are fertile areas for defying authority around the world.
Theatre provides obvious possibilities for sly parallels with reality, even where the truth cannot be spoken directly. And it is not just contemporary theatre that has the power to offend. Hamlet and Macbeth regularly incur the censors’ anger because four-hundred-year-old storylines of informers, palace coups and political murder seem so dangerously relevant.
Music, too, provides many opportunities for rebellion. In Chile, the military junta murdered the singer Víctor Jara in 1973 in retribution for the power of his music; the stadium where Jara and others died is now named after him.
Visual and performance art challenge the authorities in ways that may mean real risks for the artist, too. Cinema smuggles hidden messages past the censor, in oblique but unmistakable ways. Cartoonists tell the truth about the reality around them – whatever the cost of that truth-telling may be.
The ways that authorities crack down on artists can be seen as an indirect tribute to the power of their work. Art is neither political nor apolitical. Art is life itself – which encompasses everything around us, including the ways we are ruled or misruled.
The Chinese authorities are often unhappy about acts of defiance by the artist Ai Weiwei. In November 2010, they ordered the demolition of his new studio in Shanghai, the construction of which they had originally encouraged and approved but were now claiming had not followed planning procedures. Ai Weiwei responded by announcing a party to ‘celebrate’ the demolition.
The artist was promptly (again) put under house arrest to prevent him from attending. It seemed that the party could not go ahead. But hundreds turned up despite Ai Weiwei’s absence. A banquet was served at long tables. On the menu were ten thousand river crabs.
River crab is a Chinese delicacy, but Ai Weiwei’s choice for his guests also had political significance, derived from a play on words. The Chinese word for ‘river crab’ sounds similar to the word for ‘harmonization’. Harmonization, in turn, is a common synonym for censorship. As the crabs were served, banquet guests started to chant, ‘For a harmonized society – eat river crabs!’
One guest pointed out that the river crab/censorship overlap created a dilemma for the authorities: ‘Will river crab become a banned food in China? And would consuming this delicacy mean that you hold subversive intent against the authorities?’ Ai Weiwei himself devised an artistic response to the destruction of his studio – with the creation of three thousand porcelain river crabs. The harmonizers and censors were both neutralized and immortalized.
Ai Weiwei’s He Xie (2010) consists of thousands of porcelain river crabs. ‘He xie’ sounds like both ‘river crab’ and ‘harmonization’. The title (and subject) refers to censorship, even while sidestepping it.
General Francisco Franco (official title: ‘Leader of Spain, by the grace of God’) died in 1975 at the age of eighty-two, after thirty-six years of authoritarian rule. Even after the dictator’s death, however, Spain did not instantly achieve democracy. Franco’s supporters remained powerful and were ready to use violence to uphold the repressive status quo. One painting became a symbol of the democratic transition that Spain eventually achieved.
In 1976, the Democratic Committee commissioned from the artist Juan Genovés a poster demanding freedom for political prisoners. Genovés painted ‘El Abrazo’ (‘The Embrace’), which depicted men and women hugging each other in joy and anguish after a long separation. When Genovés was at the printers, he was arrested for producing the powerful image. The authorities ordered all twenty-five thousand copies to be pulped. Genovés was jailed. He said later, ‘For somebody who has not lived through those times, it is impossible to imagine that one might go to prison for painting a picture of people hugging. But that’s how it was in those days.’
Democratic change continued, despite the repression. The painting gained terrible fame when armed men from the Apostolic Anti-Communist Alliance burst into a lawyers’ meeting on Atocha Street in Madrid in January 1977. They didn’t find the man they were looking for – so, instead, they stood a group of lawyers up against the wall and shot them. Five were killed, four more were injured. A poster of ‘El Abrazo’ hanging on the wall was spattered with the murdered men’s blood.
That deadly attack became a last gasp for those who remained loyal to the old regime. One hundred thousand people attended the lawyers’ funeral. Two months after the Atocha massacre, a new law was passed that led to multi-party elections the same year, the first since 1936. Half a million copies of the poster were printed. Proceeds from the sale were used to set up the Spanish branch of Amnesty International.
The image of ‘El Abrazo’ travelled the world. It had particular impact in Latin America, which suffered in the 1970s and 1980s from military dictatorship and forced disappearances. In 2016, forty years after its creation, ‘El Abrazo’ was put on permanent display in the Spanish parliament, ‘to serve as guide and inspiration’. Genovés said, ‘The painting no longer belongs to me, its image belongs to the world.’
NEON REBELLION
On 20 January 2012, eight women climbed on to a stone platform on Red Square in Moscow, just outside the Kremlin walls. Punching their arms in the air, they performed a rebellious anthem. Lyrics included, ‘Show them your freedom / A citizen’s anger’ and ‘Revolt in Russia, Putin pissed his pants!’ The police quickly carted off the motley crew, in their balaclavas and startling neon outfits (colours which were designed ‘to bring joy to the world’). But Pussy Riot had already made their mark on the world.
The Pussy Riot collective varied their membership for different performances, but all shared anger at developments in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The following month, the band staged a guerrilla performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Their ‘Punk Prayer’ begged, ‘Mother of God, drive Putin out!’
Nadya Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina and Katya Samutsevich were arrested and charged with ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’. The women insisted they were simply protesting at the inappropriate entwining of religion and state politics. They saw their protest in a larger context, with relevance to Russia’s own history.
Nadya Tolokonnikova quoted the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who spent years in Siberian camps, on the possibilities of change in apparently impossible circumstances: ‘The word will break concrete.’ She told the court, ‘Katya, Masha and I may be in prison, but I do not consider us defeated. Just as the dissidents [of the Soviet era] were not defeated … Every day, truth grows more victorious, despite the fact that we remain behind bars.’
The women were jailed for two years. They were released after international pressure ahead of Russia’s Winter Olympics in 2014. Today, they continue to highlight human rights issues – including abuses inside Russian jails.
Moscow, Russia, 20 January 2012. On Red Square, eight women in home-made balaclavas, now famously known as the band Pussy Riot, challenge President Putin with their music.
Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, in court. ‘Katya, Masha and I may be in prison, but I do not consider us defeated.’
‘Stitch’, Russia, 2012. Petr Pavlensky, who has been repeatedly arrested for his performances, sewed his mouth shut in protest against the jailing of the protest group Pussy Riot.
‘Everything was hidden. The game between director, audience and censor gave us our field of play.’
ANDRZEJ WAJDA, POLISH FILM DIRECTOR
Cinema often finds ways of smuggling prohibited truths large and small to its audience – in Eastern Europe, for example, during the Communist era, and nowhere more so, in recent years, than in the films of Iranian director Jafar Panahi.
In 2010, Panahi was sentenced to six years in jail and – in a backhanded compliment to the power of his art – a twenty-year ban on directing. His immediate crime (‘colluding in propaganda’) was to have begun a film set against the backdrop of the huge post-election democracy protests that were violently repressed in 2009. Panahi spent three months in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison before international pressure led to his release on bail.
Tehran, Iran, June 2009. Jafar Panahi’s original crime was to start making a film about the protests of 2009, when millions of Iranians demanded change.
Such experiences would make most people cautious about their next move. Panahi, however, continued as though (almost) nothing had happened. His next project was called This Is Not a Film. (How could it be a film, if Panahi was prohibited from making films?) The film (or non-film) was smuggled out of Iran to the Cannes film festival in 2011 in a flash drive buried inside a cake.
In 2015, while still banned from working and under threat of being sent back to jail (his appeal had been refused), Panahi released Taxi Tehran, filmed as he drove a cab around the Iranian capital. Taxi Tehran is a gently defiant and partly comic eighty-minute portrait of a society, as seen and heard via the passengers in Panahi’s cab. Subjects discussed range from the death penalty and interrogators’ blindfolds, to the life and death of goldfish. One passenger (and star of the film) is Panahi’s ten-year-old niece Hana, who asks what is the ‘sordid realism’ that, her teacher has told her, is forbidden in ‘distributable’ Iranian movies. Her uncle explains, ‘There are realities they don’t want to be shown.’ Hana replies, ‘They don’t want to show it, but do it themselves? Whatever … I don’t get it.’
Another passenger is human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, who defended Panahi and other human rights activists, and who has herself been jailed for her work. As she gets out of the taxi, Sotoudeh gives Panahi a red rose. ‘This is for the people of cinema – because the people of cinema can be relied on.’
‘They can ban my books, they can ban my cartoons, but they cannot ban my mind.’
ZUNAR, MALAYSIAN CARTOONIST
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thought President Bashar al-Assad was ‘a reformer’. British prime minister Tony Blair considered giving him an honorary knighthood. For Syrians themselves, the dangers were more obvious.
Cartoonist Ali Ferzat, like his Malaysian colleague Zunar, knew he was taking risks when he used his art to tell unpalatable truths. For decades, Ferzat has lived close to the edge with his allusive images and gained popularity through doing so. Things became particularly difficult when in 2010 he began to draw identifiable individuals, not just generic tyrants. That, as he put it later, pushed him through ‘the barrier of fear’.
In one image, Ferzat portrayed the Syrian leader perched on the edge of a massive armchair – Ferzat’s familiar ‘chair of power’. Sharp springs are popping out of the broken upholstery. In Ferzat’s summary, ‘Basically, things were starting to give [Assad] a pain in the arse.’
The punishment for such insolence was not long in coming. In August 2011, masked gunmen dragged Ferzat from his car, shattering his hands and leaving his fingers broken. The cartoonist was left by the side of the road.
The attack served as a perverse tribute to the power of Ferzat’s work. Even after the attack, he refused to be silenced. Ferzat is critical of international failures, too: ‘The West has used the policies of the three monkeys: I do not see, I do not hear and I do not talk.’
A cartoon by Ali Ferzat of the Syrian leader, President Bashar al-Assad. In Ferzat’s words, ‘Things were starting to give him a pain in the arse.’
NOT A BUG SPLAT
US military drones – remotely controlled killing machines, often operated from an air base in the Nevada desert – have been responsible for the deaths of many civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere. Eight-year-old Nabeela Rehman’s grandmother Mamana Bibi was killed by a drone strike in 2012. Nabeela witnessed her grandmother’s death. They had been picking okra together in preparation for Eid celebrations the next day. Nabeela told Amnesty International, ‘When drones fly overhead, I wonder, will I be next?’ Hundreds of children have lost their lives. Nabeela’s father said, ‘We do not kill our cattle the way the US is killing humans with drones.’
The White House claims ‘near-certainty’ that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. Those who document the impact on the ground do not see it that way. According to an analysis by the Reprieve human rights group, the rate of intended killing to ‘collateral damage’ has been twenty-five to one. Children are seen from the air-conditioned trailer in Nevada as a mere blur on the screen. They are described as ‘fun-sized terrorists’. One former drone pilot told the Guardian newspaper, ‘Ever step on ants and never give it another thought? That’s what you are made to think of the targets – as just black blobs on a screen.’
The military described those who lost their lives as ‘bug splats’. In Pakistan, people were determined to change that. In 2014, local groups, together with a collective of international artists, launched the #NotABugSplat campaign. A vast photograph of a girl, twenty metres by thirty metres, was laid out in a field – easily visible from high in the sky. The girl in the picture had lost both parents and two siblings in a drone attack; she herself was lucky to have survived. The drone operators saw not an anonymous blur but a huge child’s face on their screen.
Giving a face to the faceless helped change things. The number of drone attacks – and associated civilian casualties – has in recent years finally started to come down. In 2016, President Obama issued an executive order that should make civilian protection a priority for the first time.
Pakistan, 2014. This giant image spread out in a field is an art installation targeted at drone operators who refer to kills as bug splats.
The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has often got into trouble for her art performances. In her ‘Tatlin’s Whisper’ in 2009, she offered a microphone for Cubans to speak publicly for one minute on any subject they chose. The authorities were seemingly unimpressed by the dangerous incitement for people to exercise the internationally guaranteed right to free speech. They shut Bruguera’s performance down.
In May 2015, during the Havana Biennial, Bruguera organized what she called the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism. This involved a hundred-hour reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in Bruguera’s Havana home over several days. The book had been published in 1951, before Castro’s Cuba even existed, but authoritarian governments share a mistrust of books, and a title that contained the word ‘totalitarianism’ was obviously alarming. As a result, Bruguera’s bookish event was treated as if it were a danger to society.
Havana, May 2015. The copy of Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt that artist Tania Bruguera read to invited guests.
The authorities seemed to decide that the words of Arendt – and thus also the voice of Bruguera, as artist – should simply be drowned out. Construction workers were posted outside her window with pneumatic drills. The noise was deafening, and nobody could hear Arendt’s words. As so often, the authorities missed the point. Few in the audience would, in any case, have been able to concentrate on every word of Arendt’s book, even without any external disturbance. The context of the performance remained as relevant as the content – and the pneumatic drills placed outside Bruguera’s window underlined that.
As Bruguera’s event came to an end, the artist was, as she put it, ‘taken for a little ride’ by police and detained for several hours. Bruguera, whose passport was confiscated while ‘waiting for the decision of the prosecutor’, argued that the authorities are confused: ‘They’re desperate and afraid – they lost the symbolic implication of their action … They’re extremely afraid of people saying what they think, without fear of consequences.’
The authorities first tried to drown out her voice with pneumatic drills. Then police took her ‘for a little ride’.
‘Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.’
WOLE SOYINKA
Violence against women is a daily reality in Afghanistan. Most often, it goes unconfronted and unpunished. Artist Kubra Khademi wanted to challenge that. In 2015, she commissioned a metalworker to create a set of armour that fitted over her breasts, belly and buttocks. After all, she said, ‘this is all that men see of women’.
Khademi knew she would get strong reactions, but even she did not guess quite how strong. She planned to walk in her body armour through the streets of Kabul, filming reactions of passers-by. The reactions were so extreme that her performance had to be cut short. Her safety was threatened. Khademi was clear: ‘I don’t have any regrets. Artists can’t be stopped.’
Only weeks after Khademi’s performance, and reinforcing the seriousness of the issues, came the killing of Farkhunda Malikzada. Farkhunda was beaten by a mob of angry men, run over, set on fire and thrown into a river in Kabul, after being falsely accused of burning a Koran. Across Afghanistan thousands of women (and some men, too) demanded action – painting faces blood-red in reference to Farkhunda’s death and, more broadly, in protest against violence against women. Defying tradition, they refused to let men, who had failed to defend Farkhunda, carry her coffin.
The defiance has continued. In 2016, a competitor in Afghan Star – a television singing contest, along the lines of X Factor and American Idol – publicly confronted the violence. Twenty-three-year-old Sahar Arian appeared on stage with smeared make-up and streaks of bloody red paint. Sahar’s song addressed the violence all around. She explained, ‘I saw what happened to Farkhunda. I wanted to voice both my anger and the anger of all women in Afghanistan.’
Sahar received a standing ovation; she also received death threats. But she was determined not to back down: ‘I was a small lamb in a lion’s den. But I was not afraid.’
Kabul, Afghanistan, February 2015. Kubra Khademi commissioned a set of armour, which she then wore through the streets. The reactions were extreme.
