29 Aug 2019 | Events
[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”108826″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]We’re launching our latest Index on Censorship magazine at the Science Museum, as part of their Top Secret Lates on Wednesday 25 September. This is a chance for an adults only, after-hours visit to the museum, exploring all things secret, from codebreaking to secret communications.
We’ll be running interactive sessions Stop: Border Forces At Work with tech journalist Geoff White and security researcher Jacob Wilkin throughout the evening, looking at why surveillance at international borders is rising, what you might get stopped for and how this threatens the flow of global information, and ideas.
Our latest magazine has a special report called Border Forces: How Barriers To Free Thought Got Tough with articles from South Korea, Mexico, USA, Turkey and many more. Don’t miss advice on how to prepare for a border from our digital security expert.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”108828″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”109066″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”108829″ img_size=”full”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]
When: 25 September 2019, 18:45 and last entry is 21:15
Where: Science Museum, Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London SW7 2DD
Tickets: Free via Science Museum. VIP tickets available.
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2 Aug 2019 | About Index
Summer is here! As Index gets its tent ready for another festival this weekend, I wanted to share some highlights from the past few months and give you a sneak peek of what we have in store for the autumn.
Above right, Jemima Foxtrot performs at Latitude Festival.
This Friday, we’ll be gathering festival goers around the campfire for a series ofuncensored folk tales at the Cambridge Folk Festival, where we are this year’s talks partner. Cambridge comes hot on the heels of our story-telling sessions at Latitude where writers including Scarlett Curtis, Max Porter and Jemima Foxtrot entertained crowds with wild stories.
Speech of a different kind was in focus at a talk earlier in July when UN rapporteur David Kaye discussed the thorny question of who polices speech online. Our magazine launch and summer party at the Goethe Institut, with German crime writer Regula Venske, was also a chance to reflect on the ways censorship creeps up to become authoritarianism.
Other events included two special talks in London and at the Hay Festival to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings. Speakers included authors Xinran and Karoline Kan, journalist Tania Branigan and academic Jeff Wasserstrom.
China will be in focus again in October when we have an exclusive screening of the film China’s Artful Dissident, which features the work of leading political dissident cartoonist Badiucao. Badiucao, who revealed his identity earlier this year after years of anonymity and who is flying from Australia to attend, will be in conversation with cartoonist Martin Rowson after the film. This is an invitation only event. Please email [email protected] if you would like to attend.
At the end of September, Index celebrates the freedom to read. Watch out for Banned Books Week events at the British Library and Foyles bookshop as well as at independent bookshops and libraries around the UK where midnight openings will celebrate the launch of Margaret Atwood’s new book ‘The Testaments’.
Press freedom in focus
In advocacy, we were delighted at news that the investigation into Northern Irish reporters Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey was dropped in May. Index – alongside colleagues English PEN – intervened in the judicial review of their case and we are grateful for the support of Phoenix Law in Belfast and Doughty Street Chambers in London. Birney and McCaffrey had their homes and office raided last year following their documentary investigating police collusion in the murders of six men.
From left: Freedom of Expression Awards Journalism Fellows Zaina Erhaim (2016), Zaheena Rasheed (2017) and Wendy Funes (2018) in the Index booth at the Defend Media Freedom conference in July.
Media freedom is the focus of a major campaign spearheaded by the UK and Canada this year. I spoke on the issue at the UK’s launch of its annual human rights report and Index played an active role in a global conference hosted in London in July to launch the campaign. We were excited to see so many Index fellows there, including journalism fellows Zaina Erhaim, Zaheena Rasheed and Mimi Mefo, who all spoke on panels at the event, as well as Wendy Funes, NetBlocks and CRNI. We’ve also published reports looking at the wave of physical threats that journalists are facing in Russia, Turkey and Ukraine — drawn from our latest media monitoring project.
Current arts fellow Zehra Dogan had an exhibition at the Tate in May and was also one ofthe designers of flags developed to mark the 70th anniversary of the UN declaration on human rights.
Also in arts, Index continued to raise questions about the UK’s policing of drill music and spoke at the launch of a new single by two artists who are subject to controversial new orders that are forcing musicians to censor their work.
Knowledge sharing
Our expertise is in high demand. In May, Index launched a new advisory service for arts organisations facing censorship, offering consultancy services, workshops and training. We also continue to provide expertise through the media, and have featured widely in international and national press and broadcast. Head of advocacy Joy Hyvarinen has been active in raising Index’s concerns about the UK’s strategy for online safety. We also gave evidence to Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights about harassment ofMPs – on and offline.
We are recruiting for two new roles over the summer. The Head of Communications & Media and Senior Partnerships Manager positions are currently being advertised and we look forward to welcoming new additions to the Index family who will help us spread the free speech message even further.
Andrew Graham-Yooll
Finally, we were sorry last month to learn of the death of a great Index friend and freespeech champion – former editor of Index magazine, Andrew Graham-Yooll, who was a leading figure in the reporting of Argentina’s repressive regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Andrew’s family have kindly asked that people give to Index in Andrew’s memory. If you would like to do this, please visit the justgiving page.
As another former Index colleague, Matthew d’Ancona, wrote in a recent article, the right to free speech is needed not by the few but by everyone – and we are grateful to have had known individuals like Andrew who help us maintain that fight.
19 Jul 2019 | Magazine, News and features, Student Reading Lists
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”107971″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]Andrew Graham-Yooll served as editor for the Index on Censorship magazine from 1989-1993. He was then, and remained until his death in 2019, committed to free expression and the free press around the world. In honour of his memory, Index is featuring some of the highlights of his writing for the magazine about his home country Argentina. The pieces featured cover a broad range of topics and events primarily related Argentinian art and journalism, and showcase Graham-Yooll’s fierce integrity and characteristic humor. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94869″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227308532221″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Letter from Argentina
June 1973, vol. 2 issue: 2
“Censorship in Argentina is not a sin of the State, but a sickness of society”. Thus closes Andrew Graham-Yooll’s scathing indictment of censorship and self-censorship in the Argentinian press, in an environment where press controls are loosely organised but vicious.Graham-Yooll describes the routine torture and corruption in the criminal-justice system that the Argentinian press seems uninterested in, and expresses his opinion that, however damaging state censorship is, it is the fear and self-censorship it engenders in the press that is truly destorying Argentina’s soul.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94773″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227508532398″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Argentinian press under Peron
March 1975, vol. 4 issue: 1
Andrew Graham-Yooll reflects on the record he kept of all the obstacles to press freedom and independence in Argentina during the early 1970s. He outlines, in broad strokes, the conflict between right- and left-wing branches of Peronism, and what the escalating conflict between the two–and the right wing’s eventual victory–meant for the operation of the Argentinian press. The press had faced restrictions and instability under Alejandro Augustin Lanusse and Hector Jose Campora that exploded into violence and direct government interference with print, radio, and television media under Raul Alberto Lastiri, Juan Peron himself, and his widow, Isabel Martinez de Peron.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”94399″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064227908532905″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Arrests in Argentina
March 1979, vol. 8 issue: 2
Graham-Yooll takes a look into the fate of the nine workers at El Independiente, a left-of-center, nationalist local paper in the poor Argentinian province of La Rioja that “established itself on the wrong side of every provincial administration”. After Juan Peron was restored to power in 1973, the paper faced increasing harassment and frequent suspensions, until by 1976, El Independiente was permanently and forcibly closed, with seven of the nine workers arrested under dubious charges, some of their families in exile or tortured, and the remaining two workers missing. The Argentinian Newspaper Publishers’ Association demanded their release, but at the time of the article’s writing they were all still imprisoned.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”90901″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229508535825″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Coming Home
January 1995, vol. 7 issue: 2
This article is not an obituary, but it deals with the death of a gay Argentianian novelist, Manuel Puig. Puig died of AIDS in Mexico, a fact that Graham-Yooll was surprised to see mentioned in coverage of the artist and his work. Argentina’s social climate tolerates homosexuality to a degree, Graham-Yooll says, but only unobstrusive or plausibly deniable homosexuality. The brutal targeted repression under the military junta of “putos, guerrilleros, y faloperos” (queers, guerillas and drug addicts) is still in living memory for many gay Argentinians, and though the coverage of Puig could be a positive sign, discussion of homosexuality and gay rights was still not part of mainstream news coverage or culture in Argentina at the time of the article’s writing.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”90587″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220408537324″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]News From Patagonia
April 2004, vol. 33 issue: 2
In 2003, shortly before the article was written, Argentina’s Supreme Court struck down a law passed some twenty years earlier under the junta, which had made it illegal to provide broadcasting licences to community radio. The nominal grounds for that practice had been that it was easier to prevent the infiltration by the regime’s ideological enemies of commercial radio. However, before the law was struck down, its true raison d’etre had become the preservation of cronyism and political nepotism. Graham-Yooll uses the Supreme Court’s ruling as a chance to take stock of Argentina’s broadcasting landscape, with particular focus on the florshing of extra-legal, shoestring FM radio stations.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89187″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220512331339490″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Pain and the Memory: The Legacy of Nunca Mas
February 2005, vol. 34 issue: 1
In 1984, Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Person released a report, Nunca Mas (Never Again), on the human rights abuses under the National Reorganisation Process between 1976 and 1983 that devastated many in the country. In this piece, written in 2012 Graham-Yooll discusses the abuses of the military and the many ways Argentina has attempted to grapple with the report, from the junta trials to a more recent photo exhibition of the atrocities. He shares a few of his own experiences from that time and describes how both dictatorship and report live on in Argentinian memory.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89185″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220500125985″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Our Father, Who Art in Art
May 2005, vol. 34 issue: 2
In 2004, right after the Argentinian branch of the Catholic Church received praise for opening up politically, Leon Ferrari opened up an exhibition in Buenos Aires reviewing the collusion between the church and some of Latin America’s worst regimes over the centuries. Graham-Yooll describes some of the most important exhibit pieces and the extreme backlash the exhibit received from the church and laymenry–sometimes simultaneously, as in the entertaining story of a Christian vandal whose destruction of a piece was turned into an exhibit piece itself.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89186″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220500125985″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Cumbia Villera: the Sound of the Slums
August 2005, vol. 34 issue: 3
A new genre of music is becoming popular in Latin America: the “politically incorrect” cumbia villera, a high-energy, hard-hitting new street music with a Carribbean beat. The lyrics to these songs, according to Graham-Yooll, are “vile and often violent”: they are filled with misogynistic abuse, incitement to prison breaks and riots, and enthusiastic encouragement of alcohol and hard drug use. For this reason, the Argentinain government at the time of the article was considering censoring cumbia villera, but in what Graham-Yooll asserts is a reflection of Argentina’s growing class divide, the music is gaining a mass following in the slums that seems unstoppable.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”89110″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422012456134″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]The Past in Hiding
September 2012, vol. 41 issue: 3
Nearly 40 years after the dirty war, Graham-Yooll examines two new books whose dialogue he believes represent hope that the record of atrocities committed by the junta can be known and Argentina can thus “come to terms” with its past. The first book, Final Disposal, is a set of nine interviews journalist Ceferino Reato conducted with members of the erstwhile regime in prison, in which those members display, according to Graham-Yooll, both generosity with information and a cold and brutal view of their own crimes. The second book, From Guilt to Forgiveness, is a personal account written by Norma Morandini, a former journalist and politician, about her personal journey from denial of what happened under the regime to a reckoning.
Read the full article[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”80566″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306422015605706″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]From murder to bureaucratic mayhem: After Argentina’s dictatorship, what happened next for the country’s journalists
September 2015, vol. 44 issue: 3
After Argentina emerged from under the rule of the military junta in 1983, press freedom improved considerably. Now, journalists are not murdered by the regime, but silenced through systemic harassment and the entangled web of cronyism. Graham-Yooll explains how the leader of Argentina at the time of the article, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, has developed a distinct and effect new “means of controlling the message”: not reactive censorship, but preemptive control of content through control of the ownership and cash flows of the media.
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2 Jul 2019 | Artistic Freedom, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”107744″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][vc_column_text]It could be argued that identity has become a dominant feature in contemporary art and performance since the 1980s, where artists have been and still are exploring the multiple worlds they inhabit, the overlaps between identity, language, history, geopolitics, race and representation. The characteristics of identity as represented in folk or popular culture and the media are interrogated through performance and the semiotics of how identity is enacted. A particular controversial trope in performance has been that of the “blackface”. Wikipedia’s entry describes blackface as a form of “theatrical make-up used predominantly by non-black performers to represent a caricature of a black person”. Undoubtedly the grotesquery and exaggeration contributed to justifying the dehumanising of Africans and other non-white people by the dominant white masters in slavery and colonialism, and popular culture shows such as The Black and White Minstrel Show.
Recently “blackfacing” has been highlighted in many cultural manifestations that may not necessarily have been intended to demean Black or other non-white people. In January 2019, The film Mary Poppins was accused by a writer in the New York Times of shamelessly flirting with blackface, and an American restaurant displaying a photograph of white coal miners covered in coal-soot was seen as offensive by Rashaad Thomas in his opinion piece for azcentral, the digital home of The Arizona Republic newspaper, in February 2019.
Viewing blackfacing through the lens of racial subordination/superiority struck me again this year when I met and mentored the Warwickshire based British visual artist Faye Claridge this year for Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Claridge’s work reveals a deep fascination with “representation and belonging in a country obsessed with (constantly reworked) history” by exploring “how current and future identities are shaped by ideas about the past”. She works with history, folk traditions and archives to “connect the public, especially young people, to mythologies about personal, local and national identity”, particularly in rural English culture. An ongoing body of work of hers called Of Their Own Volition involved research and public participation that excavated the fluid context for blacking-up in traditional Border Morris Dancing. The work questions context, perception and tradition. However, she was compelled to remove earlier works from this series relating to Border Morris Dance.
I asked her what motivated or inspired her to research the Border Morris Dance tradition, she told me that she “felt an urgency to revisit portraits of morris dancers with blackened faces I’d made almost 10 years previously after becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the explanations I was asked to give in their defence. The final catalyst for this was when one of my images was used for a photography conference at the Tate but was then censored after it provoked complaints.” The subject is close Claridge’s heart, as the artist herself comes from a family of morris dancers. The explanation given for blacking-up in border morris “replicated a very old form of cheap and easy sooty disguise. I was told this was adopted by dancers for a range of reasons: to avoid recognition from potential employees, to beg anonymously, to bring luck – and fertility – as a pretend stranger and/or to look scary to ward off evil spirits. No reasons for disguise were related to race, I was told, and any conflation with derogatory black and white minstrel blacking was unfortunately mixing visuals with entirely different histories and motives.” This received knowledge led Claridge to seek evidence by speaking to experts, visiting key sites and digging into archival material.
However, her research did not uncover clear motives for blacking-up. “I started to recognise that finding historical evidence is only a small part of the issue. The impact of blacking up in performance (of any kind) today has unavoidable aesthetic links to the deliberately damaging racial stereotypes of the black and white minstrels. Even if undisputable evidence pointed to a non-racial origin for morris blacking, its continued use for any reason after the acknowledged harm of minstrelsy has to be questioned.” Part of the work involves a series of portraits of contemporary Border Morris dancers. One of the photographs that Claridge showed me is of a woman with long flowing brunette hair blacked up, holding a bouquet of local flowers – daisies, daffodils, ivy and bird-feathers – staged against the backdrop of a painted scenery of washed out grey clouds and English mountains. Claridge is unable to show this portrait, and other similar photographs, in exhibitions as the sitter withdrew her permission when the artist invited her to contribute to the research on blacking-up. Claridge has since re-imagined the image by masking the subject with the letter that the sitter sent to the artist. The letter, with personal information redacted, says “I would prefer that you no longer use this image of me… I no longer feel qualified to comment on the blacking up issue… I hope you will respect my wishes”. The image is displayed on the back of a picture frame instead of the front as a metaphor for the original work’s journey into self-censorship.
This work has been selected for an open competition organised by the Nottingham based gallery The New Art Exchange but when Claridge proposed the series to other curators she was met with much unease and anxiety about the work. One curator responded that “It’s all very difficult terrain out there at the moment… have a good look around what black artists are doing in this area. The question of authorship is the critical issue it seems. Who can speak for who…We are finding people returning to very insecure places and taboo subjects raise anxieties.” Another curator told Claridge that “I imagine you know what sticky territory you are in (!), and I guess you know about other precedents for this conversation.”
Art institutions are becoming increasingly risk-averse and unable to deal with the questions that such works throw up, the people in the photographs feel exposed through the perceived racist lens and the artist is a white British woman…”who can speak for who”, it’s a taboo subject that may trigger the viewers’ anxieties but shouldn’t art be a tool to ask difficult questions, to provoke debate and transcend the divisions and borders relating to race and identity? The origins of blackfacing in border morris remains a mystery and has led the artist to question her own motivations: “The research journey has taken me to other, far deeper, questions about my power as an artist in gathering and sharing opinions. If I respect and repeat all views equally then my role is strangely inhuman, if I assert my own opinions, am I unfairly using my position? My nature has been exposed and tested: I’m keenly aware that I don’t like conflict and the risk of upsetting people deeply makes me anxious. It’s also apparent that I don’t like power being misused and I hate inequality. This is what motivated my drive to seek evidence (or lack of it) for morris blacking at the start, to see if my own work had a case to answer in this regard. I’ve concluded that it has; I won’t exhibit the original morris portraits again without significant alterations and my work evolving from this research more transparently references the problematics of power, blurred histories and appropriation…”
Increasingly, artists are forced to self-censor due to the possible backlash not only by curators, academics and the community, but also from fellow artists. It is part of a wider problem that I highlighted in a blog for the Manifesto Club on the self-censorship of a young adult novel by Amélie Wen Zhao. This is worrying for artistic freedom.
As Claridge says, there is “a sadness that it should come to this and a question of where exactly this is that we have come to. I remain unsure.”
Manick Govinda is a freelance arts consultant, artist mentor, campaigner and curator. His writings can be found here.
Faye Claridge’s work Blackout will be exhibited at NAE Open from 13 July to 8 September 2019.[/vc_column_text][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1562063442406-116696fa-3728-1″ taxonomies=”15469″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
