Manus Island, in Papua New Guinea, is the location of a controversial detention centre which the Australian government uses to hold over 1,000 asylum seekers indefinitely. It is also home to Iranian journalist and 2017 Index journalism award nominee Behrouz Boochani. His film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, which exposes the realities of life as a detainee on Manus Island, has been selected for the BFI London Film Festival.
An urgent and powerful documentary, shot in a detention centre where asylum seekers trying to reach Australian shores are indefinitely detained. Secretly shot on a mobile phone by Boochani while detained on Manus, the film is a collaboration with Dutch-Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani. Boochani recounts, via the testimonies of fellow inmates, the abuse and violence inflicted and the precarious state of limbo they find themselves in.
Chauka, the name of the dreaded solitary confinement unit within the detention centre, was originally the name of a beautiful bird and symbol of the Manus Island. By interweaving dialogue with two Manusian men and shots of daily life on the island, the film gives a much-needed voice to Manus inhabitants, understandably distressed by the current situation. With marked restraint, the film exposes lives broken by shocking immigration policies.
Free to air is the autumn 2017 edition of Index on Censorship magazine
Join Index on Censorship magazine for the launch of the autumn 2017 celebrating all things radio.
In conjunction with our friends at Resonance FM, Index will be broadcasting all evening on Tuesday 10 October, as we discuss the rebirth of radio and why it is so important to freedom of expression.
Special guests include Jamie Angus, deputy director of the BBC World Service Group, broadcaster and DJ Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura from NTS Live, broadcaster and sound artist Fari Bradley from Resonance FM and writer and broadcaster Mark Frary, who will also be running a short DIY podcasting workshop before the panel discussion.
We’re launching the magazine with its special report Free to Air: Why the Rebirth of Radio is Delivering More News at the iconic Tea Building in Shoreditch, home to digital product studio ustwo, our venue partners for the launch. Features in the latest magazine include a 98-year-old granny making grassroots radio in the USA, radio journalists in Somalia who brave danger to do their jobs and the Spanish comedians who make a television show about a radio station.
There will be drinks from Flying Dog Brewery, our freedom of expression chums and sponsors and we’ll be closing the evening with a DJ set from Resonance FM’s very own Nana Nicol.
6:00 – 6:30 DIY podcasting workshop, register for your free space via [email protected] 6:30 – 7:15 drinks 7:15 – 8:30 Panel discussion 8:30 – 9:00 DJ set from Nana Nicol
Mouth Shut, Loud Shouts is a new group exhibition at Stockholm’s Marabouparken that deals with questions of censorship and silencing deeply rooted in colonial regimes. The show will feature a reading room, which includes a selection of material from the Index on Censorship.
Mouth Shut, Loud Shouts have built a reading room to hold publications and material related to the exhibition, where attendees can spend time and read. A large part of the library is dedicated to Index on Censorship magazine, a global quarterly magazine, with reporters and contributing editors around the world. It was founded in 1972 by British poet and novelist Stephen Spender whose work focused on social injustice and class struggle. Alongside translator Michael Scammell they set up a magazine to publish the untold stories of dissidents behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ – the very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and just this year it published a story by Haroldo Conti, which had never before been published in English. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere. It was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America, but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships, and focused its reporting on the different ways censorship and freedom of expression operates across the whole globe.
The collection of magazines are part of an archive loaned by the Bishopsgate Institute in London, an important space for the preservation of material on the labour, cooperative, free thought, protest and LGBTQ movements since 1895.
A series of posters, free to be taken away can be found here. These new works are connected to a project called The Klinik whose aim is to bring together artists and cultural workers to discuss cases in the censoring of artistic expression. Johanna Gustavsson and Felice Hapetzeder have produced two new posters that respond to Klinik workshops held in Stockholm in Autumn 2106. On the 16 September Belit Sağ, Secil Yayali and Felice Hapetzeder will hold public workshops exploring different forms censorship activating questions of how censorship operates in the arts in Stockholm.
In addition, there are a number of publications which relate to questions the exhibition touches upon and the exhibiting artists and their work.
The suppression of speech, information, language and image is expansive and operates in different ways across the globe. Works within the exhibition present how censoring can operate as a mode of marginalisation and delegitimisaiton. Whilst some work directly opposes forms of state censorship, other works deal with pervasive embodied codes of self-censorship. Importantly the work looks to practices that transgress these modes of silencing and suppression, finding spaces, avenues and aesthetic forms that leak out voices to the world and ourselves.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Join Index on Censorship for a summer party to launch its upcoming issue exploring the impact of the Russian revolution of 1917 on our freedoms today.
We’re launching the magazine at Calvert 22 Space, which celebrates the culture and creativity of the New East – eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and Central Asia.
There’ll be pop-up provocations looking at contemporary influences of the Russian revolution on propaganda, culture and politics from around the globe, alongside live readings of speeches tracing the political rhetoric from Lenin to Putin.
Speakers include Don Guttenplan, Editor-at-Large for the Nation on the cultural cold war, Katya Rogatchevskaia, lead Curator of Central and East European collections at the British Library on Russian propaganda, and Adam Cathcart, a specialist and lecturer in Chinese history at Leeds University on the impact of Soviet art on North Korean art and culture.
We’ll be serving beer from Flying Dog Brewery and all attendees will receive a free copy of the latest magazine.
This issue has reports from all corners of the globe including Uzbekistan, China, Russia, Cuba and Turkey. Writers for this issue include David Aaronovitch on film, Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter Nina Khrushcheva on living in the USA, and an interview with author Margaret Atwood on science censorship and her childhood in the wilderness.
[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/4″][vc_single_image image=”91222″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”http://calvert22.org/”][/vc_column_inner][vc_column_inner width=”3/4″][vc_column_text]Calvert 22 Space is hosting the summer 2017 Index on Censorship magazine launch.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/3″][vc_single_image image=”91220″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
