Mouth Shut, Loud Shouts: Index at Marabouparken

28 Jul 17 | Events

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Foto: Paulo Bruscky Lingua/gens: Tongue Performance 1996 © Konstnären och Galeria Nara Roesler

Foto: Paulo Bruscky
Lingua/gens: Tongue Performance 1996
© Konstnären och Galeria Nara Roesler

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.

About the exhibition

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]

When: Opens 15 September 2017
Where: Marabouparken, Löfströmsvägen 8, Sundbyberg. [email protected]
Tickets: Free

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Surveillance, security and censorship

19 Mar 13 | Uncategorized

The potential for communication brought about by the web is matched only by its potential as a surveillance tool. UN Rapporteur on free expression Frank La Rue recently announced that his next report will be on state surveillance and the web. In the UK, the government has vowed to reintroduce the Communications Data Bill, known commonly as the “snooper’s charter” which aims to give the authorities unprecedented powers to store, monitor and search private data. In Australia, the government has proposed similar powers and also suggested social networks should allow back-door surveillance of users.

It’s not just state gathering of data that worries people, of course. Many people object to the hoovering up and monetisation of data posted on public and private networks by the many private web companies whose services so many of us now use.

The right to privacy and the right to free expression often go hand in hand. Surveillance is bound to curtail what we say, and enable what we say to be used against us.

In Stockholm last week, Google brought together experts from politics, business, policing and civil liberties to discuss the complex intermingling of free speech, security and surveillance online.

Hosted in a former church overlooking Stockholm Harbour, the latest “Big Tent” event was kicked off with a discussion between Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Google’s Global Head of Free Expression Ross Lajeunesse.

Bildt raised a laugh while voicing confusion over the safety of “cloud computing”, asking “Where is the bloody cloud?”

But Lajeunesse insisted that cloud computing is the best way to guarantee safety from hacking and theft, adding that Google’s gmail is encrypted in an effort to protect users from surveillance.

Discussing China’s method’s of web censorship and surveillance (Read Index’s China correspondent here), Bildt put forward the interesting proposition that the authorities use of “50 cent party” a network of thousands of civilians paid to post pro government content in web conversations, was perhaps a sign the authorities had admitted that censorship had failed, as the government seemed to have conceded that you know had to argue your case rather than censor others.

Lajeunesse was hopeful for Chinese web users, simply saying that 700 milllion people who want access to information cannot be held back.

The reasoning behind state surveillance was discussed in a later panel. After Francesca Bosco, of the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute gave a frankly terrifying account of cyber crime and web security (in brief, there’s a lot of crime and no real security), Brian Donald of Europol discussed the need for surveillance, citing examples of tracking people engaged in the trade of images of child sexual abuse. He countered fears of dragnet surveillance expressed by Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jacob Mchangama of Danish civil liberties group CEPOS, saying that he was in fact limited in his powers to fight crime by European data protection laws.

Galperin and Mchangama both also expressed concern over the policing and surveillance of not just of crime, but of speech online (a subject of considerable debate in the UK).

It seems like the back-and-forth on these issues will not be resolved any time soon. Security, surveillance and free speech have always been intertwined. But mass use of the web, as our lives move online, makes the debate on achieving a balance all the more urgent.