Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), an offshoot of free speech nonprofit PEN America, has released a new report urging human rights and arts organizations to extend their protections to oppressed artists. Entitled “Art is power: 20 artists explain how they fight for justice and inspire changethe document profiles 20 visual artists, performers, filmmakers, musicians and authors, most of whom now live in exile, and argues that these cultural workers too often escape the reach of advocacy groups.
One such artist is Bart Was Not Here (the professional name of Kyaw Moe Khine), a Burmese digital artist who grew up in Myanmar in the late 1990s and 2000s and was forced to leave his country in 2021. In an interview with Hyperallergic, Bart spoke about Myanmar’s long history of social uprising and forced emigration.
The artist explained that he had always seen adults protesting when he was a child; Myanmar achieved a short-lived democracy in a 2015 election before the new government was overthrown by a military coup in 2021, plunging the country into a state of unrest, war and genocide. More … than 17,000 people were arrested and 13,000 are still in prison. During this time, Bart began to focus on a series called See red (2021), which he made available for free download on social media. The works, which depict political leaders and slogans such as “Disobey”, served as the visual language for the mass protests and strikes sparked by the coup.
“I was just doing my civilian duty,” Bart said. “I saw other people protesting before I was born.”
Later in 2021, someone shot Bart’s car and he found bullet holes in his studio. The artist secured a place in a residency program in Paris, which he says “saved [his] life.” Now, Bart is settled in New York and working on a new series that explores ideas of “leaving home, finding home, and complex relationships with home.”
Attacks on artistic freedom have multiplied in recent years. In 2021 (last year’s data was available), artistic expression advocacy group Freemuse follow up 1,251 cases of violations worldwide. This total included 39 artists who were killed, more than 500 who faced legal action (including 253 artists detained and 119 imprisoned), and 127 works of art and places that were destroyed.
Some artists who experienced displacement spoke of the difficulty of finding a community, while others lamented the difficulty of selling their work and earning a living in exile.
Omaid Sharifi co-founded the mural group ArtLords in Afghanistan in 2014. The collective of 53 artists painted more than 2,000 murals, often depicting persecuted individuals and focusing on issues of social justice. Sharifi moved to Washington, DC, in 2021 after Taliban takeover and focused on evacuating remaining ArtLord artists from Afghanistan. The painter said that so far, 46 members have emigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia. Sharifi added that selling ArtLords’ work in the United States has been a challenge and he hasn’t heard of any museums or galleries hoping to exhibit the collective’s paintings, a problem amplified when artists have ” no other means of subsistence”.
At this point, ARC Director Julie Trébault spoke of the need for arts and human rights organizations to step in and confirmed the report’s assertion that socially engaged artists are ignored at both by the world of human rights and the world of art, “each group considering them as the responsibility of the other. As for the museum sector and the art market, Trébault evoked the necessary “quality issue” which may prohibit at-risk creators from earning a living as artists abroad.
“Is it art, is it activism, and where are the lines drawn?” Ugandan poet Stella Nyanzi, another profiled artist, asked in an interview with Hyperallergic. She was imprisoned for it poems criticizing political leaders and was eventually forced to leave Uganda. Nyanzi, who now lives in Germany, spoke of the need for art in times of upheaval. Music, poetry and art can help remedy “a tiredness and tiredness” that can afflict continued civil resistance through “beautiful energy that challenges very ugly human oppressive power”, she said. .
In the United States, Dashka Slater, also featured in the new report, represents the host of authors whose work has been censored in the unprecedented number of book bans during the last years. She has published a novel for young adults titled The 57 bus (2017), a true story about a 2013 hate crime against a teenager in California.
“I think what’s happening right now is we’re running into a disconnect between our ideals – what we assume to be true and what’s happening on the ground,” Slater said, acknowledging that rights of the American First Amendment offer protection against certain oppressive acts. faced by the other artists featured in the report.
The ARC report offers a long list of recommendations, including calls for countries to update their policies on the protection of artists (such as creating pathways to immigration and residency programs) and to countries to create a “UN Plan of Action for the Protection of Artists”.
“As attacks on artistic freedom escalate at an unprecedented rate around the world, the widely held idea that only states, or only human rights organizations, have the responsibility to protect artists at risk is obsolete,” the report concludes. “The art and human rights worlds must work together to address growing needs and advocate for more comprehensive state protections.”
