Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the two members of the Russian anarchist punk group Pussy Riot currently serving two-year sentences at prison camps after their anti-Putin performance in a Moscow cathedral last February, was denied an early release by a Russian court on Friday because, she claims, she “didn’t repent” for her actions, the Associated Press reports. Under Russian law, inmates can seek early release after serving half of a prison sentence, and Tolokonnikova has been in custody since last March. In February she was hospitalized due to fatigue and sickness. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Censorship’
April 29, 2013, 7:40 am
Pussy Riot Member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova Denied Parole
March 25, 2013, 10:25 am
Museum Visitor Demands Censorship of 19th Century Erotic Whale Bone Carvings
A visitor to the Vancouver Maritime Museum (VMM) was taken aback by the institution’s new exhibition “Tattoos and Scrimshaw: The Art of the Sailor,” which opened earlier this month and includes tattoo art and bone carvings by sailors including, according to Ann Pimentel, scrimshaw so graphic it qualifies as “whale bone porn.” “The Museum have [sic] a new exhibit called Scrimshaw which features numerous images of inappropriate nature (oral sex, sex, nudity, male anatomy etc.) on tusks,” Pimentel wrote in a TripAdvisor.com post quoted by the National Post. “As a mother and a teacher I was extremely disturbed and believe these pieces of ‘art’ should be removed.” (more…)
March 15, 2013, 12:05 pm
Saatchi Gallery Latest Victim of Facebook Censors’ Rampage Due to Iconic Dali Photo
After Facebook’s censors over-zealously took down a Laure Albin Guillot photograph from the Jeu de Paume’s page and an image of a Gerhard Richter painting from that of the Centre Pompidou, London’s Saatchi Gallery has become the latest victim of the social network’s aesthetic obscurantism. Gallery director Rebecca Wilson told ARTINFO via email that the latest of several offending image that Facebook has removed from their page — and threatened to shut down their account over — is Salvador Dalí and photographer Philippe Halsman’s 1951 collaboration “Voluptas Mors” (above). (more…)
March 13, 2013, 2:24 pm
Statue of God-on-Goat Action Earns British Museum’s Pompeii Show a Parental Warning
A statue of the Roman half-goat, half-man god Pan — who was the Greeks’ god of the wild — getting wild with a female goat (see above) has proven so NSFW (or, in this case, NSFM) that the British Museum has placed a parental advisory in the gallery where it will be on view as part of the upcoming exhibition “Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum.” The statue was excavated from beneath some 100 feet of Volcanic ash that enveloped the Villa of the Papyri, the residence of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, on the slope Mount Vesuvius. (more…)
March 6, 2013, 2:34 pm
Facebook Censors Paris’s Jeu de Paume, Threatens To Deactivate the Museum’s Account
After censoring a Gerhard Richter nude on the Pompidou Center’s page last summer, Facebook is at it again. The social network removed a 1940 photograph of a partially nude woman from the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume’s page and even disabled the museum’s account for 24 hours because of its infringement of Facebook community standards. (more…)
February 6, 2013, 2:13 pm
Rome’s MAXXI Museum Cancels Premiere of Anti-Berlusconi Documentary Ahead of Election
At the request of Italy’s Ministry of Culture, Rome’s MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art has canceled the premiere of a new documentary directed by journalist Annalisa Piras that is very critical of media mogul and three-time prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, “Girlfriend in a Coma” — which was scheduled to screen there on February 13 — a move that has drawn accusations of censorship, particularly with the February 24-25 election in which Berlusconi is running for a fourth term looming. (more…)
February 3, 2013, 12:27 pm
Gallery Evicted After Showing Art Containing Exposed Breasts, Sues Utah Town and Its Mayor
Remember when nude art was considered obscenity? You probably don’t, because it hasn’t been the case since the mid-20th century*. City government officials in the small town of Ephraim, Utah, apparently didn’t get the memo. The city (pop. 6,135 at last count) evicted a small contemporary art gallery, the Central Utah Arts Center, from its Main Street last summer fter government officials were offended by the nudity present in several exhibitions. The gallery is now suing Mayor David Parrish and the city of Ephraim in federal court, according to Courthouse News. (more…)
January 27, 2013, 7:17 pm
Fear of Government Censorship Won’t Squash Egypt’s Burgeoning Art Community
The Arab Spring of 2011 was a windfall for a number of artists across the Middle East and North Africa. But two years later, are they really better off? Last weekend, there was an update on the Tunisian art scene, and this week, the Art Newspaper checked in on the state of free speech in Egypt, a country which experienced a number of democratic hiccups in the two years since protesters in Tahrir Square spurred the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak. Artists in the North African country are skeptical that the new freedoms afforded them under a democratically elected regime will last, as the new government is run by the ultra-conservative Muslim Brotherhood. (more…)
January 20, 2013, 11:45 am
Art, Revolution, and Islam: Checking In with Tunisian Artists Two Years After the Arab Spring
In Tunisia — the birthplace of the Arab Spring — the lives of artists are radically changed, and yet, in some ways, no better at all. Lively street art dots the landscape of the capital, but censorship still abounds, and the growing power of Islamic extremists is a constant threat to open artistic expression. ARTINFO covered the Salafist Islamist attacks on the Printemps des Arts fair outside of Tunis last summer, and this week, art blog Hyperallergic posted an update to the situation in North Africa.
January 9, 2013, 9:23 am
Artwork Quoting IRA Prisoners Sparks Dispute About Terrorism, Call for Censorship in Ireland
In the mid-1990s, Irish artist Shane Cullen created “Fragmens sur les Institutions Républicaines IV,” a wall-text that reproduced the tiny messages passed among republican political prisoners during the H-Block protests of 1981. It earned him the ire of military and justice department veterans, who believed he was glorifying terrorists. The work has since been purchased by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (it went on display in the summer of 2011), but when an edition appeared at the Luan Gallery in the small town of Athlone, neither Cullen nor the gallery were quite prepared for the harsh criticism they heard from local officials. (more…)
