REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK A PUBLICATION OF L’INTERNATIONALE BOOKS REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK Cover credit: Tania Bruguera, El Susurro de Tatlin #6 (versión para La Habana), 2009. TABLE OF CONTENTS 4 46 Introduction Havana Tribunes Tamara Díaz Bringas 8 UNDER ATTACK 51 (or Expression in the Age of A Dangerous State Selfie-Control) Tamara Díaz Bringas André Lepecki 55 15 Who Said Fear? Bourgeois Censorship: Tamara Díaz Bringas No Representation Without Taxation! Anej Korsika 59 Zero for Conduct 22 Tamara Díaz Bringas Syria as a Global Metaphor Yassin Al-Haj Saleh 64 Assembly 29 (L’Internationale) The Myth of Unfamiliarity Agency Banu Karaca 68 35 “Representation Under Attack” Chained Reaction: Freedom of Expression, Through the Lens of the Collections Historical Censorship and Opposition and Archives of the Members Movements of L’Internationale Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş Diana Franssen, Jesús Carrillo, Lola Hinojosa, Jan De Vree, 41 Nav Haq, Sezin Romi, Igor Španjol Club Silencio and the Emptiness of the Square (regarding Tatlin’s Whisper) 88 Tamara Díaz Bringas Biographies L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK – 3 REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK INTRODUCTION REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK Following the attacks on the creators of the con­ representation, to what kind of manipulation and vic­ troversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris timisation strategies attacks such as these engender. in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free While working on this special issue, L’Inter­ speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights nationale was confronted with another intricate and activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, tragic case of the politics of representation. A few and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the months after the Museo Reina Sofía was subjected cultural field is forced to process the significance to legal attacks due to the work of Mujeres Publicas of these events and their wider implications for our in the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, the Museu work. In Paris and many other instances across con­ d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) became tinents, representation itself came under attack. embroiled in a struggle surrounding the censorship Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis of the work of Ines Doujak and John Barker in the for some time, yet the current context demands that exhibition La bestia y el soberano (The Beast and the we consider this crisis from different perspectives Sovereign). To our great regret, the fire turned inward, and historical frameworks. As the public platform where a conflict between the director and curators of a confederation of museums and art institutions, about the contents of the exhibition resulted in the L’Internationale Online has commissioned a series of resignation of the director and the dismissal of the opinion pieces that comment on this complex situa­ two curators. The museum now finds itself search­ tion in order to start a wider discussion from different ing for new leadership and direction. L’Internationale cultural and geopolitical contexts. We invited con­ Online will publish comments on these events in the tributors to consider the issues at stake: from ques­ coming months. tions of manipulated archives and how access to In her contribution “The Myth of Unfamiliarity” historical documents might play a role in attacks on based on the attacks on Charlie Hebdo’s editorial L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK – 5 REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK team or the less recent “war on terror”, Banu Karaca with regards to the labour of the Syrian citizens, their exposes how power shapes the conditions of pro­ political participation, and the conceptual and aes­ duction and circulation of images. She proposes to thetic representation of their reality. Al Haj Saleh consider free speech as a terrain of struggle in which takes the Syrian example as a metaphor for a global freedom of expression is in constant need of discus­ crisis of representation, one which needs a global sion in terms of power, place and history. solution. “Modernist forms of representation need to Theoretician Anej Korsika decides to grasp be replaced, and the first step towards reconstruct­ the deeper historical rootedness and ideological ing an alternative field of representation is recognis­ substance of so­called “freedom of speech” and ing that the responsibility is global”, he writes. its media and social visibility in his contribution Observing the brutality of the “politically expres­ “Bourgeois Censorship: No Representation Without sive selfie” in Western democracies, André Lepecki Taxation”. Korsika points to a few examples taken analyses a form of fascism in “Under Attack (or from the recent history of controversial censorships Expression in the Age of Selfie­Control)”. “The differ­ related to the freedom of information circulation ence between fascist formations of expression now (Edward Snowden, most notably), and to the well­ and in 1939 is simply this: it is no longer the masses known but still “horrific discrepancies” between the that are pushed by power to express themselves in media coverage and response to the events such as pogroms, book burnings, lynchings even when they the Charlie Hebdo attack or Boko Haram’s slaughter of are denied rights of free expression; but rather it is 2000 people in northern Nigeria. The question for him that monstrous apparatus of subjectivity known as lies in “how to make the social body self­conscious the Self that is constantly pressed to express.” and build such forms of self­representation and self­ The international initiative Agency's artistic con­ understanding that will breach the everyday consen­ tribution, “Assembly (L'Internationale)”, reports on sus and representations as reproduced and imposed a legal case in Australia. An indigenous elder was by mass media”. charged with theft of the Australian Coat of Arms, In “Syria as a Global Metaphor”, Yassin al­Haj while he claimed his action was in response to the fact Saleh places under­representation within contem­ that his people had never been asked for the right to porary Syrian society under scrutiny. This occurs use images of two animals that are sacred to them. His L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK – 6 REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK lawyer's attempt to transfer the case into the field of copyright law turned out to be unsuccessful. Through the lens of “Representation Under Attack”, L’Internationale Online offers the first in a series of transversal presentations of L’Interna­ tionale’s member institutions’ collections and archives. The selection of several artworks and events, com­ piled by Diana Franssen (L’Internationale Online, Van Abbemuseum) with help of Sezin Romi (SALT), Igor Španjol (MG+MSUM), Jesús Carrillo (L’Internationale Online, MNCARS), Lola Hinojosa (MNCARS), Jan De Vree (M HKA) and Nav Haq (L’Internationale Online, M HKA), looks critically for evidence of actions that highlight the limits of museological and bureaucratic protocols in relation to artistic freedom from the per­ spective of the institutions themselves. Among the authors invited to blog for L’Inter­ nationale Online, both Tamara Díaz Bringas, who anal­ yses Tania Bruguera’s current charges in Cuba, and Nazım Hikmet Richard Dikbaş, who writes about “the Saturday Mothers”, relatives of the Armenian intel­ lectuals who were killed during 1990s in Turkey, bring concrete examples of the complexity and currency of attacks on the field of representation. —Editorial Board of L’Internationale Online L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK – 7 REPRESENTATION UNDER ATTACK UNDER ATTACK (OR EXPRESSION IN THE AGE OF SELFIE-CONTROL) ANDRÉ LEPECKI UNDER ATTACK (OR EXPRESSION IN THE AGE OF SELFIE-CONTROL) – ANDRÉ LEPECKI The description of one of the basic principles to constantly be in a state of expression? And why is through which fascism implements and sanctions this self­expression at the core of the entire corpo­ violence was given point blank by one of its most rate­governmental machine of screenal ‘social­net­ astute observers, Walter Benjamin. Writing in 1939, working’ — where the entire Internet is turned either he observed how fascism grants “expression to the into a 24/7 mall of everything imaginable, or into a masses — but on no account granting them rights”. It platform for an apparently unstoppable expressive is not too farfetched to say that this is a situation we proliferation of selfie­images? are perhaps heading towards in our Western democ­ Might it be that this double movement is the racies where one is constantly encouraged (not to necessary slow infusion of a multitudinal fascism, a say coerced!) to endlessly express. The difference fascism for our current times where the people or the between fascist formations of expression now and in masses no longer hold as expressive political cat­ 1939 is simply this: it is no longer the masses that are egories? A fascism in which the main concern is to pushed by power to express themselves in pogroms, ensure that life and subjectivity does not findfree ­ book burnings, lynchings even when they are denied dom of expression but gets mesmerised in and by a rights of free expression; but rather it is that mon­ weak image of freedom understood as the corporate strous apparatus of subjectivity known as the Self offering of screenal occasions for ventilating to the that is constantly pressed to express. Or, more accu­ world so many self­centred expressions? Might