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	Police raid Belarus Free Theatre performance in Minsk by Uncut: Index on Censorship   On 8 December police entered the rented Minsk premises of the Belarus Free Theatre (BFT) and forced the actors and members of the 60-person audience to provide identity information.   The officers interrupted a performance of the BFT’s play Zone of Silence. After they had recorded the identities of everyone in the building, the show then went on.   The theatre troupe is used to police harassment. Saturday’s raid was the second police visit in 24 hours — the previous day police told manager Svetlana Sugako to prepare a list of the passport details of all BFT actors and staff.   The BFT is known for staging plays that reflect life in Belarus under the authoritarian rule of President Lukashenko, and for international campaigns protesting state repression and demanding the release of political prisoners. Index has worked with the theatre company over a number of years.   As the company is not licensed by the state, BFT performances must take place in secret. Prospective audience members receive text messages at short notice, directing them to spaces in the woods or temporarily rented houses. Audience members have been arrested, and actors frequently harassed. Nicolai Khalezin, the company’s Art Director who was forced to flee Belarus with his wife and fellow theatre member Natalia Koliada after the country’s rigged 2011 elections, told Index:   The police entering the theatre during the play is just the tip of the repressive iceberg as the most serious acts of repressions take place off stage. All our actors were sacked from state theatres, expelled from universities; most of them have been detained, arrested or included in travel ban lists by the Belarus authorities.   We are considered dangerous to Lukashenko’s regime as we are well-known abroad, and things we say about the real situation in Belarus are picked up by international media.   Mike Harris, Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship watched the Free Theatre perform in Minsk in 2010:   The Free Theatre have been targeted because their artistic dissent is one of the most internationally recognised voices against Lukashenko’s regime. The regime is attempting to curtail one of the last remaining spaces for free expression in Belarus. Visit the related web page
	The high price being paid for freedom of expression in China by Dateline & agencies China   Feb 2013   450,000 people demand China release the only imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.   In a campaign led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the International Committee for Liu Xiaobo, with the support of Amnesty International, hundreds of thousands of people around the world united on Wednesday in support of imprisoned Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia. Supporters delivered petitionsto demand their immediate release.   This show of solidarity from people all over the world sends a powerful message to the Chinese government to free this courageous couple and all other prisoners of conscience.   The campaign was launched in solidarity with a letter signed by 134 Nobel laureates demanding Liu’s freedom.   “Today, 450,000 petitions were delivered to Chinese authorities in Hong Kong, Paris, Washington, and other cities.” said Archbishop Tutu, who started the petition demanding freedom for his fellow Nobel laureate Liu.   “These petitions represent the voices of people around the globe imploring the new Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo and his wife Liu Xia. We hope this will show China that the world supports their willingness to hear the voices of their people.”   Liu Xiaobo has been detained since December 2008, and his wife has been under house arrest since October 2010.   The Nobel Laureate is serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power" for his part as the leading author behind “Charter ‘08”, a manifesto calling for the recognition of fundamental human rights in China.   “Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia represent the hopes and aspirations of millions of Chinese who are currently silenced. This show of solidarity from people all over the world sends a powerful message to the Chinese government to free this courageous couple and all other prisoners of conscience,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.   “It is wonderful to see such a massive and genuine outpouring of support for Liu Xiaobo and Liu Xia,” said Jared Genser, the founder of Freedom Now—a member organization of the International Committee for Liu Xiaobo—and international pro bono counsel to the Lius.   “Clearly, the citizens’ movement led by Archbishop Tutu speaks with one voice when it calls for the immediate release of the Lius. We urge the Chinese government to heed this moral imperative.”   http://www.amnesty.org.au/news/comments/31217/   http://fr.rsf.org/petitions/liuxiaobo/petition.php?lang=en   Mar 2013   Ai Weiwei has been acclaimed worldwide for his rebellious artwork aimed at the Chinese authorities, but in his home country he’s faced imprisonment and censorship, and even been banned from leaving.   Dateline speaks to him about the high price being paid for freedom of expression in China and his determination to keep fighting.   Other artists have faced violent attack and eviction from their homes, but Dateline shows that it hasn’t stopped a nomadic underground arts scene from thriving.   How long can it escape the attention of the authorities? And just how far are the artists prepared to go to in the name of freedom?   Jan 2012   Who is Ai Weiwei? Artist, dissident, by Matt Millikan?   All eyes were on China during the Olympic Games in 2008. The spectacle drew back the curtain on the country and was widely seen as the inauguration of a new, open era. Most eyes were on the centrepiece of the games, the National Stadium in Beijing, affectionately known as the Bird’s Nest because of its architecture.   According to the artistic consultant involved in its construction, it was intended to ‘embody the Olympic spirit of "fair competition".’ That consultant was celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.   It must have seemed like a good idea to ask him to contribute. He was known in the arts and design world for establishing the experimental artists’ Beijing East Village and FAKE Design, co-founding the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW), curating the Jinhua Architecture Park and along with HHF Architects designing a lauded private New York residence for Christopher Tsai.   Then the day before the Opening Ceremony, Ai published an opinion explaining that he would boycott the commemoration, declaring:   ‘Almost 60 years after the founding of the People"s Republic, we still live under autocratic rule without universal suffrage. We do not have an open media even though freedom of expression is more valuable than life itself.‘   It was this moment that brought Ai Weiwei’s views to the world’s attention, prophesying his path to becoming the country’s prankster provocateur and celebrity thorn in the government side. It was also when Kiki Fung, started looking more closely at Ai Weiwei.   ‘When he became more and more politically active, and was investigating the [Sichuan] earthquake, I just found out more… about him,’ Fung tells us. A prolific creator, Ai isn’t merely an artist or architect, he’s also a writer, photographer and filmmaker. After reading interviews with him, Fung discovered that Ai had produced numerous video works and documentaries.   ‘He’s very well known in the art world, but not necessarily at film festivals or with film audiences, though everybody knows him as an artist or an architect or political activist.’   A student of the Beijing Film Academy, cinema was actually one of the first artistic endeavours undertaken by the man who would later be ranked first in ArtReview’s Power 100. It’s not surprising this aspect of the creative chameleon could be overlooked. Though he’s produced revered works such as Sunflowers, and Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, Ai is just as celebrated for blogging and Tweeting, while his activism and its consequences keep him squarely in the sights of the media. Despite the censorship of his Internet activity and periods of detention, his online mastery has made him an unlikely darling of the digital age.   It’s these disparate parts of Ai Weiwei that make him such a fascinating figure. Though he’s smashed priceless Han dynasty artefacts in the name of art, his 178,231 twitter followers perhaps know him better for posting pictures of his blood-clotted cranium pre-surgery. He’s plastered across t-shirts, his bruised visage an icon of injustice that has gone as global as Gangman. So stellar is his fame and notoriety, he’s even had an asteroid named after him.   Perhaps the protean nature of Ai Weiwei’s personality and practice is why Fung dedicated an entire section of his program to him and his films. In order to secure them, including the world premiere of Ping"an Yueqing, Fung travelled to Beijing to visit the artist during his latest battle with the government over taxes.   Ai’s tax problems are largely seen as farcical, fallout from his investigation into schoolchildren killed in the Sichuan earthquake and his suggestion that government corruption contributed to the instability of buildings. This is chronicled in the film So Sorry, which is screening. Since then he has been detained and allegedly assaulted by police, had his passport confiscated as well as being ‘disappeared’ for 81 days in 2011.   Because he can’t travel, Fung visited Ai and apart from discussing showing his films at the festival, Fung says that they spoke about art, life and politics, mentioning that their time was frequently interrupted by phone calls from Ai’s lawyers, as well as government officials concerning his legal woes. We asked how he seemed during her visit.   ‘He’s very open and cheerful. I think he has a way of looking at what he’s suffering as an irony and is able to turn it into humour. When he’s facing lawsuits about tax evasion, this is just like something that can happen in a Kafka novel – how absurd it is – sometimes he just makes fun of his own situation,’ Fung explains.   ‘House arrest, travel restrictions, surveillance, stopping phone service, cutting the Internet connection. What we can still do is greet the crazy motherland once again,’ he tweeted in 2010.   Despite appreciating the surreal nature of his situation, Ai recognises he’s not the sole recipient of such treatment, or official brutality. His latest film, Ping"an Yueqing aims to uncover the circumstances surrounding the death of Qian Yunhui, a village leader and dissident found on Christmas Day under the wheel of a truck. Through the prism of this one event, Ai explores the corruption, confusion and injustice rampant throughout China.   Ping"an Yueqing is an interesting addition to Ai’s work as he usually uses his own experience with officials to investigate broader issues. ‘In those more political documentaries [like So Sorry and Disturbing the Peace], he is the subject himself and he’s always penetrating right into the system and exposing its flaws or weaknesses, the absurdity and lack of humanity,’ says Fung.   Throughout Ping’an Yueqing, the viewer never glimpses Ai, the celebrity concealed behind the oft-manic and secretive camera work. ‘For him… making documentaries is different from creating other artworks,’ she notes. ‘He doesn’t want to make it too stylistic… it’s distracting and has a personal stamp. He believes as documentary it has to be the most direct and unquestionable stare. Although he’s presenting opinions in Ping’an Yueqing, he’s not taking any sides.’   That’s not to say the film doesn’t have artistic merit. Though it features opinion, assumption and hearsay from sources including government officials, independent journalists and villagers, there is little clarification surrounding Qian’s death. Indeed, as the film progresses, the issues are further obfuscated, making viewing an exhaustive almost frustrating experience.   ‘This is precisely the affect that he wants to bring about. He believes that only when information is presented this way can the audience grasp the true complexity of these issues. By doing so, the audience experiences the same perplexity as those that are involved,’ Fung reasons.   Though Chinese audiences will only be able to view the film through underground screenings at independent galleries, community groups and universities, there’s also a practical reason to remove himself from the frame – further persecution.   ‘The fact the government disappeared him, and then afterwards continued to go after him through various charges, sends a signal to other activists that even if you are well known it does not really protect you,’ Wang Songlian of the Chinese Human Rights Defenders Network told The Guardian. ‘On the other hand, the way he turned it around was very clever, and I think activists have been energised.’   His detention brought worldwide media attention and support. The way Ai turned it around was by making himself more than his art and films. He became a t-shirt, a product opposed to oppression and a brand for justice (an interesting inversion of his appropriation of Chinese antiques). Guardian journalist Tania Branigan summed it up succinctly when she wrote, ‘He has become, to many, the face of human rights in China: more a symbol than a person.’   Ai has a sense of this notion himself, stating in the same article: It’s never about me. [My supporters] use me as a mark for themselves to recognize their own form of life: I become their medium.   But even this is a somewhat simple classification and Ai Weiwei is anything but easily classified. Visit the related web page
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