The compendium marks the launch of the 2023 cultural policy research campaign “Silencing Dissent? On Barriers to Freedom of Artistic Expressions” and explores the current challenges and framework conditions for artists’ creativity. In the coming months, the platform will publish several reports written by cultural policy expert Andreas Wiesand and invite the general public to participate in various interactive formats (e.g. webtalks, online surveys, interview screenings).
Is freedom of artistic expression in danger?
According to Karima Bennoune (then UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights) in her Report of 25 July 2018, the free “exercise of cultural rights… including through the contestation of dominant norms and values” via artistic expressions, is a precondition for cultural development. However, she also noted that:
“In recent years, respect for cultural diversity has been threatened by those who deny this human reality and seek to impose monolithic identities and ways of being, by those who advocate various forms of supremacy and discrimination, and by diverse populists, fundamentalists and extremists.”
That – still aggravating – situation does not only endanger democratic processes, in general, but often the work and sometimes even the very existence of artists, writers and arts institutions or businesses, in particular. This prompted the Compendium team, together with the Board of the Compendium Association, to take a closer look on underlying conditions and current challenges in the cultural sector. Fresh perspectives will also help to prepare the next Compendium Conference 2023 in Malta, as cultural rights are envisaged to be its main topic.
In order to make this fact-finding and evaluation effort manageable, the team decided to focus on barriers to artistic freedom or rather, as we will learn, of freedom of artistic expressions. It asked Andreas Joh. Wiesand, the co-editor (with Kalliopi Chainoglou, Anna Śledzińska-Simon and Yvonne Donders) of the 2016 handbook “Culture and Human Rights – The Wroclaw Commentaries”, to prepare an introduction to this exercise. It will be published in the Compendium as a series of four articles:
- Definitions, Instruments and Stakeholders
- Barriers to Freedom of Artistic Expressions
- Political climate (influencing/restricting this freedom)
- Censorship (from institutionalised to self-censorship)
- Social and community pressures (some of which started, or are fuelled, in social media bubbles
In the course of 2023, an experts’ survey is envisaged, whose results may also contribute to the debates at the Compendium Conference in Malta.
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