White Walls

International political changes in recent months have not been without impact on art and artists. In some cases, the reactions to art were immediate, while in others, the changes were the result of gradual developments. Ultimately, however, these too aimed to destroy or render art invisible and, in this respect, were no less drastic in their outcome and correspondingly significant as symptoms of developments that will pose challenges for the 21st century.

The focal points of international diplomacy also become crises for art. However, these are perceived more as incidental collateral problems and not as subjects of negotiations and diplomatic or even political efforts. That is why, at least here, art should be remembered as a victim in the shadow of world politics and given the attention it otherwise only receives in footnotes.

Afghanistan

At a height of 3.70 metres, concrete walls barricaded institutions and facilities in Afghan cities, especially in Kabul's Green Zone, against bomb attacks. Monumental concrete walls dominate the cityscape and leave it desolate. In such an environment, it is difficult to create quality of space and life. The Berlin Wall during the Cold War was also exactly 3.75 metres high: the ideal height to prevent people from climbing over it. For the people of Afghanistan, and especially for visual artists, the walls represented a lack of public space. As in Berlin, the blast walls in Afghanistan began to be used for artistic purposes around 2010. The English graffiti artist Chu held a workshop in Kabul in 2010, which was also attended by the young artist Shamsia Hassani. From then on, she made it her mission to create murals. In 2014, the group Art Lords was formed around Omaid Sharifi, Kabir Mokamel and Lima Ahmad, who were able to obtain official permission from the Afghan government to artistically design the inner-city protective walls. It developed into a kind of Afghan street art movement and spread to cities in the country's provinces. Non-professionals, especially children and young people, were involved in the creation of many of the works.

The murals critically addressed the country's problems, were the opposite of propaganda, and reflected everyday violence and the longing for peace. International issues were also addressed, such as racism in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement following the police crime against the American George Floyd. Victims of violence in Afghanistan were honoured, such as Japanese doctor and human rights activist Tetsu Nakamura (1946-2019), who was killed in an attack in Kabul in 2019. The Art Lords in Kabul responded to this crime with a mural of the doctor, which served as an unconventional memorial.

In their works, the Art Lords sometimes drew on the visual language of British graffiti activist Banksy, to whom they said they felt a strong connection and with whom they would have liked to collaborate in Afghanistan. Like him, they defined themselves as ‘artivists’.

Unfortunately, this did not happen. The radical change of regime with the return of the Taliban to power in mid-August 2021 shattered this lively reappropriation of the cityscape by the Afghan public, represented above all by the Art Lords. The Kabul ‘artivists’ had to fear for their lives, and despite the catastrophic turmoil, some of them managed to flee the country into uncertain exile, mostly in Europe and North America. They paid for opening a window to the world with their works in the urban space of many cities in Afghanistan and Afghan society with the loss of their homeland. Their works on the walls of Kabul were despised by the new rulers as an expression of an un-Islamic international culture. It took only a few days until the beginning of September 2021 for whitewash to move in and destroy the diverse, expressive and colourful murals on the walls of Kabul. Painters had to apply propaganda for the new regime to the now white walls, slogans against the enemy USA and also quotations from the Koran. The commemorative image of the doctor Nakamura, who had written a congratulation on Afghanistan's new independence, also disappeared under white paint.

The failure of international politics set Afghanistan and its population back decades within a few weeks and catapulted the protagonists of a new Afghan society and culture in all directions.

Hong Kong

At the end of December 2021, white and empty walls, where meaningful artwork had previously been displayed, could be found further east of Afghanistan in facilities belonging to the former crown colony of Hong Kong. The cleansing of public space here only affected works of art, plaques and inscriptions dealing with the violent suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on 4 June 1989. While this history of the suppression of the democracy movement in mainland China was immediately tabooed after the events, the memory of it was able to continue in Hong Kong under the slogan ‘one country, two systems’ and exist as a reinforcement of democratic approaches in society. The memory of the 1989 democracy movement was particularly strong at Hong Kong's universities, as most of the Beijing activists at the time had been students. There were inscriptions, sculptures and murals of the ‘Goddess of Democracy,’ which had been spontaneously created and erected by protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And there were reliefs and a sculpture that depicted the brutality of the crackdown on the protests in drastic imagery. Hong Kong's universities had become a safe haven for these works, which had long since been banned from public spaces, and even the commemorative rallies in Victoria Park were increasingly regulated and made impossible. Under the flimsy pretext of unresolved legal and property issues, the works were removed in the autumn and winter of 2021/22. Not only were walls whitewashed, but above all, neutral privacy screens were erected to hide the cleansing of public space from unwanted memories of the less than heroic past. This did not make the iconoclasm against the memories of the Tiananmen Square massacre any less obvious: some managed to hold their mobile phone cameras above the protective walls and capture the cleansing of unwanted works of art. At the centre of the action and most strikingly, the Chinese iconoclasm in Hong Kong in December 2021 targeted the work ‘Pillar of Shame’ by Danish sculptor Jens Galschiøt, which was erected in Hong Kong in 1997 as the first pillar of its kind and part of a whole series, initially in public space and most recently in the Haking Wong Building of the University of Hong Kong. It was at this column in particular that the public and officially undesirable memory of the suppression of the protests in Beijing manifested itself every year at the beginning of June. The presence of the work, which dramatically piles up dozens of bodies, has been enhanced since 2008 by a bright orange-red coat of paint.

The removal of unwanted images and memories of the Chinese democracy movement of 1989 and its brutal suppression is tantamount to a creeping erasure of this past from the collective memory of an entire country, a memory that was already concentrated solely on Hong Kong and no longer played a role in mainland China. After the state in China succeeded in completely controlling and manipulating public communication and information in an Orwellian manner using digital means, the images removed in Hong Kong at the end of 2021 seemed like outdated dinosaurs, whose existence may have been due to an extremely unfortunate gap in the otherwise complete control apparatus. Nevertheless, dissenting opinions, especially among the population of Hong Kong, are locked away with absurd legislation, so that almost nothing disturbs the heavenly peace of harmony and national sentiment. Against this backdrop, and embodied by the completely masked security forces, the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February 2022 must have seemed like an absurd international mistake. If the ecological crimes of these ‘Games’ or the human rights issues in China had not been a reason for cancellation, then the authorities could certainly allow themselves to erase the works of memorial art in Hong Kong.

Russia

China's northern neighbour Russia has also recently shown striking similarities to George Orwell's novel ‘1984’, where Orwell's ‘Newspeak’ is booming: A war can no longer be called a war, but only a ‘special military operation,’ even if it involves murder, rape and crimes against humanity and international law, as all wars have always done. The alleged ‘denazification’ by shelling the Kiev television tower also affected the nearby Babyn Yar memorial, which commemorates German crimes during the Second World War in Kiev. The elimination of the word ‘war’ introduces a whole new dimension of current cancel culture into the political public sphere.

When the ‘Pillar of Shame’ and other works commemorating the Chinese democracy movement were removed in Hong Kong at the end of December 2021, Russia's Supreme Court did something similar: it ordered the dissolution of "Memorial", one of the last organisations in Russian society dedicated to critically examining the recent past of the Soviet Union and, above all, to preserving and researching the public memory of the crimes of the Stalin era and its gulag system. "Memorial" is a child of perestroika, founded in 1989 as a scientific association and established as a human rights organisation in 1991, receiving the alternative Nobel Prize in 2004 for its achievements. This and other recognition made "Memorial" suspicious to the regime that has been spreading in Russia since 2000, and so it was not surprising that "Memorial" was also categorised as a ‘foreign agent’, branded with the xenophobic-fascist label that has been used in Russia since 2012 to label all individuals and institutions committed to democracy. Protest and diversity of opinion are being eliminated from the public sphere, arrested and locked away by outraged judges using absurd laws. The courage of unconventional protests, such as those on frozen canals in St. Petersburg or a mural by Maria Kolesnikova, one of the protagonists of the Belarusian democracy movement, musician and artist, deserves recognition.

The mural appeared shortly after Kolesnikova was sentenced to eleven years in prison on 6 September 2021. In St. Petersburg, too, this brought the authorities down in a huff, and the image was quickly erased. A similar fate befell a mural of Novichok victim Alexei Navalny in St. Petersburg at the end of April 2021.

These conditions are suffocating critical artists, taking away their ability to breathe. Some nearly succumbed to despair, while others managed to flee abroad in time. The fate of artists who despair of their confinement in Russia, where lies are the norm and truth is the exception, remains unclear, captured for a fraction of a second by a desperate yet courageous television announcer on camera. Artists have long addressed the absurdity of the situation in Russia in daring actions in public spaces, such as Pyotr Pavlensky on Red Square or in front of the notorious Lubyanka. They too were unable to stop the dangerous perpetual motion machine of phobia and paranoia, but they were able to provide impetus, agitate and shake things up. Here, contemporary art can build on the work of important predecessors, exposing lies and confronting systems of deception with reality. There are many ways to do this, ranging from simple drawings to classical methods of representation and even high technology. Even if only for a moment, it is possible to tear down the façade of the system of lies and catch a brief glimpse of the gruesome reality.

The silent power of white walls, of whitewash that seeks to suffocate reality, must be countered with the power of images. This is a great challenge for contemporary art in public space, and we must rise to this challenge.