Whilst Vladimir Putin imposes ever-harsher restrictions on freedom of speech some other folks nonetheless search to voice opposition to him, outside and inside Russia. The exhibition NO in Berlin was once devoted to those other folks – “to all those who have the courage to disagree.”
Its primary center of attention was once the revered media organisation Meduza, established in Latvia in 2014 through reporters fleeing the more and more restrictive insurance policies of oligarch media moguls and the Russian safety products and services after the annexation of Crimea.
Meduza’s protection has remained a relied on supply for the ones within the west and in Russia (the place it has but to be blocked) in need of intently to observe occasions underneath the Putin regime. The importance of Meduza’s paintings, which is revealed in Russian and English, has most effective been heightened through Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
NO, held in Berlin’s Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien cultural centre, was once a multidisciplinary exhibition that wove in combination recent artwork and documentary testimonies. The primary segment of the exhibition featured the works of 13 artists from Russia and in other places reflecting upon key issues impressed through Meduza’s paintings: dictatorship, censorship, exile, battle, resistance, worry, loneliness, polarisation, and hope.
The second one featured a specifically commissioned documentary through Russian playwright and exile Mikhail Durnenkov. The video undertaking displays at the final ten years of Meduza and makes use of the testimonies of its reporters and collaborators.
As quickly because the invasion of Ukraine started, the Russian government introduced that publishing any account of the occasions which didn’t correspond to legitimate variations may just incur as much as 15 years in jail. The reporters of Meduza, naturally, have no longer revered those constraints. Because the movie critic Anton Dolin places it within the documentary: “I’m a product of the 1990s [after the collapse of the USSR], I’m used to feeling like an adult, a person who chooses his own trajectory.”
The NO exhibition seemed again at 10 years of Meduza and its proceeding fight to talk reality to energy.
Meduza
Telling the reality, and thereby inevitably expressing team spirit with Ukraine because the sufferer of Russian aggression, resulted in Meduza being proclaimed an “undesirable organisation” in 2023. This now implies that legal fees is also introduced in opposition to any one who such a lot as mentions Meduza’s lifestyles on their social media. The ones nameless members who’re nonetheless running inside of Russia are subsequently taking strange dangers.
The Russian government have began to limit get entry to to VPNs (digital personal networks, used for confidential get entry to to web pages), banned the Meduza app and, because the testimonies within the documentary attest, have additionally deployed adware to bother people and fastened relentless cyber-attacks to check out and shut the Meduza website online down.
Even in another country, Meduza’s reporters take care to not expose their place of job’s cope with, to not deliver guests there and even have meals delivered. All this most effective serves, in fact, to underline the importance of Meduza’s paintings, and the level of the risk the Russian govt perceives from its fearless reporting.
Existence in exile
Lots of the reporters interviewed for the exhibition now in finding themselves involuntarily in exile. Whilst over 6 million Ukrainians have fled to Europe as refugees on account of the battle, round 650,000 Russians have additionally left Russia all over the similar duration.
As soon as in Europe, they’re left questioning simply what their standing is in another country: are they themselves refugees? Political émigrés? Have they change into successfully the opposition to Putin in exile? Will they ever go back to their local nation, for which some have a love-hate courting?
Existence in exile is a contradictory lifestyles. There are advantages of a subject material type, and reporters are for essentially the most phase bodily secure. And but, because the exhibition displays, they really feel profoundly rootless, bring to a halt from their customary lives and environments, welcome neither at house nor fully of their new nations. They care for a bridge to their house nation, but this is a bridge they can not believe themselves crossing within the foreseeable long term. Most of the reporters are nonetheless younger, lots of them girls.
Galina Timchenko, co-founder and writer of Meduza, displays at the paternalism of dictatorship, which promises safety and steadiness for the nationwide “family” on the expense of particular person freedom. And the battle correspondent and author Elena Kostyuchenko provides: “War is a concentration of patriarchal culture, its manifestation.”
One nameless contributor from inside of Russia feedback:
“At the beginning of the war, I thought that people supported the war because they didn’t know what was really happening. […] It turns out the problem isn’t so much that journalists can’t tell the truth about the war, but that people to whom that truth is addressed don’t want to hear it.”
One Meduza editor reported utter dismay upon finding that even their very own members of the family believed the assault on Ukraine to be justified. And but the reporters persevere.
There’s little optimism on this exhibition. Maximum members recognize that they have got little likelihood of overcoming the Leviathan this is Putin’s police state. The violent deaths of a number of reporters inside of Russia, the homicide of flesh presser Boris Nemtsov in Moscow in 2015, and the suspicious loss of life of the flesh presser and vocal critic of Putin Aleksey Navalny in jail in 2024 have been shattering blows to liberal hopes for a extra democratic long term.
NO exhibition catalogue: Desk of Contents.
Meduza
The Meduza reporters reside with worry and guilt about what would possibly occur to them bodily, or to their family members again house. As Meduza’s co-founder Ilya Krasilshchik places it:
Throughout the nation, we have now a decimated civil society, opposition leaders killed or imprisoned, and those that have fallen right into a state of apathy. Externally, there may be the assault on Ukraine and an alliance with the worst political regimes in the world…However even now, we all know of people that have spent years talking out in opposition to authoritarianism, dictatorship and battle…Even if it’s unattainable to win, we will save ourselves, our circle of relatives, buddies, values and sense of vanity.
Those émigrés fall again on a non-public code of ethics, a trust within the transformative energy of non-violent acts of resistance, team spirit with fellow dissidents and a real sense of group. Announcing “no” powerfully outweighs the hazards of claiming not anything in any respect.
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