Power beyond question–is ‘tyranocracy’, not democracy.
Belmarsh Live
Belmarsh Live is an art project I do together with Tom Aslan from assange.network
For an exhibition for Julian Assange I curated in August 2022 I moved the first time from painting into installation or as Joseph Beuys would said, the social plastic.
Due the preparation process for the exhibition I was introduced to Tom Aslan, and we talked about the work I planned for the show. As I told him, I am not able to paint a picture which clearly shows the situation Julian Assange is in, so I decided to recreate his prison cell and lock people up in it to feel - Tom straight away said "We need to bring this on the road" and the idea of "Belmarsh Live" was born.
About the art installation:
Since April 2019, the journalist Julian Assange has been a political prisoner in a solitary cell in the Belmarsh high-security prison in the Thamesmead district of the Royal Borough of Greenwich in the British capital of London. After the artistic conception of the Leipzig based artist Manja McCade, we are reproducing this cell as close as possible in terms of its haptics, physiognomy and audition and will be presenting it temporarily in various cities in Germany from September 2022.
As a result, those who are interested can experience this synaesthetic two-by-three-meter confinement space and experience it first hand, what isolation and psychological torment mean.
Everything that happens within this staged isolation room is broadcast on the internet in order to create a demographic, socio-critical sensitization.
To see first videos from the installation, click
here
This performative art project ties in with groundbreaking socially critical experiences of public space sculptures that ultimately fulfill pedagogical tasks. Cross-genre artists such as Joseph Beuys and Christoph Schlingensief set artistic global standards in their time period, which only considered the discursive integration of all recipients as a (complete) work. In this respect, art as such received a further task and in the meantime also makes demands.
We plan this tour goes through Germany and this art installation also is planned to be presented in Strasbourg the place where it is expected to be the last court make a decision in the extradition process for Julian where he hopefully will be united with his family.
Some impressions from the installation. We are very grateful Stella Assange, Julians wife visited us in Berlin while the Noisy Leaks exhibition. Also journalist Can Dündar, came to us, to raise his voice for Julians freedom.