Lost in Translation, MMOMA

Collateral Event of the 55th International Art Exhibition — la Biennale di Venezia
Curated by Antonio Geusa

http://www.mmoma.ru/en/exhibitions/special/venicebiennale2013_lost_in_translation/

[…]

Opening: May 29 at 5 p. m.
Press-preview: May 29 at 11 a. m.

Opening hours: daily, except Tuesdays, 10 a. m. to 6 p.m.

In Russia a poet is more than a poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko

As part of the Collateral Events of the 55th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia — Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents «Lost in Translation», a large-scale exhibition of contemporary Russian art exploring the inherent untranslatability of culture-and context-dependent works in times of globalization. The exhibition brings together over one hundred works made in the past forty years from the collection of MMOMA and other public and private collections.

Since its formulation about half a century ago, the concept of global village has evolved from theoretical potentiality into practical reality. Technological development has made international communication simpler and faster. The wide web the world has become today has strongly curtailed the power of geographic, political, and economic borders to isolate. Although the village is global, it is clearly not homogeneous. Communicating has become easier, but its effectiveness is still dependent upon clear understanding between communicators. To achieve clarity, the main factor is the accuracy of translation from one language into another. Art is not immune to the need of being translated. A process of transfer is in act each time a work of art is exhibited to the audience which is not familiar with the context it comes from. Historical and political differences, cultural diversities, the language barrier, or even dissimilar approaches in theoretical analysis are some of the causes that can induce lack of intelligibility and the need of further explanation.

Contemporary history proves that, despite the fall of the Iron Curtain in December 1991 and the consequent end of the isolation and immediate entrance of Russia into the global village, translation is still a fundamental element to trigger proper understanding of individual artworks and the layers of meaning they carry. In many cases, this is a complex procedure requiring, besides the plain translation of the verbal meaning of a message, the addition of an explanatory account shedding light upon the given historical, cultural, political, social, and economical environment the work is motivated by and refers to. Artist Oleg Kulik gained worldwide popularity after doing a series of his «man-dog» performance in the 1990s. It would be easier to grasp his outrageous artistic disguise should one interpret it in the context of the radical economic reforms launched by Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin; the reforms described as «shock therapy,» which was aimed at converting the whole country from socialism to capitalism. Likewise, the context would make it easier to understand why the popular Soviet TV series The Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973) was a source of inspiration for several Russian modern artists while meaning virtually nothing to the Western viewer.

Lost in Translation draws together works executed in various media — paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, videos, installations, performances — by established Russian artists with international acclaim as well as emerging young artists. Carefully selected by the curator on the basis of their resistance to translatability, these artworks are particularly difficult to decipher without the basic knowledge of the «Russian context» they were born in. They will be displayed together with their «expanded translation» — a concise verbal account with essential references, a thesaurus article of sorts, which facilitates readability and help the viewers grasp the meaning of the work and relate it to international contemporary art discourse. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with entries on each exhibit, and is complemented with film screenings, talks, performances, and a multidisciplinary conference.

The exhibition is held at Ca’ Foscari University, an established center for Slavic Studies in Italy, and the home of the CSAR Centre for Studies on the Arts of Russia aimed at researching the historical and cultural heritage of Russia and promoting exchanges with major Russian cultural institutions.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Yuri Albert | Nikita Alekseev | Sergey Anufriev | Bluesoup |Sergey Bratkov | Alexander Brodsky | Erik Bulatov | Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov | Elena Elagina | Semen Faybisovich | Andrey Filippov | Rimma and Valery Gerlovin | Lyudmila Gorlova | Iced Architects | Dmitry Gutov | Anna Jermolaewa | Alisa Joffe | Ilya Kabakov | Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid | Irina Korina | Valery Koshlyakov | Alexander Kosolapov | Oleg Kulik | Sergey Leontiev | Anton Litvin | Vladimir Logutov | Igor Makarevich | Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe | Andrei Monastyrsky | Semen Motolyanets | Vladimir Nemukhin | Timur Novikov | Boris Orlov | Peppers | Pavel Peppershtein | Viktor Pivovarov | Alexander Ponomarev | Gia Rigvava | Mikhail Roginsky | Yuri Shabelnikov | Sergey Shutov | Leonid Sokov | Alena Tereshko | Avdey Ter-Oganyan | Vadim Zakharov | Konstantin Zvezdochetov | and others

ANTONIO GEUSA
CURATOR

Dr. Antonio Geusa is an independent curator, art critic, and lecturer; he is an expert in new media art and a key researcher of Russian video art. He holds an MA in philology (University of Bari, Italy), and a PhD in media arts (London University, U. K.). Dr. Geusa is the author of numerous publications, including «The History of Russian Video Art. Volumes 3-2-1» published on the occasion of a three-part exhibition under the same name organized by MMOMA in 2007-2010. He lives and works in Moscow, Russia.

[…]

Being-towards-death as a new kind of ETHICAL authenticity

Franz Fanon, violence as liberation

Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”

http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/05/slavoj-zizek-the-event-politics-art-ontology/

Event Date: 9 May 2013
Room B34
Birkbeck Main Building
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HX

The Department of Psychosocial Studies presents:

Professor  Slavoj Žižek – “The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology”

‘The Debris Field’ by Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe

In Pamphlets, Play of Voices 

Reviewed by David Clarke

http://sabotagereviews.com/tag/slavoj-zizek/

The Atlantic liner Titanic, which sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 with the loss of more than 1,500 people, has achieved a remarkable status in western culture. It has become a persistent moral metaphor, serving to illustrate everything from the hubris of humanity (as in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Convergence of the Twain’), to the failings of the class system (as in Roy Baker’s still harrowing 1958 film A Night to Remember) and the dangers of a misplaced confidence in progress (as in Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s poem sequence The Sinking of the Titanic of 1978). In the Second World War, the story even served Joseph Goebbels as a symbol of the evils of British capitalism, the theme of a 1943 film drama he commissioned on the disaster (see The Titanic in Myth and Memory: Representations in Visual and Literary Culture for more on this). Slavoj Žižek has aptly described the Titanic as a symptom of modern culture in the psychoanalytic sense, a ‘knot of meanings’ occupying a space in our collective imagination that somehow pre-existed the actual disaster itself: as Žižek points out, one popular novel from 1898 had already described the sinking of a ship called Titan in uncannily similar circumstances.

It is this ‘knot of meanings’ that The Debris Field sets out to explore. Here the Titanic is described as a ‘double ship’, ghosted by its own myth. The pamphlet results from a multimedia project to mark the centenary of the Titanic that poets Simon Barraclough, Isobel Dixon and Chris McCabe developed in collaboration with filmmaker Jack Wake-Walker and composer Oli Barrett. The complete film is scheduled for release on DVD, but the publication of the pamphlet stakes a claim for the words to have an independent existence beyond the original project.

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Chris Hedges interviews Julian Assange

http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_death_of_truth_20130505/

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Britain has rejected an Ecuadorean request that Assange be granted safe passage to an airport. He is in limbo. It is, he said, like living in a “space station.”

“The status quo, for them, is a loss,” Assange said of the U.S.-led campaign against him as we sat in his small workroom, cluttered with cables and computer equipment. He had a full head of gray hair and gray stubble on his face and was wearing a traditional white embroidered Ecuadorean shirt. “The Pentagon threatened WikiLeaks and me personally, threatened us before the whole world, demanded that we destroy everything we had published, demanded we cease ‘soliciting’ new information from U.S. government whistle-blowers, demanded, in other words, the total annihilation of a publisher. It stated that if we did not self-destruct in this way that we would be ‘compelled’ to do so.”

“But they have failed,” he went on. “They set the rules about what a win was. They lost in every battle they defined. Their loss is total. We’ve won the big stuff. The loss of face is hard to overstate. The Pentagon reissued its threats on Sept. 28 last year. This time we laughed. Threats inflate quickly. Now the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department intend to show the world what vindictive losers they are through the persecution of Bradley Manning, myself and the organization more generally.”

Assange, Manning and WikiLeaks, by making public in 2010 half a million internal documents from the Pentagon and the State Department, along with the 2007 video of U.S. helicopter pilots nonchalantly gunning down Iraqi civilians, including children, and two Reuters journalists, effectively exposed the empire’s hypocrisy, indiscriminate violence and its use of torture, lies, bribery and crude tactics of intimidation. WikiLeaks shone a spotlight into the inner workings of empire—the most important role of a press—and for this it has become empire’s prey. Those around the globe with the computer skills to search out the secrets of empire are now those whom empire fears most. If we lose this battle, if these rebels are defeated, it means the dark night of corporate totalitarianism. If we win, if the corporate state is unmasked, it can be destroyed. 

U.S. government officials quoted in Australian diplomatic cables obtained by The Saturday Age described the campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks as “unprecedented both in its scale and nature.” The scope of the operation has also been gleaned from statements made during Manning’s pretrial hearing. The U.S. Department of Justice will apparently pay the contractor ManTech of Fairfax, Va., more than $2 million this year alone for a computer system that, from the tender, appears designed to handle the prosecution documents. The government line item refers only to “WikiLeaks Software and Hardware Maintenance.”

The lead government prosecutor in the Manning case, Maj. Ashden Fein, has told the court that the FBI file that deals with the leak of government documents through WikiLeaks has “42,135 pages or 3,475 documents.” This does not include a huge volume of material accumulated by a grand jury investigation. Manning, Fein has said, represents only 8,741 pages or 636 different documents in that classified FBI file.

There are no divisions among government departments or the two major political parties over what should be Assange’s fate. “I think we should be clear here. WikiLeaks and people that disseminate information to people like this are criminals, first and foremost. And I think that needs to be clear,” then-press secretary Robert Gibbs, speaking for the Obama administration, said during a 2010 press briefing.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and then-Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, said in a joint letter to the U.S. attorney general calling for Assange’s prosecution: “If Mr. Assange and his possible accomplices cannot be charged under the Espionage Act (or any other applicable statute), please know that we stand ready and willing to support your efforts to ‘close those gaps’ in the law, as you also mentioned. …”

Republican Candice S. Miller, a U.S. representative from Michigan, said in the House: “It is time that the Obama administration treats WikiLeaks for what it is—a terrorist organization, whose continued operation threatens our security. Shut it down. Shut it down. It is time to shut down this terrorist, this terrorist Web site, WikiLeaks. Shut it down, Attorney General [Eric] Holder.”

At least a dozen American governmental agencies, including the Pentagon, the FBI, the Army’s Criminal Investigative Department, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Diplomatic Security Service, are assigned to the WikiLeaks case, while the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are assigned to track down WikiLeaks’ supposed breaches of security. The global assault—which saw Australia threaten to revoke Assange’s passport—is part of the terrifying metamorphosis of the “war on terror” into a wider war on civil liberties. It has become a hunt not for actual terrorists but a hunt for all those with the ability to expose the mounting crimes of the power elite. 

[…]

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

Glenn Greenwald, guardian.uk

4 May, 2013

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.