Area 77

Hello everyone. I’m back.

I was flipping through old photographs from highschool the other day when I came across a few of the IB Art (advanced 2-year art course) end-of-the-course gallery where all our work from the two years were displayed for a week while the grader that flew in interviewed each of us. I remember that me and two others were told by the school’s administration to have our art works be covered up until the week the gallery was officially open for viewing. My art instructor told us not to worry about it and that we should be proud infact because our art made a commotion and the censorship caused other students and teachers to be eager to see the class’ art works. My censored political catoons poked fun at the ‘niqab’ and another student had her whole body of work composed of nude women. So she had more censored works than me. And the last one had just one computer graphic of a nude ‘fairy’. We were happy about the censorship ironically, but now I look back and I wonder. What about the professional artists here in Kuwait? Are there any that have been censored? I’m sure there are. Especially political cartoonists. But what about the painters and the sculptors and etc.? I’m not talking only about studio art. We all remember Ramadhan of 2003 when in the soap opera “Thiman 3omry” had a scene of an episode cut when it was shown on KTV1. The scene was as follows: an unmade bed with the girl on it and the man leaving the room. Nothing ‘physically’ wrong with that. But it implies the fact that they had had sex and that the two were unmarried. The other TV channels that had the same soap opera shown, like Dubai and Qatar, did not have that scene cut. I then thought, is this happening ONLY in Kuwait (and no doubt SA)? I wonder if the Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, or Qatar have their artists cencored.

It’s really a shame. These are very popular ways in which one can express themselves. It’s really frustrating when criticizm is OK but conditioned. They might as well tell us we are not allowed to do anything. But then again, who are ‘they’? Is it the government, the newspaper/magazine owners, the people? I had those same cartoons displayed in the school’s library in my first year and they were taken down because a boy was offended and complained. Visitors of Mad M2000’s blog know that he was supremely critical of the government and various aspects of politics. He used his great cartoons to express himself online. But he was halted for a brief period of time for reasons I do not know of. Maybe he felt he was offending many people or maybe he was contacted by undercover government mafia personel! Haha. But he’s back and we’re all happy. No one can touch us online, but we would love to have the same freedoms offline as well.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 11:03 am and is filed under Cartoons/Art, My Life, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.