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SVT: Art Exhibition in Borås Halted for Security Reasons
PUBLISHED September 6, 2023
The Borås Culture House chooses to cancel artist Sadaf Ahmadi’s exhibition for security reasons and the potential for people to be offended.
– It has direct connections to the situation with the Quran burnings, says Ida Burén, cultural chief in Borås.
Sadaf Ahmadi’s exhibition consists of two parts. One features works symbolizing women murdered by the regime in Iran. The other, now halted, comprises concrete-covered sculptures depicting women in full-length veils, known as chadors.
– It comes from my childhood when I had to cover my head and body. I have tried to show spirituality, but at the same time, the rule of the Islamic regime, says Sadaf Ahmadi, who fled Iran to escape the regime’s oppression.
The exhibition was shown in France during the spring, and Sadaf Ahmadi had contact with the Borås Culture House, which booked the exhibition for September this year. But now they have changed their minds, as reported by Borås Tidning.
Joint risk assessment
Ida Burén, cultural chief in Borås, says the decision is based on a risk assessment made by the cultural administration together with the Center for Knowledge and Security in Borås.
– They share the image of the explosive power of the work and recommend a different placement of the work, and we have not been able to solve that practically, says Ida Burén.
The cultural chief argues that the work could be exposed to different forces, leading to potentially unsafe situations.
– The work could give rise to different types of interpretations, says Ida Burén.
Isn’t that the purpose of art?
– It is, and if we were in the art museum, we would have had the capacity to handle it, but in this open space, we cannot.
“Not comparable to Quran burnings”
But for Sadaf Ahmadi, it is a reminder of censorship in Iran.
– The strange thing for me is that they said this to me in Sweden, which is known for its freedom of expression and democracy. How is that possible?
But can’t you understand that people are cautious considering the elevated threat level?
– It is not possible to compare Quran burnings with an art exhibition; they are two completely different things. Besides, I am talking about human rights and women’s rights, says Sadaf Ahmadi.”
SVT: Sadaf Ahmadi turns down the Cultural Center's offer of a new venue: "Like a dark shoebox"
UPDATED September 8, 2023 | PUBLISHED September 7, 2023
Sadaf Ahmadi, the artist who is not allowed to exhibit hanging female statues in chadors in Borås, is currently receiving attention from various quarters. She is now receiving invitations, including one to exhibit in the European Parliament.
“This is criticism of political Islam, and I see strong reasons to support that,” says Charlie Weimers (SD), a Member of the European Parliament.
Sadaf Ahmadi confirms to SVT that she has received several invitations after it became known that she is not allowed to exhibit at Borås Cultural Center.
Politicians react
Charlie Weimers, an EU parliamentarian from the Sweden Democrats, invited Sadaf Ahmadi after learning that parts of the exhibition had been stopped.
“I have not yet received a response, but I have explained that if she chooses to accept, it is by no means a statement in favor of our party’s politics. It’s simply an opportunity to exhibit her art in the European Parliament,” he says.
Parliamentarians can invite
EU parliamentarians have the opportunity to exhibit art in the parliament twice during a mandate period. For example, representatives of the Liberals have previously exhibited the photo exhibition “Last Night in Sweden” after Trump’s statement in 2016, and Left Party’s Malin Björk has previously exhibited the art of Elisabeth Olsson Wallin.
“I cannot see a better way to use my place than to dedicate it to this,” says Charlie Weimers.
He strongly criticizes the decision of Borås Cultural Chief Ida Burén to stop parts of the exhibition in the foyer of Borås Cultural Center for security reasons.
“In this case, it is pure censorship. Ahmadi is clear that it is not criticism of Islam but of political Islam, the veil mandate, and the regime in Iran. And I see very strong reasons to support that.”
At the same time, we have the second-highest terrorism threat level in Sweden; don’t we need to protect Swedish citizens?
“We have to ask ourselves if the best way to protect Swedish citizens is to give up freedom of expression.”
Even cultural politicians in Uddevalla are interested in exhibiting Ahmadi’s art. Henrik Sundström (M), the second vice-chairman of the municipal board, says he is seeking contact with her.
"Faint-hearted and Timid"
PUBLISHED September 6, 2023
Borås Cultural Center chooses to cancel the exhibition of artist Sadaf Ahmadi for security reasons, citing the Quran burnings and the potential for people to be offended. Now, GP’s cultural chief and former Borås resident, Johan Hilton, reacts.
“I can understand feeling fear, but it is all the more important to show backbone in such a matter,” he says.
Artist Sadaf Ahmadi fled Iran to escape the regime’s oppression. Her exhibition has been shown in France during the spring, and now it was supposed to be the turn of Borås Cultural Center. However, after initially accepting the exhibition this spring, the Cultural Center now chooses to cancel.
A decision that GP’s cultural chief, Johan Hilton, does not understand at all.
“I think one is bending to a specter that doesn’t even exist, bending to imagined threats rather than concrete threats,” he says.
Listen to Johan Hilton about the canceled art exhibition in the clip.
LE MONDE: In Sweden, censorship hovers above the ghosts of the Iranian Resistance
By Anne-Françoise Hivert(Malmö (Sweden) correspondent)
Published on September 23, 2023, at 3:00 am (Paris), updated on September 23, 2023
The city of Borås has decided not to showcase Sadaf Ahmadi’s sculptures for security reasons. The Tehran-born artist wished to denounce through her work the regime’s repressive discourses against women.
She is still in shock, stunned by the decision; Once again, she can sense the “shadow” floating over her, a shadow that haunted her all her life, and from which she thought she would finally be freed by leaving Iran. Three years ago, Sadaf Ahmadi emigrated to Sweden with her husband. Since then, the artist born in Tehran in 1985 has lived in Borås, a town of 114,000 inhabitants, some 60 kilometers east of Gothenburg. On September 16, the first anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death in Iran, she was due to present two exhibitions at the town’s cultural center. But, 10 days before the opening, the municipality decided to cancel one of them, for security reasons.
The banned works consist of a dozen veiled women’s faces, sculpted in concrete and suspended from the ceiling by a wire. In an interview with local newspaper Borås Tidning, director of culture Ida Burén justified her decision by citing “the general security situation” in Sweden. On August 17, intelligence services raised the terrorist alert level from three to four on its five-point scale. A few days earlier, Al-Qaeda had encouraged Muslims in Europe to “take revenge” against the Scandinavian kingdom for the Qurans burned there since the start of the year.
EURO NEWS: Sadaf Ahmadi's 'Concrete' exhibition was praised when shown in France. Why won't it go on show fully in Borås?
Jonny Walfisz
Iranian artist Sadaf Ahmadi’s upcoming exhibition at Kulturhuset in Borås, Sweden has been censored by the gallery, the artist claims.
Ahmadi was born in Tehran, but moved to Borås where she has worked as a filmmaker and artist. Moved by the protests following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was taken into Iranian police custody for not wearing a hijab according to government standards, Ahmadi created ‘Concrete’.
The innovative exhibition features portraits of people killed by the Iranian state. The portraits are covered in concrete, and Ahmadi asks visitors to break the concrete to reveal the hidden tales of Iran’s tragically lost people.
Alongside the portraits, ‘Concrete’ also features a walk-through exhibit of 10 veiled heads, hanging ghost-like from ropes. Alongside the portraits, the heads provoke a haunting sense of lives covered up and ultimately lost.
‘Concrete’ was first exhibited in March at La Maison des Chapitres in Forcalquier, France. Another exhibition followed at Paris’ Espace des Blancs Manteaux. Both were well received and went without incident.
The success of ‘Concrete’ led Ida Burén, the Head of Culture and Administration for Borås to bring the exhibition to the city’s culture centre Kulturhuset.
Due to start this month, Ahmadi was contacted earlier this week by the gallery’s curator claiming there would be security issues with staging the exhibition.
The concerns were regarding the hanging sculptures that were planned to be in the Kulturhuset’s entrance. The curator was concerned with the “work’s religious motif image which the viewer may be close to and/or associated with other religious actions such as the ongoing Koran burnings, and the increased risk image and increased security level that applies in Sweden,” they wrote to Ahmadi.
After contacting the city’s Cultural Administration, the gallery concluded that “ we would have had to raise the security level significantly in the Culture Center by bringing in guards during opening hours, having night patrols to avoid vandalism, etc.”
Ahmadi says the gallery was also concerned about reactions from Sweden’s far-right supporters.
“I was shocked. I was scared again,” Ahmadi tells Euronews Culture. “The same thing was happening to me that happened in Iran.” Even after she left Iran, she tells of how the experience of censorship in the country caused her to start “censoring myself.”
“Being censored is like raising a baby for nine months. And when you give birth to that baby, the baby is killed by a doctor. And there is nothing else you can do,” Ahmadi says.
When she moved to Sweden in 2020, she thought she was finally free to talk and create. ‘Concrete’ was the result of that. “Concrete is something that symbolically and in reality is covering everything in Islamic regime,” Ahmadi says.
The Kulturhuset offered to continue to show ‘Concrete’, but instead of putting the hanging veiled heads in the entrance, to move it to a small black-box theatre in the basement. Ahmadi was only offered this after “we made a stink about being censored,” explains her manager, Basil Glew-Galloway.
“It hurts because this installation is supposed to be open,” Ahmadi says, noting also the work already done with engineers to design the installation for the original exhibition space.
Ahmadi insists that her work, particularly the hanging veiled heads, are not meant as a criticism of Islam entirely, but of the Islamic Republic of Iran. “Everyone I know in Iran who believe they are Muslims, it doesn’t stop them from being themselves and desiring their freedoms.”
The civil unrest that followed Mahsa Amini’s death shows the side of Iran’s society that is against government censorship and the enforcement of laws such as those around the hijab. “I used the concrete to show the heaviness of the rules and all these obligations that I had to have, as a nine years old girl, and carry with me my whole life.”
Ahmadi points out a recurring phrase throughout the protests. “Freedom is an everyday practice.” While Ahmadi has encompassed that phrase into her art, the irony of censorship following her to Sweden is not lost on her.