Censorship
As human beings, we know that there are things that need to be blocked, to be played down, to prioritize, to force and repress. It appears in the education of our children, in discourse with the environment, in personal and collective memory, and even in our artistic choices. Censorship that appears and is imposed upon us from above is perceived by us, therefore, as an inseparable part of that basic essence.
Censorship seeks to get along with what is left. You can see the movie, but not the nude. It is permissible to perform in the theater, but not such a play. It is permissible to talk to students about current events, but not about specific current events. The closing of funding bins on the basis of an action or an opinion contrary to government, the removal of inconvenient information or its removal to a remote location in the newspaper, all became an inseparable part of our reality in Israel 2017.
In the work of curators, I chose not only works that transfer censorship as an act of control, control and oppression dictated by external factors, but also works that deal with the ways in which we censor ourselves, control our consciousness, limit, conceal, ignore and repress "internal censorship."
In choosing the works and placing them in the spaces, in some cases, I discovered that I had to deal with "censorship" with the artists and their works. AZA13 sits in the Ankori Studio, a junior high school I initiated with Osnat Haber and the Ankori Education Network, and we have a great deal of responsibility for the children and the content they will be exposed to. Where is my border between the curator, the artist and the student?
'Censorship' - the theme of the exhibition - caused me and artists to choose in many cases works that are overexposed, perhaps as an act of defiance, and found myself struggling with the same works I chose whether or not I should present them. Content too difficult? Taking a one-sided stance? Nudity and sexuality? What is permitted and what is forbidden? These and other questions flooded me and they did not allow me as a curator to carry out my work, which is supposed to be free of censorship.
I believe that this dialogue, between us and ourselves, the exhibition 'censorship' wants to provoke. To understand in depth our border between what is permissible and what is forbidden, between choice and coercion, between the visible and the hidden, between the full and the censored. --- Yehezkel Lazarov