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Art for Health is a charity event that is hosted every spring to support innovative medical projects in Cameroon, Africa. Through art exhibitions, performance, live music, body painting, as well as slam and spoken word poetry, the artist’s creative energy is channeled towards supporting health projects for indigenous communities in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as towards promoting the message of social justice and free expression for people world-wide.
Since 2009, Hope International for Tikar People, founded by Cameroonian native and activist Issa Nyaphaga and the Bush Medicine Partnership, founded by students from Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia have been working together to improve the quality of life in the Tikar villages in Eastern Cameroon as well as other marginalized communities with no access to medical care. Thus far, the partnership has served the urgent health needs of over 8,000 people in the isolated tribal communities of Cameroon.
Art for Health, is a venue for transforming uninhibited artistic expression into tangible medical and public health aid for marginalized communities. Each year, the Bush Medicine Partnership sends medical volunteers and essential supplies to Cameroon to carry-out health campaigns in remote, under-served communities that lack even the most basic health care, villages which include N’ditam, where Issa was raised. With cleaner drinking water, less chronic intestinal and malarial disease and crippling injuries, our hope is that these communities will become closer to being freed from the burdens of poverty, and be more able to focus on education, art, music and expression of their unique cultural lineage.
Art for Health will take place on March 31 at Project Reach NYC and is co-sponsored by freeDimensional. All are welcome to attend this lively event! The goal is to raise $10,000 which be used to purchase essential medical and surgical supplies for a five week medical campaign in Cameroon this Summer.
Project Reach NYC. 39 Eldridge St. 4FL. New York, NY. 10002
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Experienced Dancers living in the UK, Ireland and Europe are invited to apply to attend auditions held in London for a new production at English National Opera of Handel’s Julius Caesar, directed and choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan (Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre).]]>
Chaw Ei Thein (2011 Mentee Alum, Burma), is a painter and performance artist whose work stems from her contrasting experiences of growing up in a politically oppressive Burma and then shifting to a very different landscape in the United States. Chaw Ei’s emotionally charged work of addressing these conflicts in her native country has earned her critical acclaim, awards, and residencies in the U.S. and abroad. However, it has also forced her to live in political exile in which returning to her native country could mean reprisal from the Burmese government. Between her experiences in the U.S. and her desire to return home, Chaw Ei balances multiple tensions in her work. She shares how she deals with her experience and how she has found her Mentorship with Alexandra Pacula in the NYFA Mentoring Program helpful to her artistic career and personal pursuits. The Mentoring Program collaborated with freeDimensional to pair Chaw Ei with her Mentor.
”I was nominated to participate in the Mentoring Program by freeDimensional. Since I had to make a decision to live in New York, I faced a lot of challenges, not only for daily living but also for my artistic career. At that time I felt very scared, worried and confused about starting my career and life again here in the U.S. and especially in New York City where living is expensive and the art field is so competitive. Furthermore, I was trying to engage with a new and different people, culture, language, system and customs for my survival.
]]>When I began the Mentoring Program at NYFA, I found that I was not alone in this situation and with these challenges. All of the artists I met in this program are immigrant artists. I learned a lot about them and how they are trying to survive as artists like I am. During the program I felt that I got back some of the energy that I had when I lived in Burma. And then when I met with my Mentor Alexandra Pacula, I felt like I had received a great opportunity, as my Mentor is generous and helped me with many different aspects of my living and my career. She was also an immigrant from Poland and she shared with me all of her experiences of being an artist in New York.”
To read the full article visit: http://www.nyfa.org/level3.
asp?id=659&fid=1&sid=145
Press alert: Music Freedom Day
- a global manifestation for freedom of expression for musicians on Saturday 3 March
In 48 hours, on this Saturday, the annual Music Freedom Day is marked with events, seminars, exhibitions, film shows, radio programmes and news paper articles on freedom of expression for musicians and composers all over the world.
List and programmes of events
Events are currently being prepared in 19 countries:
Activities on Music Freedom Day 2012
Music Freedom Reports
Freemuse publishes eight Music Freedom Reports from West Papua, Azerbaijan, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Libya, Pakistan, and more, on www.musicfreedomday.org.
The Malaysian government has defended its deportation of a Saudi journalist accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a tweet
Home Minister Hishamuddin Hussein said the deportation to Saudi Arabia was legal and that Malaysia cannot be seen as a safe haven.
Hamza Kashgari, 23, was sent back to Saudi Arabia on Sunday.
Mr Kashgari’s controversial tweet last week sparked more than 30,000 responses and several death threats. Insulting the prophet is considered blasphemous in Islam and can be punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
He has since removed the tweet and apologised for his comments.
Mr Kashgari fled Saudi Arabia and was detained when he arrived in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday.
His lawyers claimed to have obtained a court injunction to keep him in Malaysia. But the government deported him, saying that they did not receive any court order.
“I will not allow Malaysia to be seen as a safe country for terrorists and those who are wanted by their countries of origin, and also be seen as a transit county,” Mr Hussein was quoted by the Associated Press news agency as saying.
According to the BBC’s Jennifer Pak, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia do not have a formal extradition treaty. This is the reason why human rights activists say that Malaysia has violated international human rights.
Amnesty International has said that Mr Kashgari is a “prisoner of conscience”.
“If he (Kashgari) faces execution back in Saudi Arabia, the Malaysian government will have blood on its hands,” said Phil Robertson, Asia deputy director of Human Rights Watch.
Dear friends,
On the 2nd February 2011 our friend Víctor Leiva, known as “el Mono”, left the cultural center where he was taking dance classes. Moments later a firearm cut his life short.
Víctor was 24 years old when he was murdered. He was an artist and human rights defender, focusing particularly on the rights of young people, with whom he also worked.
This deplorable act of violence was condemned by civil society and national and international human rights organizations.
A letter sent to Guatemala’s Public Prosecutor on the 2nd August 2011, marking six months since his death and requesting the prompt investigation of his murder, was signed by 44 organizations and over 400 individuals from 26 countries.
Nevertheless, nearly a year after his murder, the circumstances surrounding his death have yet to be fully investigated. For this reason, institutional and individual signatures are currently being collected for the attached letter, which will be published in the Guatemalan media on the 2nd February 2012. It is hoped that even more signatures will be received than in the previous action, to show that the murder of young human rights defenders like Víctor cannot remain in a state of impunity.
You can sign by emailing quevivavictor@yahoo.com or by signing online athttp://www.thepetitionsite.
In solidarity,
Friends of Víctor Leiva
Image taken from http://nisgua.blogspot.com/
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Salman Rushdie has canceled his talk at Jaipur’s literary festival after hearing rumors that there were plans to assassinate him.
The controversial author was due to speak about his early work Midnight’s Children at India’s biggest literary festival, which began on Friday, though influential Muslim clerics had protested his participation, BBC News reported.
“I have now been informed by intelligence sources in Maharashtra and Rajasthan that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to ‘eliminate’ me,” Rushdie said in a statement that was read out at the festival.
The author’s controversial 1988 book The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, and it incited Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruohollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his execution, according to The Guardian. The threat caused the author — who was born in India but has lived in Britain for most of his life — to remain in hiding for many years.
Rushdie has visited India privately several times, and attended the Jaipur literary festival in 2007.
Author and festival organizer William Dalrymple called Rushdie’s decision to stay away from the festival “a great tragedy,” BBC reported. Rushdie will speak via video conference instead, according to reports.
On Jan. 10, Darul Uloom Deoband, a leading Islamic seminary in India, called on the government to block Rushdie’s visa as he “had annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past,” according to the BBC.
The literary festival, in which over 250 authors will be participating, began as scheduled on Friday, according to the BBC. Participants include Michael Ondaatje and Ben Okri, playwright Tom Stoppard, journalists David Remnick and Philip Gourevitch and TV host Oprah Winfrey.
Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend the festival.
The festival’s producer, Sanjoy Roy, said there was a need in India “to question … why we continue as a nation to succumb to one pressure or another.”
“This is a huge problem for Indian democracy,” he told The Guardian.
Text reposted from Globalpost.com. Image taken from Vanityfair.com
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Kuala Lumpur 18.01.12: Celebrated Malaysian political cartoonist Zunar (née Zulkifli Anwar Ulhaque) appeared at the Kuala Lumpur High Court today for the first hearing of a civil suit brought by himself against the government and the police, in which he challenges them for his wrongful arrest and detention in September 2010.
Represented by the group Lawyers for Liberty, Zunar is seeking the return of confiscated property as well as aggravated losses and damages incurred in the incident which took place on 24 September 2010. That night, hours before the launch of Zunar’s latest compilation of political cartoons titled ‘Cartoon-O-Phobia’, the police raided the artist’s office in Kuala Lumpur, seized all copies of the book and arrested him for sedition.
In a career spanning two decades, Zunar has produced popular political cartoons which dare to lampoon public figures and institutions in Malaysia, with the aim of exposing the abuse of power by the police, judiciary, election commission and government officials. His work is considered sensitive, even radical, in Malaysia.
freeDimensional joins ARTICLE 19 in urging the Malaysian government to hasten progress on a raft of reforms, including an immediate review of regressive media and censorship legislation such as the Sedition Act 1948 and the Printing Presses and Publication Act 1984, both of which exert a serious chilling effect on freedom of speech and of the media.
Text reposted from www.Article19.org. Image taken from cartoonistsrights.org
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Zakaria Zbeidi, the former commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin who was pardoned by Israel two years ago, has been added to Israel’s wanted list again.
In recent days, Palestinian security services informed Zbeidi that upon Israel’s request, he must remain in the Palestinian Authority’s detention facilities during all hours of the day and night, otherwise Israel will arrest him.
Zbeidi confirmed the report to Haaretz, yet said he did not know why the pardon was rescinded. Last week, Palestinian security forces arrested one of Zbeidi’s brothers, along with one of the workers at Jenin’s Freedom Theater, which Zbeidi directs.
In the summer of 2007, Zbeidi was among 200 wanted Fatah militants in the West Bank who turned in their weapons, under an arrangement in which Israel granted them effective amnesty as a gesture to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
In 2009, actor Juliano Mer Khamis founded the Freedom Theater and appointed Zbeidi as its director. Zbeidi also began working as an official in the Palestinian Authority’s prisoners division. The theater’s founder, Mer-Khamis, was shot and killed last April. The case has not yet been solved.
For more information and updates on the case visit: www.thefreedomtheatre.org
Text reposted from Haaretz.com. Image reposted from LinkTV.org
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Vaclav Havel, the writer and dissident whose eloquent dissections of Communist rule helped to destroy it in revolutions that brought down the Berlin Wall and swept Havel himself into power, died on Sunday. He was 75.
A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel spent five years in and out of Communist prisons, lived for two decades under close secret-police surveillance and endured the suppression of his plays and essays. He served 14 years as president, wrote 19 plays, inspired a film and a rap song and remained one of his generation’s most seductively nonconformist writers.
All the while, he came to personify the soul of the Czech nation. His moral authority and his moving use of the Czech language cast him as the dominant figure during Prague street demonstrations in 1989 and as the chief behind-the-scenes negotiator who brought about the peaceful transfer of power known as the Velvet Revolution, a revolt so smooth that it took just weeks to complete, without a single bullet fired.
(Excerpted article reprinted from www.truth-out.org)
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fD joins the Artsfex summit in Copenhagen on 9-11 December 2011 along with several prominent national and international artists’ networks, and freedom of expression organisations. The summit is organised by Freemuse and Danish PEN, and funded by the Danish Ministry of Culture. Participants will present recent examples of censorship of the arts, and discuss the effects of censorship and repression of artists. Featured presenters include founding members of the Belarus Free Theatre, currently living in exile.
When the international community places emphasis on the protection of freedom of speech, it generally focuses on the freedom of media and literature. International human rights organisations include repression of media and media professionals in their annual and country reports on freedom of expression. However they rarely document repression of artists or cultural workers.
Artistic expression is under pressure from many sides and it is frequently in the centre of conflicts between different interest groups.
By bringing together a wide range of stakeholders who have an interest in protecting art and artists’ rights, the Copenhagen summit will explore options for establishing a global network for the protection and advocacy of artistic freedom of expression.
For more information visit: http://artsfex.org/
Image taken from The New York Times online & text taken from http://artsfex.org/
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The Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International has released its case-list for the six-month period July - December 2011, which summarises the cases of all reported attacks against writers and journalists that come to PEN in that period.In 2011 the WiPC recorded a total of almost 900 cases in 90 countries including 43 killings and 137 cases of long term imprisonment. ]]>The Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) of PEN International has released its case-list for the six-month period July - December 2011, which summarises the cases of all reported attacks against writers and journalists that come to PEN in that period.In 2011 the WiPC recorded a total of almost 900 cases in 90 countries including 43 killings and 137 cases of long term imprisonment. ]]>