Student decries ‘censorship’ of artwork project

AN art student has cried foul after teachers pulled part of her politically charged work about the role of bankers in the country’s economic doom and gloom.

The work was part of an exhibition opened last night by more than 100 students at Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa in Cork, where Gráinne McHugh has done a one-year creative ceramics course. She put up her Orwellian work on Wednesday, depicting a scene in which bandana-wearing “piggy bank robbers” stand under a wall with the slogan “All Animals Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others” from George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, a satire on communist Russia, painted across a financial newspaper.

The scene features four smaller pigs to represent ordinary citizens but two banners she had put over them were removed by course director Stefanie Dinkelbach when she arrived at college yesterday. The red banners carried slogans from the 1968 social protests in France: “Art is dead, let’s liberate our everyday life” and “Run Comrades, the old world is behind us”.

“When I arrived in this morning, the banners had been taken down. It’s like political censorship, but if they didn’t want anything political we should have been told beforehand,” said Gráinne, who has campaigned against US military use of Shannon Airport.

“I just feel it’s unfair to control art work, it should be about the artists. I think the teachers are afraid of political activism, and don’t want to rock any boats,” she said.

Ms McHugh said she was connecting the greed and accumulation in Animal Farm with that in Ireland and the work is a response to the bailing out of banks and property developers.

Ms Dinkelbach said there was no censorship but that as curator of her students’ work, she has the final say on what should appear. But, she said, there is a policy not to show anything which might cause offence as the college’s exhibitions have a wide audience, with sexually suggestive material being among other works removed for the show.

“In Gráinne’s case, there is still a strong political message but I felt the banners did not help to deliver it,” she said.

“The rest of the class put up their work on Monday and I’d discussed changes with each of them but she only came to put hers up on Wednesday and it was different to what we had agreed,” Ms Dinkelbach said.

The student was hoping last night to be able to re-insert the banners, having informed college authorities at her unhappiness, saying she takes full responsibility for their overall meaning.