Guess who's on Tunis's IP black list

It is a well-established fact that censors in all times in history were just stupid. However, the finding that the Tunisian government feels it important to censor a Hungarian research center on avantgarde art is a surprising discovery.

It is a well-established fact that censors in all times in history were just stupid. However, the finding that the Tunisian government feels it important to censor a Hungarian research center on avantgarde art is a surprising discovery.

The finding has been confirmed that http://www.artpool.hu is available from Hungary but not from Tunisia, and the well-known French-language 404 page turns up. (Interestingly, the page is the clone of the default Internet Explorer 404 page. 404 is the code name for “page not found”.)

Artpool was founded by Galántani György, a Hungarian neoavantgarde artist most active in the 1960s, and the founder of the then-famous semi-illegal Chapel-gallery at Balatonboglár.

The art research center has an outstanding online and offline collection of documentation and artwork ranging from the 60s to the present day.

“Communication art” is one of the main focuses of the center, which connects it to the ongoing WSIS process.

For example, Artpool has an unmatched collection of original artists’ stamps and letters. It also documents political acts of freedom occuring in the context of neoavantgarde art, such as the documentation on the guerilla-galleries of Centrum, the latest squatting movement in Budapest.

On the one hand, it qualifies for surrealism to put such a remote and insignificant site on the blacklist — so artpool should be documenting it. On the other hand, if one is inclined to look at the facts from a positive perspecitve, the censorship can be interpreted as a sign of recognition of the center in particular, and art as a potent tool of social change in general.

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