A group of men came and tried to censor the production. They said what was allowed and what was not to be done. Above all, you were not allowed to say anything that was against the war.

This is how artist Pavel Semchenko describes his life in Russia shortly after the country attacked Ukraine in February 2022.

– After Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, we were no longer allowed to criticize, protest against, or express ourselves publicly against the regime, either in artwork or on social media. It stunned us.

Impossible to practice free art in Russia

Until February 2022, Semtjenko had lived an international life. He is an artist with many talents: he both paints, directs theatre, makes scenography and acts. With his theater group AKHE, he has visited countless theater festivals around the world over the past 35 years.

Before Russia’s attack on Ukraine, the group was based in an industrial area outside Saint Petersburg. It was a private theater that ran completely independently. Until it became impossible.

Censorship and free art are opposites.

Semtjenko applied for an artist residency through the organization Artists at Risk and was accepted. In April 2022, he arrived in Helsinki together with his wife.

 

Sanctuary for artists in vulnerable situations

Artists at Risk is a Finland-based international organization that helps artists get out of stressful situations in their home countries – even if only for a short period. Through the organization, you can apply for help to get temporary residence for anything between three months and up to two years.

If you are accepted, you get individual help with whatever it takes: to get away from a dangerous situation and to safety, to find residential accommodation and make contacts within your own industry. The most important thing is still to be able to breathe out, continue with your artistic work and feel that you have a context.

Artists at Risk

• Non-profit organization that since 2013 has worked at the intersection between art and human rights
• Helping persecuted, threatened or imprisoned artists of all kinds, both unknown and world famous
• Offers artist residencies in Helsinki or at one of its 302 partner institutions around the world
• AR has won several prizes, for example the state’s art prize and the European Parliament’s European Citizen Prize

It all started more than ten years ago when the curators Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen realized that there was a need for this kind of activity. They have curated several exhibitions and projects together.

Many artists who were invited came from trouble spots around the world. It felt unfair that they would have to go back to risk zones after working freely in Finland. So Stodolsky and Muukkonen, who have contacts in the art field not only in Finland but also internationally, started helping artists by offering them artist residencies.

One of the first was the Egyptian street artist Ganzeer, who was active in the pro-democracy movement and the Arab Spring in his home country. He worked on the exhibition Checkpoint Helsinki in 2014.

In Egypt he was threatened with death, and he later managed to come to the United States.

– The artists generally do not apply for asylum. They work internationally and move all over the world to earn income. Many come here to Finland, but they often move on because they both can and want to, says Marita Muukkonen.

One of the more famous artists who came here via Artists at Risk is the Iraqi artist Kholod Hawash. She represented Finland in the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale earlier this year. At the same biennial, Artists at Risk celebrated its ten years of activity.

 

Ten years of activity have provided routine when applications pour in

In ten years, the business has expanded. Artists at Risk now consists of an international network. The organization has several employees who work with application management, risk analysis and with pairing applicants with various partners.

Every time the development of democracy is threatened somewhere in the world, it is immediately visible in the number of applications. One such event was when the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, as well as the crises in Myanmar and Syria.

– We have area-wise teams that go through the applications. Regarding Afghanistan, we had extensive cooperation with experts who could prioritize which film directors or artists lived under the highest risk of being murdered and tortured. Risk analysis is incredibly important, because we also receive non-serious applications, explains Muukkonen.

“In a way, we lost”

Pavel Semchenko moves between the scenes of the theater production he helped build in the Nordsjö district of Helsinki. The play is called Neuvostoihmisen lappu and is based on the book Tiden second hand: the end of the red man, written by Svetlana Aleksijevic, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.

 

The working group that calls itself Helsinki 98 has staged the performance in an old school building. It has sold out performances since last autumn and is a real audience success (read Svenska Yle’s review here).

The system eliminated everything that is alternative. They censored television, radio and newspapers. So at that stage, everything we were able to do before collapsed.

– Pavel Semchenko

Semtjenko has designed the scenography. It is concrete brutalist and filled with Lenin busts in various sizes. In the background, behind a row of windows, black-and-white archive footage from the Soviet Union spins. Soviet people work. The Soviet army is marching.

The analogy to today’s situation is obvious.

What is happening in Russia is depressing, says Pavel Semtjenko. A crisis for the artistic life. What his group was doing before was free art – they didn’t think much about politics. Of course they tried to be part of the protest movement, but their performances were not explicit protest performances against Putin or against the system, he explains.

– In a way, we lost. The system eliminated everything that is alternative. They censored television, radio and newspapers. Everything we were able to do before collapsed, he says.

Therefore, it is important to help artists and dissenters

Artists at Risk has now helped a few hundred Russian and Belarusian artists, and also started an artist residency program in Ukraine, thus helping a large number of Ukrainian artists who cannot leave the country.