In 2018, the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra presented his series “Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain” at the ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid, which consisted of 24 pixelated portraits of people who had been deprived of their freedom for their ideologies, mostly leftist. However, shortly after the series was acquired, the fair directors asked the gallery responsible to remove the photographs due to the controversial media coverage of the work.

The decision to censor the work had a great impact on its new owner, the Catalan businessman Jose María Benet Ferran, better known as Taxto Benet, director and shareholder of the giant Spanish audiovisual production company “Mediapro”. Overwhelmed by the amount of adverse reactions that a work he had acquired had provoked, he decided to investigate on his own behalf about other similar situations that have happened in the art world. In addition to finding other similar cases, he was surprised to discover that no one was documenting or gathering information about other works that had been victims of censorship.

This is how Benet decided to start his own art collection called “Censored”, which brings together works by artists whose work have been severely criticized, persecuted and banned. It is important to emphasize that censorship is the quality that unites all the works in the collection; It does not distinguish whether they have been censored by the left or the right, by religious institutions or by progressive social movements, or whether they belong to famous or unknown artists. According to Benet, censorship does not recognize ideologies, and it is not only conservative groups that censor, liberal or progressive movements have also removed works in the name of what they call “politically correct.”

2 years after the collection began, it already has more than 70 pieces among which we can find authors such as Ai Wei Wei and Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of the most notable works are:

• “Statue of Peace” by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung, a sculpture of a Korean sex slave, which were sold during the Japanese occupation of Korea. She was removed from a contemporary art exhibition in Japan after receiving threats of an attack.

• “The Revolution” by Fabián Chairez, which celebrates Mexican LGBT culture through a naked and feminized Emiliano Zapata, and which sparked a series of protests in 2019 due to its exhibition in Bellas Artes.

• “Freedom Fries” by Yoshua Okón, a video that shows a photo session of an obese woman who posed inside a McDonalds. It was removed from a Mexican art exhibition in London because it was considered offensive.

• “Silence” by the French-Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah, which consists of an installation of high heels on prayer mats (an act that is considered profane since it is not allowed to wear shoes during Islamic prayers) and with which seeks to highlight the presence of Islamic women who fight for their rights

It is important to mention that although Taxto Benet is constantly working on the growth of its collection, he does not always share or support the messages attributed to the works he acquires. “There are works in which I may not participate aesthetically or ideologically, but I understand that people have the right to see them and decide for themselves,” he says. He is currently developing a project to found the “Museum of Freedom” where he will bring together all the works from his collection.

With information from La Vanguardia, El Universal and La Razón.