BLOCKED: Fighting for Life

7 OCtober 2024

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Fighting for Life was a multimedia exhibition highlighting the history of the anti-death penalty movement in Singapore, directing attention towards the voices of those on death row, their families and their communities. TJC had intended it to be an anchor event, running throughout the ten days of Putting the Death Penalty on Trial, our series of events planned for World Day Against the Death Penalty. Days before its scheduled opening on 10 October, we are left with no choice but to cancel the exhibition due to the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) refusal to provide us the necessary classification to proceed.

As required by law, we applied to IMDA on 23 August 2024 for an Arts Entertainment License to hold the exhibition. Following some queries from IMDA over the course of a few weeks, we finally received a message on 1 October 2024 asking for a meeting. TJC members met with IMDA officials on 3 October 2024 and were told that Fighting for Life “undermines national interest” and “exceeds” the Arts Entertainment Classification Code. IMDA said they’d consulted the Ministry of Home Affairs in making their decision, given that they were the “subject matter expert”, before making this decision.

The censors claimed that our exhibition contained various “allegations against the government and various agencies on the use of the Death Penalty” which were “not supported by facts”. IMDA also asserted that the exhibition suggests that “the government’s decision to maintain the Death Penalty was made in bad faith” and therefore “undermines the integrity of public institutions and the administration of justice”.
 In their follow-up email to the meeting, IMDA stated that “taken in totality, the exhibits paint a misleading picture of the use of the death penalty in Singapore”.

However, when we pressed them for specifics during the meeting—which would have helped us figure out if changes could be made to the exhibition that would allow it to proceed—IMDA said they could only give us “some indicators” but that these would be “non-exhaustive” given how “wide-ranging” Fighting for Life was. With only these “indicators” as hints, TJC was expected to make our own assessment as to what to change before re-submitting an application—with no guarantee that this application would then succeed. In any case, IMDA told us that any re-application would need to be reassessed, which would not be completed in time for our exhibition period of 10–20 October. 

One of the “indicators” IMDA provided was that they found accounts contained in letters written by death row prisoners problematic. When TJC asked if their concerns could be alleviated by adding disclaimers stating that views expressed within the letters were that of the individual prisoners, IMDA said that this would be “unlikely to address references that were potentially contempt of court”—an offence that they thought they might be “party to” if they allowed the exhibition to proceed. We asked if such disclaimers would at least address their other concerns, but were told that this was a “speculative space” and that IMDA would only be able to assess adequate measures based on a fresh application for a licence.

According to one of the IMDA officials at the meeting, IMDA and TJC were at “two different extremes and we needed to narrow the gap”. However, without more details, it is unclear to us how wide this chasm is or how we should go about narrowing it. With time running out and no clarity on what would constitute a successful application, it is not feasible for TJC to make changes to the exhibition, even if we could have got it approved in time. Therefore, by refusing to provide a licence for our exhibition, IMDA has effectively banned Fighting for Life, while maintaining plausible deniability by saying that we could have resubmitted our application. This is how the licensing regime in Singapore grants the authorities maximum latitude to police expression without sufficient transparency or checks and balances.

This experience with IMDA raises further questions about the censorship regime:

1. What exactly was the nature of the “consultation” with the Ministry of Home Affairs? What role did MHA’s assessment play in IMDA’s decision?

2. If IMDA has assessed our exhibition and arrived at a conclusion, why are they unable to provide us with a conclusive list of issues to address? Should the onus be placed on artists and exhibitors to grope in the dark and engage in acts of self-censorship—in our case, just days before the scheduled opening—in the hopes of appeasing an opaque bureaucracy?

3. How can IMDA claim that material in Fighting for Life is “unsupported by fact”, yet not provide details on which elements are supposedly “unsupported by fact” or unacceptable? How did they determine that something was “unsupported by fact”? What places IMDA in the position to make such determinations in the first place? Leaving us in the dark puts TJC in an impossible position where we are unable to address their concerns or argue our case.

This act of censorship is a demonstration of how the state monopolises public discourse on the death penalty regime in Singapore. This repression also comes amid a slew of POFMA orders that TJC has been subject to, policing our opinions under the guise of correcting “facts”. Only the government’s narrative of the death penalty, and opinions that align with it, can be expressed and distributed to a wider audience. Other voices—even those most directly affected by the death penalty—must be policed, marginalised, silenced.

Every act of oppression against those calling for an end to the death penalty, every attempt to silence the voices of those on death row, every constraint to our freedom of expression, strengthens our resolve to fight and end the death penalty.

We hope it strengthens your resolve too.

Despite this setback requiring the cancellation of our exhibition and gallery tours, which TJC members have poured a lot of love and care into curating, the rest of Putting the Death Penalty on Trial will proceed as planned. We will also be announcing an additional event in our World Day series: ‘Censorship and the Death Penalty: A conversation in lieu of an exhibition’. Please look out for more details on TJC’s website and social media pages, and we look forward to seeing you at Putting the Death Penalty on Trial.