For Freedom: Julian Assange Topic for NFT Drop At Venice Biennale
Imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is the subject of a new NFT collection that will be displayed at this year’s art exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The collection, This Cannot Be Erased, is a collaboration between the Greek artist Miltos Manetas and the renowned British composer Howie B.
Assange, who is currently fighting extradition to the United States, is not involved in the operation, although he is said to be aware of it: Manetas, whose work has long explored the digital landscape, is a longtime friend of the activist.
The collection will be released in three phases with 37 tokens each, each NFT representing a unique oil-on-canvas painting by Assange produced by Manetas. The works show Assange’s face, broken before they come together again, never to disappear.
Internet icon
A famous conceptual artist, Miltos Manetas is no stranger to the Venice Biennale: he founded the exhibition’s internet pavilion in 2009 and the technology tent is the site of his latest work.
The pavilion, now in its seventh edition, is this year dedicated to Julian Assange. In May, Manetas and Lightbox director Mara Sartore opened the doors to “AIIA – Assange is the Internet The Internet is Assange”, an exhibition featuring 222 hand-painted portraits of the journalist produced by Manetas as part of the #AssangePower movement. The Venice Biennale 2022, now in its 59th year, runs from April 23 to November 27.
As an NFT collection, This Cannot Be Erased lives both inside and outside the exhibition’s internet pavilion. After all, while the series is part of the AIIA event, the tokens themselves will reside in buyers’ web3 wallets. The 111 works of art that make up the collection will be embossed on Materia, a multi-chain NFT platform created by art professionals and blockchain specialists.
Uniquely, holders of Assange NFTs in limited editions will become trustees for AIIA, with money raised from the sale going into the Internet Pavilion DAO. In essence, this model will give members the opportunity to influence how the Pavilion disposes of funds for art projects in the future, with an emphasis on nurturing work related to internet freedom.
According to Manetas, his ambition is to ensure that people do not forget Assange’s situation, a clear possibility given that many mainstream media have stopped covering the case. NFTs are less easy to reject, since they live forever on the public blockchain. For Manetas, Assange is an internet icon, a man who exposed the contradictions in liberal democracies and thus fell for power brokers who try to silence dissent and crush their political opponents.
Manetas first began painting Assange while imprisoned in Colombia under Covid in 2020, and his intention was to create a new work for each day of Assange’s imprisonment. Ultimately, 222 portraits were produced to reflect the 222 days of the Venice Biennale, with half of these given digital form through Materia.
The artist has previously fought for Assange’s cause with his “Assange’s Condition” show at Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni in 2020, as well as “Assange Situation” at Belgium’s IKOB Museum a year later. Manetas also put the dissident in touch with crypto artist Pak, whose collection Censored raised $ 54 million for his legal fund earlier this year.
