News from Civsy, based on generative AI tools and retrieval-augumented real time data searchIn November 2025, the Bern Light Show, a long running public light and media art festival in Switzerland’s capital, became a vivid example of how external political pressure can shape cultural programming inside a liberal democracy. Chinese authorities objected to the inclusion of Tibetan produced works that addressed Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, framing them as distortions of China’s policies and interference in internal affairs. In response, the festival removed several Tibetan works from its official program, including the film Listen to Indigenous People by the trans Tibetan artist Tenzin Mingyur Paldron.
The Film “Listen to Indigenous People”
Paldron’s 12 minute film investigates the circulation and reception of a 2023 viral video showing the Dalai Lama asking an Indian boy to suck his tongue, tracing how the clip was framed, condemned and defended across digital platforms. The work uses this controversy to open broader questions about consent, power and the ethical expectations placed on figures from oppressed communities. It links these questions to footage of Tibetans raising Palestinian flags and to references to Chinese state violence against Uyghurs and other Indigenous or stateless peoples, placing intimate moral debates within a larger structure of geopolitical inequality and systemic repression.
“Constellation of Complicity” and Authoritarian Networks
The film was part of the exhibition “Constellation of Complicity: Visualising the Global Machinery of Authoritarian Solidarity”, co curated by the Myanmar Peace Museum. The exhibition proposes that contemporary authoritarianism is sustained by transnational networks of support, including military cooperation, trade, diplomatic protection and shared propaganda strategies, rather than by isolated regimes acting alone. By bringing together works on Myanmar, Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong, the curators show how these struggles are interconnected through flows of weapons, capital, technology and political cover.
The Myanmar Peace Museum is an exile led initiative created by artists and activists opposed to Myanmar’s military junta. It documents wartime violence, cultural destruction and the complicity of foreign states and corporations in the junta’s survival, while creating platforms for artists to narrate their own experiences of repression and resistance. In this context, the inclusion of Tibetan works, and Paldron’s film in particular, underscores a shared analysis of how authoritarian states support one another and export repressive practices beyond their borders.
Free of political intentions
Swiss parliamentary authorities and the organisers publicly justified the removal by saying the Tibet segment was “too political” for projection on the façade of the Federal Palace and that shows on this building must remain free of political intentions. A spokesperson for the Parliamentary Services argued that Tibet is associated with political questions and that, to preserve institutional neutrality, only non-political imagery should be used in that state linked space, a rationale the artistic director accepted without objection.
Cross Border Censorship and Institutional Self Censorship
Chinese diplomatic pressure on the Bern Light Show fits a wider pattern in which officials seek to influence cultural institutions abroad whenever Tibet, Xinjiang or Hong Kong are portrayed in ways that contradict state narratives. Such pressure often relies on a combination of economic leverage, for example fears of losing tourism or cultural cooperation, and diplomatic signalling, such as complaints that exhibitions harm bilateral relations or disrespect Chinese sovereignty. Faced with this, institutions may calculate that withdrawing artworks is the easiest way to avoid controversy, transforming formal guarantees of free expression into hollow commitments.
In Switzerland, a country that hosts major human rights and multilateral institutions and that presents itself as a defender of civil liberties, the removal of Tibetan works under foreign pressure is particularly revealing. It shows how quickly cultural actors can internalise geopolitical risk and begin to pre-emptively police their own programming when powerful governments object, even without direct legal constraints. This dynamic erodes trust for exiled and diasporic communities that look to European venues as safe spaces for truth telling and critical memory work.
Artistic Resistance and New Layers of Witness
The Tibetan Youth Association in Europe refused to accept the erasure of these works and organised a parallel screening on 22 November, the final night of the Bern Light Show. They projected the slogan “STOPP ZENSUR” alongside an image of a red hand with yellow stars, echoing China’s flag, covering a human face, directly visualising how Chinese state power suppresses Tibetan voices. By reclaiming public space in the same city where the official festival had removed them, the organisers transformed censorship into a trigger for new artistic expression and public documentation.
This response illustrates a recurrent pattern in struggles over artistic freedom. Attempts to silence artworks often generate new images, new coalitions and new records that travel further than the original presentation might have done. The Bern case therefore functions on two levels, as evidence of how cross border censorship operates through compliant institutions inside democracies, and as an example of how artists and communities can counter that machinery by producing their own narratives, symbols and spaces of visibility when official platforms fail them.
In November 2025, the Bern Light Show in Switzerland removed Tibetan artworks, including Tenzin Mingyur Paldron’s film “Listen to Indigenous People”, after pressure from Chinese authorities and a claim that Tibet was “too political” for the Federal Palace façade.
This decision shows how cross border censorship now operates inside European democracies. When institutions internalise geopolitical risk and censor exiled communities to preserve “neutrality”, formal guarantees of artistic freedom become fragile.
At the same time, the response by the Tibetan Youth Association in Europe, who organised a parallel projection with the slogan “STOPP ZENSUR”, demonstrates how artistic resistance can reclaim public space and create new layers of documentation and witness.
This case matters for anyone working at the intersection of culture, human rights and foreign policy. It raises urgent questions about how festivals, museums and public authorities handle pressure from authoritarian states, and whose voices get protected when conflicts of interest arise.
#ArtisticFreedom #HumanRights #Censorship #Tibet #China #Switzerland #CulturalPolicy #TransnationalRepression #FreedomOfExpression #Mimeta #ArtsAndPolitics #DiasporaVoices #BernLightShow
