Andrei Molodkin, the artist who made headlines earlier this year when he took $45m worth of art ‘hostage’—threatening to destroy them if Julian Assange died while confined in prison—is showing his portrait of the WikiLeaks founder in public for the first time in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Meticulously drawn with a humble ballpoint pen, the 2.2m x 1.7m work is what the conceptual artist describes as “an artistic gesture” to draw attention to the WikiLeaks founder’s detention. Its title, Date of Freedom (2024), refers to Assange’s release from Belmarsh Prison in London on 24 June, where he was held awaiting extradition to the US to face charges including espionage. Assange spent four years in custody, and another seven in self-imposed exile at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, before his release this summer.
Begun in February, after the death in custody of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the large-scale drawing was finally finished last month when Assange visited Molodkin in southern France. He was able to add the date of his release to a space left blank by Molodkin in the hope that he would one day be free and able to ‘complete’ the work.
Andrei Molodkin, Date of Freedom (2024) © the artist
Following his speech to the parliamentary assembly of the council of Europe (Pace) in Strasbourg last month, Assange travelled to La Raillère, a former spa resort close to the French-Spanish border that Molodkin has turned into an artist’s space. It was there that the artist had a 32-tonne safe room built in which more than a dozen works—including some by Rembrandt, Picasso and Warhol, along with contemporary pieces, donated by collectors or the artists themselves—were entombed. Alongside them was a device—a ‘dead man’s switch’ set to a timer— that enabled the contents to be turned to dust using a remote mechanism that apes methods used by US security agencies as a last-measure protection at its embassies, the artist says.
"Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroad,” Assange said in Strasbourg, addressing the council’s committee on legal affairs and human rights. “I fear that unless norm setting institutions like Pace wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late."
“The date Assange drew in ballpoint pen to complete his portrait is a rest counter…,” Molodkin says. “Its ticking reminds us that in a time of catastrophe, art history can be turned into a new form—a pile of grey ashes.”
Molodkin describes Dead Man’s Switch as a kind of “symbolic portrait”, aligning his work with the what he calls the ‘Political Minimalism’ of artists such as Santiago Sierra, with whom he is exhibiting in East West, a two-man show at Kvadrat 500, an extension of the National Gallery in Sofia. The artists argue that the existence of political prisoners is a critical indicator of the health of democratic institutions and their approach to human rights.
The exhibition, which is curated by a/political — the London-based organisation founded by Andrei Tretyakov of Bluewire Capital in London, which focuses on socio-political art — opens on 26 November and runs until 16 February 2025. Sierra, best known for contributing to the Spanish pavillion at the 2003 Venice Biennale by blocking the entrance, is showing his work Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain (2018), which was censored in his home country, and works from his Veterans series. Molodkin is showing his pen drawing of Navalny alongside his portrait of Assange. He will also display some of his sculptural installations, including Blood Democracy, which includes human blood donated by Russian and Ukrainian soldiers.
“Everyone is so scared of a Third World War, and this new level of confrontations,” Molodkin says. “Dead Man’s Switch was written about in more than 300 publications. It shows that art can change our perspective on the world.”