Dissident Artists and Musicians Shine at Free2Be Event

VOC Executive Director Marion Smith opens our Free2Be exhibit celebrating dissident art, music, and film in Washington, D.C.'s historic Dupont Underground on June 22.

On June 12-22, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) hosted a multimedia exhibit and dual concert event called Free2Be in Washington D.C.’s historic Dupont Underground, featuring dissident art, music, and film viewed by hundreds of tourists and locals throughout a 10-day period.

The exhibit displayed a selection of oil-on-canvas from The Gulag Collection, a series of 50 paintings by gulag survivor Nikolai Getman depicting the brutal nature of Soviet concentration camps. Interspersed among the paintings, VOC’s award-winning Witness Project videos played on loop, telling the harrowing stories of witnesses to communism such as Cambodia’s Nal Oum and Hungary’s Dániel Magay.

The exhibit was bookended by concerts featuring young musicians inspired by a yearning for freedom. The opening performance was by Dr. Elida Dakoli, an Albanian-American pianist who also spoke on the effect communism’s legacy has had on her creative development.

The closing concert featured Wuilly Arteaga, a native of socialist Venezuela who gained worldwide fame for braving street protests against the brutal dictator Nicolas Maduro armed only with his violin. He was injured by buckshot to the face, arrested on false charges, held in prison for 19 days, and had his violin destroyed by a National Guard soldier. Arteaga was joined on stage by Jana Kubánková, a Czech violinist and composer whose family suffered under communism. The two musicians performed a duet composed by Kubánková expressly for the Free2Be event, and earned a standing ovation.