PART OF an EU art exhibit dedicated to breaking down stereotypes and overcoming censorship has been covered up following a diplomatic complaint over “toilet humour”.
Workers moved into the Council of Ministers building in Brussels late on Monday night and draped a black cloth over a section of the Entropa exhibit that depicts Bulgaria as a Turkish “squat” toilet. The decision was made after Sofia made a diplomatic complaint to the Czech Republic, which commissioned the art to publicise its presidency of the EU.
“It is a humiliation for the Bulgarian nation and an offence to national dignity,” Bulgaria’s spokeswoman to the EU told journalists when the exhibit was launched.
Entropa is a controversial eight-tonne art installation that depicts all 27 EU states in the form of national stereotypes. It was the brainchild of the Czech EU presidency, which commissioned artist David Cerny to co-operate with an artist from each member state to design their country’s exhibit.
It emerged, however, the day before the installation was unveiled in Brussels that Cerny had hoodwinked his own government – all the exhibits had been dreamed up with three Czech colleagues in an elaborate hoax.
The controversial depictions of several EU states have provoked an angry response and allegations of bad taste from some governments, although the exhibit is extremely popular with officials working at the EU’s usually colourless headquarters.
The exhibit depicts France with the word “strike”, Sweden with an Ikea box stuffed with the wing of a fighter jet (a reference to its weapons industry), the Netherlands is under water with several Islamic-style minarets poking through, while Italy is represented by masturbating footballers (a reference to Italy’s auto-erotic love of football).
Ireland is depicted by a hairy set of uilleann pipes, described by the programme as reflecting the “need for inner ethnic exoticism and the marketing of a distant, idealised Ireland”.
Slovakia, depicted as an Hungarian salami, also made an official protest to Prague but later accepted an apology rather than demand its exhibit be covered.
Cerny apologised to Bulgaria at the launch of Entropa last week, saying he never meant to cause offence. Czech deputy prime minister Alexander Vondra, who commissioned the exhibit, also apologised to Bulgaria while vowing to retain the exhibit.
“We wanted to prove that 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there is no censorship,” said Mr Vondra, a former dissident in his own country.