Finnish artist Jani Leinonen (Hyvinkää, 1978) knows what it's like to be in trouble with the law. In 2011, after founding the so-called Food Liberation Army, he kidnapped a statue of Ronald McDonald from a restaurant in Helsinki and then published videos threatening to "behead" the clown if McDonald's did not respond to certain questions related to its ethics, from quality from their food to the employment of illegal immigrants. Days later, seven police officers showed up at his house to arrest him. Interrogated for thirty hours, he ended up in court, where he was sentenced to pay a fine.
Four years later, he himself made a skeletal version of the famous mascot of the hamburger chain, hanging like a crucified Christ, with the skin attached to the ribs. His McJesus (2015), with which he tried to denounce the colonization of all spirituality by capitalist thought, toured numerous museums without generating headlines until, in 2019, its inclusion in an exhibition at the Haifa Art Museum provoked violent protests, with demonstrations and throwing of incendiary devices. Leinonen did not know that his work was on display in the Israeli museum until he began receiving hate messages from fundamentalists around the world. “It was terrifying,” he recalls at the Museu de l’Art Prohibit, where the piece has finally found its place among many other censored pieces. In his case, it was he himself who asked that the work be removed, since he was part of the boycott of Israel movement, BDS.
“It is stimulating and inspiring to be in this museum surrounded by artists with so much courage,” he says. “In recent years I have been afraid to talk about the cases of censorship that I have suffered in my life, of putting my safety, my career, everything at risk... But I have to break the silence because it is the ally of the censor and It ends up eating your soul,” he says.
The McJesus controversy was his most vocal, but life has become unexpectedly difficult for him on many other occasions. The last one, last year when, together with other artists, he signed a letter asking that the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art break its ties with one of its benefactors, the Jewish collector and businessman Poju Zabludowicz, whose wealth comes largely from the agreements of arms trade between Finland and Israel. “The Bishop of Helsinki made a tweet in which he called us 'cultural Nazis', we were accused of being anti-Semitic. Nobody threatened me personally, but they did it through my family, my friends, my gallery owners... Collectors I knew said that they would never buy one of my works again, that they would burn the ones they already had. They stir up storms of negative publicity to change our minds, and to some extent they succeed. It was a different fear, because it affected my closest people. After a period of time in which no one entered the gallery, the gallery owner, who has a son, asked me to remove the signature. And I did it.”
Finland is not the country of happiness, he says, the extreme right is part of the government and the wounds of the civil war that pitted reds and whites at the beginning of the 20th century are still open. He himself tries to close those of his family, to rescue the story from his oblivion, through a graphic novel in which he tells the story of the more than one hundred workers murdered and then buried in a common grave in a nearby forest. to the town where he grew up. “The relatives put seeds in their pockets so they could later identify the place where the bodies were.”
