[from the Critical Art Ensemble Legal Defense Fund Web site for which NAAO acts as fiscal agent:]What happened to Steve Kurtz?
"On May 11, 2004, Steve Kurtz's wife of 20 years, Hope, died of heart failure in their home in Buffalo. Kurtz called 911. Buffalo Police who responded along with emergency workers, apparently sensitized to 'War on Terror' rhetoric, became alarmed by the presence of art materials in their home which had been displayed in museums and galleries throughout Europe and North America. Convinced that these materials - which consisted of several petri dishes containing harmless forms of bacteria, and scientific equipment for testing genetically altered food - were the work of a terrorist, the police called the FBI.
The next day, as Kurtz was on his way to the funeral home, he was illegally detained by agents from the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, who informed him he was being investigated for "bioterrorism." At no point during the 22 hours Kurtz was held and questioned did the agents Mirandize him or inform him he could leave. Meanwhile, agents from numerous federal law enforcement agencies - including five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Buffalo Police, Fire Department, and state Marshall's office - descended on Kurtz's home in Hazmat suits. Cordoning off half a block around his home, they seized his cat, car, computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife's body from the county coroner for further analysis. The Erie County Health Department condemned his house as a possible "health risk."
A week later, only after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had tested samples from the home and announced there was no public safety threat, was Kurtz allowed to return to his home and to recover his wife's body. To this day, the FBI has refused to return most of the tens of thousands of dollars worth of impounded materials, including a book Kurtz was working on. Kurtz and his acclaimed art collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) were using the harmless bacteria and materials in several projects."
more
[from the Sundance Film Festival Web Site. With special thanks to EC:]
STRANGE CULTURE
U.S.A., 2006, 75 Minutes, color
Director:
Lynn Hershman Leeson
"Lynn Herschman Leeson returns to Sundance (Teknolust premiered at the 2002 Festival) with Strange Culture, a brilliantly conceived documentary that breaks conventional rules out of the necessity to tell the story.
...
Because Kurtz cannot legally talk about the case, Leeson enlists actors, including Tilda Swinton, Josh Kornbluth, and Peter Coyote, to interpret the story. Leeson skillfully weaves dramatic reenactment, news footage, animation, testimonials, and footage of Kurtz himself into a sophisticated documentary about post-9/11 paranoia and the risks artists face when their work questions government policies."
— Shari Frilot
[image from the Critical Art Ensemble Web site]
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