Art
Palestinian artists targeted in Germany ahead of major art event – Al Jazeera English
Berlin, Germany – Just a few weeks before the opening of documenta 15, one of the world’s most prestigious art events, Palestinian artist Yazan Khalili received a WhatsApp message telling him there had been a break-in at his exhibition space.
He arrived at the room in a former nightclub in Kassel, central Germany, to find the intruders had let off a fire extinguisher and spray-painted what appeared to be death threats on the walls.
The perpetrators remain unknown, but the vandalism marked an alarming escalation in a controversy that has been rumbling in German media for months, after an obscure blog in January accused artists and organisers of documenta, in particular Khalili and his The Question of Funding collective, of anti-Semitism.
This year’s documenta – which runs from June 18 to September 25, 2022 – is curated by Indonesian art collective Ruangrupa, which has broken with tradition by using a collaborative format and inviting a wider range of participants from the Global South than previous editions of the quinquennial exhibition.
But the debate surrounding the event has raised questions about whether Germany’s approach to combating anti-Semitism discriminates against Palestinians and supporters of Palestinian rights, and limits artistic freedom.
“There was so much emotion and fear,” Khalili told Al Jazeera. ”This has been building since January – lots of hostile, aggressive media campaigns … against me and other Palestinian artists, or artists who showed support for Palestine.”
Documenta organisers interpreted the “187” sprayed on the walls as a reference to murder in California’s penal code, and “Peralta” to Spanish neo-Nazi Isabel Peralta, who has links to the extreme right in Germany.
The incident on the night of May 28 has led to concerns for the safety of artists in Kassel, which is about a two-hour drive from Hanau, where a right-wing extremist murdered nine people in a racist killing spree in 2020.
“There is a line that has been crossed. Before all these defamations and aggressions were digital. Now they have become physical,” said artist Yasmine el-Sabbagh, whose work involving an audio-visual archive of life in the Palestinian refugee camp Burj al-Shamali will feature in documenta. She was named in the blog post in January.
In response to the targeting of Khalili’s exhibition space, documenta said it had filed a criminal complaint with police and would step up security at the event.
“We are united against the racist attacks that started this sequence of events,” Ruangrupa said in a statement published on Friday.
“We also express our dismay and disappointment at the amplification that the original baseless blog post of disinformation and manipulated content received in some of the mainstream media. We denounce the media participation in these smear campaigns,” it added.
Germany’s support for Israel is a cornerstone of its post-war political identity and was named a raison d’etat by former Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In 2019, the German parliament declared the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates an economic and cultural boycott of Israel over its occupation of Palestine, to be explicitly “anti-Semitic”. In the years since, supporters of BDS have been stripped of awards, disinvited from events, and publicly denounced as anti-Semites.
Germany is home to Europe’s largest population of Palestinians, but many find the political climate is becoming increasingly hostile towards them.
“You are suspected of not sharing the German memory culture, the consensus on Holocaust memory,” said Palestinian-German academic Sami Khatib. “And of course you’re scrutinised for that.”
In May, Berlin police prohibited all Palestinian rallies on the weekend of the anniversary of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – on the grounds that there was a high risk of anti-Semitic behaviour, which organisers denied. This included a vigil organised by a Jewish group for Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli security forces in May.
“From a German perspective Palestinians are problematic; their very existence is problematic,” said Khatib. “This is not all of Germany, but this is what you get from major journals, certain politicians, and also certain NGOs who are engaged in a civil society fight against anti-Semitism. And today, this fight is mostly against Palestinians.”
The recent targeting of Palestinian artists at documenta began when the news blog Ruhrbarone published an anonymously authored post sourced from the Kassel Alliance against Anti-Semitism, a group that identifies as part of the “anti-German” scene.
The anti-Germans are a left-wing sect that identify closely with the State of Israel and are staunchly Islamophobic.
The blog post accused several figures involved in documenta of anti-Semitism for their support of BDS or signing of petitions critical of Israel. It focused particularly on Khalili and The Question of Funding, and their connection to the Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah. The author painted al-Sakakini, an Arab nationalist intellectual born in the 1870s, as a Nazi sympathiser – an account rebutted by historian Jens Hansen.
The accusations were picked up and repeated by major German-language newspapers from across the political spectrum, including left-wing Die Tageszeitung, liberal Die Zeit and conservative Die Welt – none of which initially contacted Khalili, he said.
Though several newspaper contributions and statements from public figures, including the head of the Anne Frank Educational Centre, have dismissed the claims of anti-Semitism made by the blog post, the issue has continued to resurface, even dragging in Germany’s culture minister Claudia Roth.
In April, stickers were posted on Ruangrupa’s headquarters, which read “Freedom instead of Islam! No compromises with barbarism!” and “Solidarity with Israel”.
Ruangrupa pushed back against what it called “bad-faith” attacks in a public statement, saying that the “alliance” was in fact one person, whose allegations were totally false. Ruangrupa has organised a series of online talks to discuss the “role of art and artistic freedom in the face of rising anti-Semitism, racism, and Islamophobia”, which featured artists Eyal Weizman and Hito Steyerl. After the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany wrote to Roth to criticise the composition of the panels, Ruangrupa scrapped the series and said it would allow the event to speak for itself.
“It’s so obvious that it’s a smear campaign from the very beginning, that all these accusations are not based on anything. They are incendiary,” said el-Sabbagh, adding that many news outlets failed to scrutinise the blog’s racist language.
“It’s really shocking to see that mainstream media doesn’t reflect critically on this. Many of them just pick this up to put more oil on fire.”
In a statement published on Friday, the Kassel Alliance against Anti-Semitism denied any connection with the vandalism, which it suggests was committed by local youths and was not political, but referred to the Hamburg hip-hop group 187 Strassenbande and unknown Filipino rapper RJ Peralto, who has no obvious connection to Germany.
The group did not claim responsibility for the stickers, but said they were a legitimate form of solidarity with Israel. “We make no secret of the fact that we are critical of Islam,” it added.
![The graffiti would initially appear to be of far-right origin, possibly done by someone associated with this Kassel antisemitism alliance group [Al Jazeera]](https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/IMG_2195_WH22.jpg?resize=770%2C578)
Without a lobby to defend them, Palestinians make an easy target for German media outlets who wish to associate them with anti-Semitism, said Khatib.
“It’s kind of a public performance of moral goodness, of being self-righteous.”
Khalili initially offered interviews to the German press to defend himself, but found the tone of questioning from journalists to be frequently hostile or presumptive of his guilt. One asked him whether the curators made a mistake in inviting his collective – “a humiliating question”, he said.
Though he had exhibited several times before in Germany without a problem, he now found himself spending countless hours grappling with a crisis into which the collective had been thrown. The art community in Kassel has been incredibly supportive, he said, but the ordeal has been exhausting.
Members of the collective have had to rethink the exhibition, which will examine alternative economic structures to the institutional model of funding art in Palestine, to ensure that individuals and communities in Palestine who are involved will be protected.
“I think I was too innocent thinking that we can come and express our work,” Khalili said.
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Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
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Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
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These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
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