German art exhibition documenta 16 doesn’t open until 2027 but already two members of its Finding Committee, tasked with appointing the event’s artistic direction, have quit.
Tel Aviv-based Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger resigned on Friday 10 November. In her resignation letter, she said she had been unable to fully participate due to the conflict and that her requests to delay proceedings had been rejected.
‘What can art bring to our dark age?’ she asked.
Two days later, Indian writer and curator Ranjit Hoskote shared his own resignation letter, saying, ‘I am being asked to accept a sweeping and untenable definition of anti-Semitism that conflates the Jewish people with the Israeli state; and that, correspondingly, misrepresents any expression of sympathy with the Palestinian people as support for Hamas.’
Hoskote had been attacked for signing a petition against an event linking Zionism to Hindu nationalism at the consulate general of Israel in Mumbai back in 2019.
Andreas Hoffmann, Managing Director of documenta, said the event’s organisers need to ‘consistently distance ourselves from all forms of antisemitism. The events of summer 2022 must not be repeated. This is the only way to achieve a genuine new beginning after the events of documenta fifteen.’
Directed by Indonesian collective ruangrupa, documenta 15 was derailed last year by accusations of anti-Semitism, vandalism directed at Palestinian collective The Question of Funding, and the inclusion of a racist Jewish caricature in the mural People’s Justice (2002).
It’s not just documenta that has been impacted by German sensitivity to accusations of anti-Semitism.
Curator Anaïs Duplan was dropped from an exhibition at the Museum Folkwang in Essen for sharing and commenting on the Israel-Palestine conflict on his Instagram.
Duplan shared an email from the Museum’s Director, Peter Gorschlüter, saying that posts that ‘do not acknowledge the terroristic attack of the Hamas [sic] and consider the Israeli military operation in Gaza a genocide’ were ‘unacceptable’.
Gorschlüter cited the 2019 Bundestag ruling opposing the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which, according to their website, ‘works to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and pressure Israel to comply with international law.’
Gorschlüter said ‘you have put us in the situation that the Museum might be considered to support anti-Semitic tendencies’.
‘Therefore, we have decided to suspend our collaboration with immediate effect,’ he said.
In London, Lisson Gallery has postponed its Ai Weiwei exhibition indefinitely following a now deleted tweet in which the artist reportedly said, ‘The sense of guilt around the persecution of the Jewish people has been, at times, transferred to offset the Arab world.’
Ai told The Art Newspaper his show was called off ‘for my own well-being’.
‘The cancellation of an exhibition is not important at all because tens of thousands of exhibitions are still going on,’ he said.
‘Without exaggeration, as a person or an artist, I can live without ever doing another exhibition, and I can live without art as the space of expression, but I cannot live without free thinking and free speech. That would mean the end of life.’
In response to Hoskote’s resignation, Ai tweeted, ‘It takes a voice to fight’.
