Decolonize This Place

DCF Press Release 1.pdf

#DecolonizeThisPlace Brochure.pdf

#DecolonizeThisPlace Wall Labels.pdf

Funders This Place.pdf

This place. We are here, in this place, with our friends, families, and communities. This place, the place of the museum, claims to be dedicated to cultural enrichment, public education, and the housing of great works of art, all in the name of the People. Yet this place also exists within an expanded field of capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. This place, the Brooklyn Museum, lends itself to these oppressive powers.  This place allows itself to become complicit with processes of racist displacement from Crown Heights to the West Bank of occupied Palestine. This place happily facilitates gentrification, sporting a 1% real estate developer on its board—even while claiming to serve the very communities being driven from their homes. This place proudly hosts an exhibition that aestheticizes apartheid and settler-colonialism–even while patting itself on the back for displaying works of art produced by the liberation movements of the past century. As artists, as workers, as citizens and non-citizens, we are here in the living spirit of decolonial struggles. We are conjuring the powers of our ancestors to begin decolonizing this place, liberating this place, and returning this place to the People.

Exhibit A: This Place.

Agit-Prop of the Oppressor. This Place is an exhibit of world-renown art photographers who were invited to visit the state of Israel and the occupied West Bank between 2009-2012. It cost six million dollars to initiate and each artist received a stipend of $70,000. Jeff Wall, Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, and more. Blue chip artists tasked with creating a “deeply humanistic and nuanced examination that reminds us of the place of art, not as an illustration of conflict, but as a platform for raising questions and engaging viewers in a conversation.” This is a humanistic conversation, however, in which Palestinian humanity is effaced. By hosting This Place, the Brooklyn Museum lends its cultural legitimacy to a sanitized vision of the region. It normalizes and aestheticizes illegal Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank. It renders invisible the daily violence experienced by Palestinians living under occupation, and the ongoing dehumanization of Palestinians who live in Israel. It conveniently says nothing of the Gaza Strip, currently enduring the tenth year of a brutal siege. This Place is the agit-prop of the oppressor.

Rhetoric of the Image. In the words of the state-run Tel Aviv Museum, where the show debuted last May, organizer Frédéric Brenner “believes that only through the eyes of great artists can we begin to understand the complexities of Israel—its history, its geography, its inhabitants, its daily life—and the resonance it has for people around the world.” The ethos of This Place, we are told, is not one of comfortable identification, but rather of one of unsettling strangeness: “Israel is a place of radical otherness, where every single person is an other for someone else. I wanted to invite others to question this otherness.” This Place features only photographers from outside of Israel and the West Bank, but this curatorial choice was something of a face-saving necessity: Brenner had initially invited Israeli and Palestinian artists as well, but by his own admission, no Palestinian artists would agree to collaborate. “For me, it would be a stain on the project that would last forever, to have Israelis and not Palestinians.” Perhaps this had something to do with Brenner’s criteria: “I knew one thing would disqualify a photographer — anger. It was important to look at Israel without complacency but with compassion. I believe art has a power to address questions that an ideological perspective cannot.” No Anger. No ideology. No politics. Just humanity.

The Matter of Palestinian Lives. Illegal settlements abound, steadily swallowing what little Palestinian land is left. Precious olive groves and private property are destroyed. People are deprived not only of the use of their land to grow food, which would provide suitable living, but also their freedom to move through it. The Wall looms. IDs are confiscated. People are subject to military raids, arrest and imprisonment, which often leads to indefinite detention and solitary confinement. Many are killed, in their own neighborhoods, in scuffles at “checkpoints,” or later, in prison. Under Israeli Apartheid, Palestinian lives are made not to matter.

BDS and Beyond. Palestinian Civil Society has called for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law and human rights. This Place is not captured by BDS because its funding is private. Eighty-five US, European, and Israeli private donors and foundations provided the $6 million in funding for this show; the majority of these funders either directly or indirectly (through other organizations and projects they fund) support Israeli interests and institutions. While some of these funders’ projects support “coexistence” between Jewish and Arab Israelis, they acknowledge neither Palestinians nor the illegal occupation. A few donors have directly funded Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank, and even the Israeli Defense Forces.

BDS is the floor, not the ceiling, of what is expected from our museums and cultural institutions. Artistic and institutional neutrality of the kind propagated by This Place is a myth. When we are talking about Palestinian lives, there is no side to be on but that of life itself. The purported balance served by claiming not to take sides–or indeed to highlight the “complexity” of the situation—perpetuates the settler-colonial regime. Where is the balance between an oppressed and an oppressor? There is none. Apartheid is a black and white issue.

We Act In Solidarity. We owe to Palestinians at least what we demand for ourselves: freedom from occupation, freedom from new forms of colonization, freedom to return to and inhabit the territory which we and our families called home. Without annexation, without financialization, without exclusion, without pollution, without the destruction of the common resources that sustain collective life. We act in solidarity and with a desire for justice when we hold our cultural institutions accountable. We express our bond with those in bondage by acts of refusal and acts of love. Militant love.

To The Brooklyn Museum: You are hereby on notice. BDS is the floor not the ceiling. The days in which art and artists are instrumentalized to normalize oppression, displacement, and dispossession of any people are over. We are watching you, and we will scrutinize your exhibitions and your funding, and we will act when you fail.

EXHIBIT B: AGITPROP!

Museums and Movements. Agitprop! is an exhibition located on the same floor of the Brooklyn Museum as This Place. It is sincerely dedicated to assembling the art of radical social movements of the past century, ranging from the artist-engineers of the Russian Revolution to the work of our contemporary friends like Occupy Museums—though conspicuously lacking any reference to the Palestinian struggle. What does it mean to place the work of such activist artists in the space of the museum? Does it deaden and petrify their radical energies, which more properly belong in the streets and the squares? Or might the gathering-together of these histories and voices provide a platform to call out the institution itself for violating its own purported ideals?

The Museum Facilitates Racialized Displacement. Several weeks before the opening of Agitprop!, community groups and artists drew attention to the fact that the Brooklyn Museum would be renting itself out for the sixth annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. This was a gathering of more than 600 of the biggest players in Brooklyn’s real estate market seeking to answer questions including “Which emerging areas are primed for transformation?” and “How can investors take advantage of demographic changes?” Protests were held in front of the museum under the banner “BROOKLYN IS NOT FOR SALE.” The museum was called upon to stop hosting a predatory ultra-luxury industry driving black and brown people from their homes, and to instead create space for the voices of grassroots community organizations struggling against displacement. Looming above it all was the presence on the Board of Trustees of David Berliner, CEO of Forest City Ratner, the corporation best known for overseeing the development of Barclays Center–the prime anchor of large-scale gentrification in downtown Brooklyn over the past decade.

The Contradictions Have Become a Crisis. A show about activist art, hosted by an institution in the thrall of the 1%. Essential questions about the mission of a public museum are coming to a head: who or what does the museum represent and serve? Who do they imagine their community to be? How might the museum be motivated to live up to its claim of being a museum of, by, and for the People? The museum sought to manage the looming crisis by making space within Agitprop! itself for a display by aggrieved community groups, and made vague promises to host “programming” about “art and gentrification,” congratulating itself in the New York Times for its magnanimity. Such gestures have proven inadequate to shield the museum from the deep critique to which it is now being subjected from within and without. Demands are now being issued that will shake the museum to its core, and which open new horizons of decolonial solidarity from Brooklyn to Palestine and beyond. When We Breathe We Breathe Together.