In the midst of Berlin’s bustling art week, replete with the usual openings, talks, and VIP dinners, something else unfolded in Kreuzberg: The fundraiser for the Gaza Biennial—Berlin Pavilion. During extreme political repression, depleted public funding, physical and bureaucratic state violence, and censorship, the fundraiser aimed to raise funds to make an iteration of the Gaza Biennial possible. As an act of solidarity, the fundraiser disrupted market-driven valorizations of art, and brought together thousands of people committed to expanding the idea of what art could be.
While the main purpose of this fundraiser, and the Biennial it supports, is to insist on ending the ongoing genocide committed by Israel and to support Palestinian liberation, it also becomes an example of collective organizing and cultivating culturall imaginaries grounded in self-governance. With this column, we look into the ways the fundraiser undermines common economic and cultural conditions of how art is shown, valued, and circulated.
Leading up to the event, more than 400 Berlin-based artists hand-delivered over 1,100 works on paper, which volunteer organizers cataloged to raise funds for the Pavilion planned for November. Unlike Berlin Art Week, there was no jury determining the selection. Rather, the only criteria were that it be limited to an A4-sized work on paper and that the artist be based in Berlin. Donated works were neither ranked nor labeled. Every artwork was sold for the same price.
Enabling anyone to contribute a small work on paper opens a platform for artists to participate, regardless of their education, social status, or cultural capital. Yet, this open invitation also confronts us with the inequalities we are facing in the cultural field. For some artists, contributing to the fundraiser reflects a genuine wish to support despite limited means, while others would possess the resources and influence to contribute on a much larger scale. Undermining normalized cultural hierarchies within the microcosm of the fundraiser becomes a reminder that despite equal participation, contributing to a shared cause comes with the responsibility of everyone involved reflecting on the means and reach they have to support it.
Where the mainstream gallery scene entices through the aura of recognized names and the value circulation within established economies, the fundraiser introduced a different logic of engagement. Presenting unframed and unlabeled works on a table offers the chance to be guided by resonance rather than reputation. Perhaps it risks sounding naïve, but it seems worth asking what we find moving or desirable when the scaffolding of labels and assigned values is stripped away.
Beyond questions of taste or aesthetics, beauty here arises from the assembly of works, as a constellation of singular gestures that extend beyond themselves, revealing the simultaneity of two disparate artistic realities: the luxury of producing art as a means of support, and the urgency of artistic production as resistance to erasure. In the fundraiser, those contrary conditions do not diminish one another but instead open a productive space as solidarity, allowing one to sustain the other.
A fundraiser, of course, is not a novel thing. Yet, this makes it even more important to recognize how working within a seemingly familiar format can generate something that exceeds the (im)possibilities of the restricted cultural conditions in Berlin. It reveals a horizon for abolitionist practices and for approaching art differently.
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©Dania Shihab, Carlos Vásquez Méndez, On Lines, 2025
