Following the discontent and mobilizations of artistic and cultural organizations in solidarity with Palestine against the German state's complicity in the atrocities committed by the State of Israel in Gaza and the escalation of further bloody wars in the Middle East, the German state has implemented retaliatory measures aimed at silencing dissent and increasing precarity. Now that Realpolitik has breached the comfort zone of the art and culture sectors, will solidarity, cooperation, disobedience, and radical universalism finally guide the people's project of emancipation? The longer we are unable to inhabit a different world, the longer the genocide of the Palestinian people will continue.
The return of xenophobic nationalist rewritings of art history, the emergence of new forms of censorship, the cutting of public subsidies, creating new disparities between museums in the same territory, or between the North and South, and the role that multibillionaires occupy in the art world are creating a landscape of fierce and difficult struggles, to which more diverse programming responds in part, particularly in the museums that do not aspire to be universal. Authoritarian racial capitalism, dependency on financiers to make art, the occupation of Palestine and the destruction of its heritage, and current counterrevolutions demand an analytical rigor and leaps of the imagination that an institution cannot carry alone, especially if its workings and economy go unquestioned.
– A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès
In November 2023, Berlin's Culture Senate initiated a legal review of the organization Oyoun’s funding to assess whether it could be withdrawn or revoked. The audit concluded that “no violations of criminal law or other applicable law were apparent.” Despite this, the funding was ultimately canceled on technical grounds, with Culture Senator Joe Chialo advocating to develop a new “operating concept.” The decision was based on unfounded accusations of anti-Semitism following Oyoun’s hosting of 20 Years of the Jewish Voice – Celebration of Mourning and Hope. This event commemorated the 20th anniversary of Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, an Israeli critical organization advocating for measures to resolve the deepening conflict between Israel and Palestine. The event sought to honor the victims of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. Such efforts, however, challenged Germany’s stance of unconditional solidarity with Israel. Despite the gravity of the decision, and an open letter broadly signed by citizens, no major Berlin institutions that claim to culturally uplift diversity, inclusivity, and decoloniality took a clear stand against the defunding, regardless of the legal trials that ultimately have proven Oyoun's integrity. This silence highlighted the deep climate of fear and state compliance woven within the cultural sphere which is deepened by a lack of radical universalism [1] among certain agents and institutions that often claim progressive values. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, their silence has not protected them: the cultural scene in Berlin at large has been drastically defunded.
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The Institutional Crossfire
Only in the past month, two major events, deemed to target individuals and initiatives, shook the art and cultural landscape, revealing the tight relations between control of narratives and identities and funding distribution. On November 7th, the Bundestag approved a measure broadly criticized by many major Jewish voices, the Antisemitismus-Resolution (Anti-Semitism Resolution) replicating a discursive and ideological strategy that is central to Zionism; that is to conflate criticism of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism. Further, it singles out people coming from the Middle Eastern diaspora as potential anti-Semites. Beyond the blatant racism and Islamophobia, the resolution, which is not legally binding, creates an opaque legal framework that will make it much easier to refuse citizenship and labor opportunities to those close to the Palestinian struggle and/or directly affected by the current wars in the region.
Only a couple of weeks later, on November 19th, the federal government announced substantial cuts of up to 100% of the budget allocated for funding the non-institutional art scene in 2025. The governing coalition’s fiscal plans will involve a continued decline in spending between 2026 and 2028. These austerity measures target spaces and initiatives devoted to inclusion and preservation of diversity. Equally, they penalize initiatives that work with cultural education and the promotion of artistic research. This will lead, almost inevitably, to their closure. An example is Sinema Transtopia, a transnational space for film culture, art, knowledge, and community, that has developed links between urban space and film as a cultural practice. The consequences of these policies which target, by depleting economic resources and freedom of expression, will worsen the already precarious working conditions of artists and an entire class of migrant cultural workers coming from the Middle East and the Global South, who are not protected by Schengen passports. Their labor is the criterion of their residency permits. They very likely will find themselves in this situation, and, thus, be forced to choose between assimilation to Germany’s structured neoliberal framework or the risk of seeing their visa not renewed. As Nadija Samour, Senior Legal Advisor for the European Legal Support Centre, assessed in an interview with Phil Butland for the Berlin Left, these measures are paving the road for a wave of deportations.
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These measures are a consequence of a major German economic recession and the rising cost of living since the beginning of the war between Ukraine (and NATO) and Russia. The industrial sector is facing a crisis and the current government (the truncated SPD coalition) has been pulverized and lost popular support due to its inability to solve economic problems, while at the same time, it bolsters the military-industrial-legislative complex by involving itself in the conflicts in the Middle East and Europe. Forms of fascism looming over German society, which is already advancing in the majority of European countries and the US (before and especially with Trump's re-election), reproduce a grim historical moment, where the rule of imperialist wars defines the rule of the economy. Information is readily available within the public domain that indicates the austerity measures applied by the German state to its cultural class will not impact the army industry, which since 2022, has seen 100 billion euros invested in a “special fund” for defense (on top of the military budget of over 50 billion Euros each year). In this sense, culture and art spaces become the mirror of an “expanded ideological battlefield through which those who profit from war polish their reputations and normalize their violence.”
The quintessence of these measures of austerity, militarization, and ideological gatekeeping occurred on November 24, during the symposium Art and Activism in Times of Polarization: Discussion Space on the Middle East Conflict, organized by the writer Saba-Nur Cheema and the Anne Frank Education Center director Meron Mendel, and hosted at the Neue Nationalgalerie. The ambiguous title of the event already suggested state-conforming and comforting narratives to be promulgated by the organizers and the majority of the participating guests. The event at the Neue Nationalgalerie received severe criticism from individuals and organizations that support the Palestinian struggle, resulting in withdrawals by participants such as the South African artist Candice Breitz, and the British-Israeli architect and author Eyal Weizman. More disturbingly, attendees were subjected to restrictive security measures based on their names and racial identities. Autonomous documentation of the discussions was prohibited, in addition to the racial profiling inherent in such measures – which perpetuate the false notion of dissenting voices as dangerous. Thus, a more insidious problem arises the institution's monopoly on documentation. By controlling how debate is recorded and disseminated, the Neue Nationalgalerie consolidates its authority in stifling dissenting perspectives and reinforcing conformity with capillary Zionism.
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Assimilation and Precarization as Mechanisms of Censorship
Cultural and art institutions have become sites of silencing, revealing the fragility and aggression of the prevailing system. This fragility is deeply tied to neoliberal strategies of precarization, control, and the assimilation of dissenting voices into the system they seek to challenge.
Precarization, marked by unstable employment, low wages, arbitrary dismissals, outsourcing, and eroded social security, undermines workers' quality of life and dismantles the working class's political power. This process strips class of its role as a collective political subject, leaving individuals isolated and powerless. The art system in Germany reflects these dynamics, where the fragmentation of the working class intersects with identity-based agendas promoted by the cultural left. Over time, the white-dominated German art scene has assimilated frameworks such as identity politics, and decolonial theory, presenting these positions as progressive innovations to profit from. Any liberatory potential of such frameworks long has been commodified by the art market and celebrated as the legitimate tools for minoritarian emancipation and the democratization of cultural spaces.
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However, inclusion is conditional. Institutions may amplify minority voices, but in exchange they demand compliance with neoliberal norms, prioritizing symbolic representation over structural change. Renowned art prizes such as the Ars Viva and Preis der Nationalgalerie have featured lists of non-white, women, and non-binary artists as winners. Major institutions such as Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Berlin Biennale have changed their teams and programs, appointing figures from the Global South as directors and curators. However, precarized and tokenized workers must align with institutional terms to secure visibility and support, effectively neutralizing any concrete dissent. While the “empowerment” of marginalized groups and the acknowledgment of suppressed epistemologies are celebrated as reforms, these gestures obscure the deeper reality: dissent is absorbed, instrumentalized, commodified, and stripped of its transformative potential. In this context, economic dependency reinforces power imbalances, allowing institutions to define “emancipation” within limits that serve neoliberal objectives. This dynamic may have advanced individual careers, but it has failed to deliver emancipation, exposing its rhetoric within capitalism as hollow – something exemplified by the ongoing struggles of Palestine.
In Germany, precarization and assimilation strategies not only manage identity but also suppress class solidarity. Sara Ahmed's concept of “conditional hospitality” [2] aptly describes how institutions extend selective support, demanding compliance as the price of inclusion. Promises of stability and recognition lure potentially disruptive groups into a clientelistic, racialized, and classist structure, deepening divisions between “acceptable” critics who conform and those who resist. The recent mobilization of Berlin’s cultural scene against budget cuts under the “Berlin ist Kultur” slogan illustrates this dynamic. While concentrating its dissatisfaction on protesting against austerity, the movement has failed to acknowledge the deeper connection between funding cuts and the criminalization of Palestinian struggles – an emblem of broader struggles for class, gender, and racial emancipation. The slogan depoliticizes the issue, obscuring how funding cuts and the Antisemitismus-Resolution work in tandem to suppress solidarity between movements. This weaponization of funding reinforces an exclusionary paradigm: those compliant with state narratives are entitled to protest austerity, while oppositional voices face economic retaliation without full solidarity from the cultural sector.
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The Ongoing Labor of Emancipation: Solidarity, Cooperation, and Radical Universalism
The question of what to do, and how to organize, amidst the advance of these measures is a burning one. In a context where dissident agents are fragmented and tied to mainstream institutions and the market, it seems important to reevaluate the meaning of solidarity, cooperation, collectivity, and disobedience within art. In this sense, it seems equally important to recognize that there is no longer any illusory comfort zone. In times of urgency such as ours, art and critical thinking can be used as an instrument of denunciation, a tool for social aggregation, and a means of creating an ethics that guides the constitution of a different reality. But those who wish to act critically must be willing to subordinate their interests in the face of socio-political struggles. The search for emancipation and freedom of thought requires an effort to create other grammars, other types of economic organization, new imaginaries and affections, forms of cooperation, and collective work that are established independently of state and private capital, but, above all, that bring together plural groups and agendas under an anti-systemic, solidarity-based, and radically universalist principle.
In the times of legalized censorship, torture, and repression during the military dictatorships in Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s, several disruptive initiatives were created independently, and clandestinely, by artists. By adopting guerrilla art tactics these initiatives aimed to consolidate networks of solidarity and communication, but also to denounce and combat the violence of the regimes. As precedents, we would like to mention the action NO+ (No more) (Chile), a slogan meant to be completed by the citizens of Santiago de Chile articulating their specific demands during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. This action, initiated by the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), served as a tool to challenge and oppose the regime. It incorporated theatrical and artistic performances as strategies to intervene in everyday life, bridging the divide between artists and spectators. Another remarkable initiative is Tucumán Arde (Argentina), where, after the government closed sugar mills and farms in Tucumán, leading to widespread poverty and starvation, the Vanguard Artist's Group collaborated with the CGT of Rosario to develop a campaign that amplified isolated actions through guerrilla and techniques of mass communication.
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Other examples are the foundation of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. Its origins date back to 1971 in Santiago de Chile, when a project arose to promote the donation of artworks from artistic circles in the Americas and Europe to the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government to create a museum for the people of Chile. The belief and support of President Salvador Allende were essential, whereby his understanding of the historical proportion of the project enabled the necessary institutional conditions for the development of this grassroots museological venture. Another remarkable precedent was set by the boycott of the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1969 after the 1964 coup which established a dictatorship in Brazil. In the United States, during the heightened racial and class warfare of the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Arts Movement was created to institute spaces and means of production for the community of racialized artists at a time when there was practically no space for them in the mainstream. These historical initiatives confirm that even in unfavorable times it is possible to create autonomous spaces and practices.
Unlike the 60s, when the world was predominantly polarized by the Cold War, the ideological dispersion and the schismogenesis within leftist and progressive groups are more pronounced today. And so is German society at large, and its artistic and cultural sectors. However, this does not prevent us from believing that it is possible to organize the artistic class collectively in the name of fundamental universal agendas such as freedom of expression and Palestinian liberation. We see that many initiatives are already in the making internationally, and in Germany, too, such as the open call by Strike Germany to boycott the 2025 Berlinale, or the grassroots weekly People United Tribunals in Berlin. What is happening right now in Gaza is not an event that can be relativized or articulated with rhetorical mechanisms that reduce or obliterate the raw reality of the extermination of a people. When a cultural system accepts this, it assesses its deep dehumanization and implications with hegemonic power. We should understand that disobeying is also to learn that “it happened to them and won’t happen to us” is the syntax of division we inherit from neoliberal competition and class division. Closing with the words of Audre Lorde: “Our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality.” We hope these words may encourage us to decenter the individual and join among the disorderly agents who are affected (and those who are not) by these authoritarian austerity and censorship measures. And, above all, they may serve to enable us to continue to raise our voices against any genocide committed against any people anywhere.
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- Footnotes
[1] The Fanonian dialectical criticism of racism, colonialism and the selective humanism/universalism of the West has as its horizon the destruction of the ideological, political, economic, and racial signs that configures a hierarchy between whites and non-whites; between colonialist/imperialist societies and colonized societies; between the bourgeoisie and the poor and oppressed population. In this sense, the emancipation of peoples is achieved through violent revolutionary processes that aim to provoke the decomposition of the symbolic and material structures that guarantee the devices of racialization, exploitation and oppression of peoples, in order to finally establish a radical universalism/humanism which includes historically excluded and dehumanized populations. To understand this dialectic, see Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
[2] This concept is discussed in the book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Sara Ahmed borrows conditional hospitality from Derrida. Whiteness is produced as host, as that which is already in place or at home. To be welcomed is to be positioned as the one who is not at home. Conditional hospitality is when you are welcomed on condition that you give something back in return. The multicultural nation functions this way: the nation offers hospitality and even love to would-be citizens as long as they return this hospitality by integrating, or by identifying with the nation.
Image credits
Cover: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 1: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 2: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 3: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 4: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 5: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 6: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
fig. 7: Joshua Schwebel, From the Aesthetics of Administration, 2017, an open invitation to the employees of the Berlin Kulturverwaltung to make the artwork in my exhibition. © Joshua Schwebel
