On November 13, Haitian-American artist, writer, and curator Anaïs Duplan received an email from Essen’s Folkwang Museum pragmatically alerting him that his curatorial collaboration in the museum’s upcoming exhibition, We is Future – Visions of New Communities”1https://www.museum-folkwang.de/en/exhibition/we-future, had been rescinded. The “severe decision”2https://www.instagram.com/p/Czl3iUyuvoz/?img_index=2 was made in response to the fact that Duplan had, in the preceding days, uploaded a number of posts to his social media to the tune of Free Palestine.
Comparably tame on the spectrum of distressing content currently flying around the internet, particularly on social media, Duplan’s posts comprise thoughtfully curated slideshows with engaging prompts, such as “How will the world have changed once Palestine is free?” interspersed with news articles urging for medical aid for civilians in Gaza and documentation of peaceful marches calling for ceasefire.
Another slideshow cites Dr. Tema Okuns’ White Supremacy Culture, in which the American author alludes to the collective fear of open conflict. Duplan describes this as the “politeness” inherent to white supremacy which in turn manifests as passivity, silence, and censorship.3https://www.thc.texas.gov/public/upload/preserve/museums/files/White_Supremacy_Culture.pdf
A centre-right blog from neighbouring Bochum promptly and incorrectly described Duplan’s posts as “hate speech,”4https://www.ruhrbarone.de/museum-folkwang-beendet-zusammenarbeit-mit-kuratorin-wegen-antiisraelischer-hassposts/226706/ condemning Duplan’s assessment of Israel as an apartheid state and further implicating Duplan’s criticism of Israel as a statement against any and all Jewish organisations.
In a rampant string of disinformation across international media outlets, the hastily published conclusion demonstrates a dangerously reckless interpretation of newly passed legislation in Germany that has ruled the BDS5https://bdsmovement.net/ movement as unconstitutional.6https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-bds-israel-idUSL5N22T4OA
Since then, any and all boycotts against the Israeli government have been determined anti-semitic under law. The email references the legislation directly, citing an institutional obligation to uphold “the special responsibility of Germany and its commitment to Israel.”7https://www.instagram.com/p/Czl3iUyuvoz/?img_index=3
Known for his body of work around colonial subjugation and identity politics, like gender norms, queer theory, and minority mobilisation, Duplan’s curatorial contribution was meant to address the concept of Afrofuturism.
The self-defeating premise of ousting a practitioner known for his work around liberation because of his outspoken response during a time of crisis in the form of misperceived antisemitism embodies a kind of collective moral failure whose hypocrisy has been recently explored by Breitz.
Less than a handful of days earlier on the other side of the country, Breitz hosted We Still Still Still Still Need To Talk, an event staged last Friday that protested the “ongoing erosion of the German public sphere.” Breitz cites countless cultural events that have been subject to a new form of cancel culture, including symposia, performances, prizes, academic talks, and of course exhibitions — all canceled for reasons of “sensivity, safety,” or “timing”.
Breitz points out that despite the heavy censorship of progressive cultural events, supremacist and far-right exploits like neo-Nazi marches continue to materialise without a hitch; thus revealing a precarious double standard regarding the exercising of free speech, democracy, and a commitment to something in the form of freedom.
Promoted over social media, We Still Still Still Still Need To Talk lasted approximately four hours and comprised talks by twenty leftist Jewish and/or Israeli cultural professionals, including Ghayath Almadhoun, Lamis Ammar, Candice Breitz, Emily Dische-Becker, Esther Dischereit, Deborah Feldman, Iris Hefets, Ferat Koçak, Talya Lubinsky, Achan Malonda, Ben Miller, Emilia Roig, Josh Schwebel, Lili Sommerfeld, Eyal Weizman, and Udi Raz.
In Raz’s speech, she explains her she had recently been fired from her position as a guide at Berlin’s Jewish Museum for using the word “apartheid” during a tour. A Haifa-born, Jewish doctoral fellow at the Berlin Graduate School for Muslim Cultures and Societies, Raz researches the notion of Germany as a nation state and the “acute regulation of public attempts to regulate encounters between ‘Muslims’ and ‘Jews’.
Her work is inspired by local and global, anti- and decolonial, as well as queer liberation movements. She is a former scholarship holder of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and of the German Bundestag as well as a board member of the Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East.
In October, Raz was set to be interviewed by Die Zeit, a prominent German newspaper. However, publication of the interview was canceled because of Raz’s support of BDS and was instead published to The Left Berlin, an independent journalism project. The interview, titled We Are Not Enemies, explores the Jewish Voice for Peace.
Breitz has openly discussed her own Jewish heritage and how this detail has garnered extra harassment from internet trolls as of late. Insults like “Nazi,” “self-hating Jew,” and “Hamas lover” continue to propagate a good-versus-evil rationale that is void of nuance, and buttresses one historical narrative within many complex, coinciding experiences. This kind of binary partition of principles, which may be applied to one situation and not another, effectively justifies active discriminatory racism in its prevailing form.
S.L., an attendee of the protest, explained that “we [Germans] grew up with the guilt, even more when we have German grandparents (not in my case) and even worse when you have Nazi grandparents, which a lot of Germans have; Nazi soldiers, direct Nazi SS, SA, sometimes high ranking officers. They feel either extremely guilty or have a tendency to support the ‘strong,’ which in this case is USA and Israel.”
The past month has revealed a stark hypocrisy in terms of racist tolerance through multifarious and ongoing double standards, particularly in mainstream media’s response to the Palestine-Israel “conflict.” At the heart of this “conflict” lies an aggressive proliferation of othering, which, unlike racism, is both objective and measurable through the actual, verified operation of an apartheid regime.
The fact that occupied Palestine has been operating under Martial law for over seventy years seems to be eclipsed by an inseparability from the United States and Germany’s historic responsibilities, or “special relationships,” to Israel. As the eerie irony of Palestine’s apartheid state seems to be lost on a feigning premise of Western universalism, the incongruity of the situation presents nothing less than an unconscious bias.
Having grown up in apartheid South Africa, Breitz is a scholar of critical race theory: an interdisciplinary academic field that unpacks the continually growing legacy of racism and how it is woven into the fabric of institutional and societal infrastructure through rhetoric and law. She has been a professor at Braunschweig University of Art since 2007 and has guest-lectured at University of Florida College of the Arts, UDK Berlin, and Zentrum Paul Klee, to name a few.
Her current installation at Berlin’s newly opened Fotografiska Museum, Whiteface, is the product of a years-long archival project that comprises a compilation of found footage collected from news anchors, talk shows, influencers, and internet warriors — each touting escalatingly delusional exhortations that denounce the advent of ‘white privilege,’ and proceed to reject and/or delegitimise notions of ‘white fragility,’ ‘white rage,’ and ‘white guilt.’
The premise of whiteness is that it is so omnipresent and subtle that it is embedded into the fibre of civilisation like “smog in the air,” as described by African American psychologist Dr. Beverly Tatum.8Tatum, Beverly D. (1997). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race. New York: Basic Books.
Since June 2021 in the USA, twenty-one states have introduced bills that attempt to restrict teaching of critical race theory (CRT), further imposing limits on how race is discussed in the classroom. Teachers do not want to run the risk, and simply avoid the issue altogether, resulting in an outright erasure of CRT from the curriculum.
This attempt at neutrality is in fact a form of supremacist violence and further inseminates an avoidant environment that is all the more dangerous considering the scope of unregulated internet soundbites, which sustain as the readily available form of education.
Instead of portraying the clips directly, she personifies the voice of each speaker through a series of fictitious characters wearing the same white shirt, each one distinguished by a different platinum blond wig, each sporting the same vacant blue contact lenses; badges of whiteness in varied incarnations. Using her body as a vessel for the decontextualised soundbites, Breitz—or rather her alter egos—are projected onto a large screen.
Each character lip syncs the words fluently with emphatic gusto, not once breaking eye contact with the camera. When facing the primary projection, it is not possible to see who the original speaker is, however, if one spins around, the source footage can be see on a smaller, low mounted screen. In this way, it is impossible to view both speakers at once.
The majority of voices in the archive are American. When asked about whiteness in the American imagination, African American author Bell Hooks responded that whiteness, and more specifically white supremacy, “is not a white thing. It’s part of this culture. It’s part of how all of us have been taught to think about difference; who’s better, who’s inferior, who’s superior.”9https://media-studies.com/bell-hooks-intersectionality/
The archive demonstrates how the notion of silent, pervasive superiority and its resistance has led to a counter-movement that outright refuses the endurance of white supremacy and whiteness.
In turn, to say that representatives of supremacy denial are guilty or defensive is virtually insufficient, as the primary counter arguments include phrases like, “I will not ever apologise simply for being white,” bemoaning “white guilt indoctrination,” and finally asserting “we will not be collectively punished for the supposed sins of our ancestors.”
Though this last statement was spoken by an American, the physical impossibility of observing both screens at once feels like an acknowledgement from Breitz that regardless of the original speaker, these kinds of virulent rants reflect and become adopted by the entire society. While the American discussion tends to regard itself as parochial and inattentive to the international stage, “political discourse is profoundly influenced by American phenomena.”10https://www.telospress.com/the-politics-of-identity-politics-learning-from-a-german-discussion/ The virality of toxic ideology is as much in the hands of its proliferators as its initiators.
Further into the installation, a series of single-channel videos take an oblong portrait form like giant pocket devices. The screens ostensibly mimic and augment the cloistered sense of consuming media on a smartphone.
A particularly frightening line of dialogue includes numerous voices lamenting the fact that “the white establishment is actually the minority,” and is “going extinct,” going so far as to implore white people to “make more babies!” and adding that “our country was built on white pride and white civilisation.”
These arguments do not seek to rationalise or excuse whiteness and its supremacy, but simply regard it as defunct. In fact, they flip the script in a sadistic and victimised posture. To my surprise and awe, the Thesaurus lists whitewashing as a synonym of victimisation.11https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/victimization
It is at this point that the framework of Breitz’s archive becomes uncannily reminiscent of the current environment in Palestine and the biased formulation of national narratives. The biggest difference between the current “conflict” and any other is the central role that social media has played in waging the war on information, hugely leveraging the plasticity of narratives being shaped by cyberspace, soundbites, and the unfolding of historical documentation.
This current “war” distinguishes itself from any other genocide ever because it is being documented differently; more specifically, a large portion of documentation is happening predominantly with smartphones. As a result of a siege on information on the part of Israel, who deprives international press from entering Gaza, a large portion of the reporting coming out of the territory is coming not only from Palestinian journalists, but from Gazan social media influencers and even just regular civilians.
Before the age of social media, victors wrote history. Supremacists regulated the narrative. Free to delete atrocities, omit details, and outright falsify information, writers of history were storytellers, not data banks. The advent of social media means that these soundbites serve to function not only as narrative tools, but also as pieces of evidence; building blocks for a differentiated record of events.
As much as they may be used out of context to weaponise, for instance pulling outdated video footage from decades past and claiming it was taken yesterday, these isolated tokens of audio and video also become an abstract currency that may be passed down to enforce a system of checks and balances. This is categorically game-changing in the canon of oral history.
A shining example of this is the recently released video footage of Israeli hostages criticising Netanyahu and the Israeli government. While Western media outlets reported the release of the video by Hamas, not one news station shared the actual footage in order to “protect the privacy”12https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl2Tvyl9bXs&ab_channel=BBCNews of the hostages and their families. Meanwhile, the uncensored footage spread across social media like wildfire, uncut and unabridged.13https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzCA7FJMwnR/
Having been harvested from cyberspace, Breitz’s archive exposes the universality and pervasiveness of racist rhetoric, not only in the context of one country or ethnicity but from the most global basin of public and often toxic discourse: the World Wide Web.
Considering the internet as its own space or state, complete with barricades, vernaculars, and conventions, the Web may be the best place to confront another kind of segregation; that which occurs in the collective imagination of the global community and sequesters certain problems as specific to geographical zones, invariably imposing arbitrary responsibility on these places to blindly overcompensate: anti-semitism in Germany, black racism in America, apartheid in South Africa.
The danger here is: not only treating symptoms instead of cause, but also that these are universal considerations and universal problems. Eradication of destructive ideology is not a localised operation.
Instead of addressing the cause, municipal pushback materialises in the form of cancelation; not only of events or speech, but of whole identities, histories, and states. Instead of being mediated, conflict is misinterpreted as terror, and the individuals or groups who raise issues are blamed, stigmatised, and canceled.
To read stories that have been silenced in Germany, follow the Archive of Silence, a crowdsourced archive of censored experiences and voices.
Whiteface is on view through 4 December at Fotografiska Berlin
Oranienburger Str. 54
10117 Berlin, Germany
more information here
