Liz Eastmond – 14 May, 2025

‘Radical left lunatics’ Trump calls previous recipients of Honors from the Kennedy Centre (the ‘nation’s cultural centre’). Trump has now taken control of the Centre.The ‘lunatics’ have included Dolly Parton, Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Astaire, Tina Turner…Perhaps my closing reference in my 2024 ‘Report’ to Waiheke’s proud tradition of ‘lunatics and activists’ was rather too flippant given the ever-increasing shifts away from freedom of speech towards ever more disturbing revelations of restrictions and cancellations in the arts globally.

‘And this is just the beginning’, ends a recent Guardian article (Charlotte Higgins, ‘Trump’s obsession with the arts is part of the authoritarian project ‘, 28 March, 2025.)

This year the 3rd of April saw Trump threatening to withhold federal funds from public schools that have diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. Around 600 foreign students’ visas in the US have been revoked courtesy of Government instructions to AI to track signs of pro-Palestinian sentiment/action. Federal grant cancellations have been imposed on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, resulting in more than 1,900 members sending an open letter to Americans with ‘a clear warning : the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated’.

However, this ‘Supplement’ s focus is on the visual culture component of this wider context. A number of US institutions including museums and galleries are affected. Reported on April 10th: ‘over a thousand grants from the Institute of Museum, and Library Services terminated.’ Since the cancellations in the visual arts noted in my April 2024 ‘Report’, many other individual projects in the US, too many to fully list, have taken place. So just a couple here: the removal of a pro-Palestine artwork from the Nevada-based Burning Man Festival and the ‘postponing’ of an exhibit of Islamic art at the Frick Pittsburgh museum.

I can also add that today, 6 May, online visual culture journal Hyperallergic notes that ‘The United States government is seeking proposals for the 2026 Venice Biennale that highlight ‘American values’ and ‘American exceptionalism’, while restricting DEI efforts.’

Given Aotearoa/New Zealand’s long-standing political, economic, social and cultural connections with America, it’s becoming clearer we should be more vigilant in our corner of the world…

Reacting to recent and current developments in the US, a new digital resource ‘National Coalition against Censorship’ has been developed. It catalogues incidents relating to Palestine/Israel.

In the sphere of film, it’s well-known that the Oscar-winning Palestine/Israel co-production documentary ‘No Other Land‘, covering the Israeli destruction of the villages in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank prior to October 7, 2023, has not, as yet, May 2025, found a US distributor. Coinciding with its recent six screenings in April at Waiheke’s local community cinema, a co-director, Palestinian Hamdan Ballal was attacked outside his home in the village of Susya by Israeli settlers, injured, and detained by the IDF, while, in a weird collision of current events, the other Palestinian co-director, Basel Adra, addressed the UN on the film and on the history of the Israeli destruction campaign, in New York. Last week the film was cancelled at a Melbourne cinema.

In Europe, the upcoming new German culture senator, Joe Chialo, proposed last year a funding clause ‘requesting artists who receive public support to commit themselves to anti-semitism, ‘as defined in the INHRA’ (Institute of Holocaust Remembrance Alliance). Many understand the definition of anti-semitism in this document to be allied with something quite other: with criticism of the policies of the State of Israel’s Government. Therein of course lies the danger for those, including many Jewish people, of publicly opposing that state’s current genocide of the Palestinians.

‘Why Can’t I Speak, Germany?’ asked Jewish-American artist Nan Goldin, referring to the German state’s conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism in a ‘searing’ speech, advocating for Palestine, at the opening of her retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerei, Berlin in November last year.

I may be wrong, but I tend to think Waiheke’s August 2023 ‘State of Palestine’ exhibit might be harder to stage now. Malcolm Evans’s appropriately scathing cartoons critical of the Israeli Government’s policies in its long-standing apartheid, settler-colonial state, might well attract a negative reaction from, say, our Winston Peters’ supporters. New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Peters called for a ‘War on Woke’ in his recent State of the Nation speech in Otautahi Christchurch. He certainly referred to the pro-Palestinian protestors present as ‘fascists’ (and, time-travelling back to 1969, in need of a haircut).

In my April 2024 piece I had missed the dropping of major Australian artist Mike Parr from Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Anna Schwarz had described Parr as ‘the greatest artist this country has ever and perhaps will ever produce.’ Nevertheless, this acclaimed performance artist, who had represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, became subject to critiques of anti-semitism as a result of his contribution to the group show ‘Sunset Claws’. This involved expressive wall text paintings which included references to Israel and Palestine (some drawn from an article in the London Review of Books). After showing with Anna Schwarz for 36 years, Parr was no longer welcome.

In recent time other concerning arts-related events have taken place in Australia. Most readers will be familiar with the extraordinary cancellation, 6 days after its announcement, of Lebanese-Australian Khaled Sabsabi’s selection to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, the ‘Olympics’ of the art world. This was allegedly due to part of a 2007 video installation including footage of Lebanese cleric, politician and Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah (recently assassinated by Israel). Subsequently an exhibition of this artist’s work, a component of the show Stolon Press: Flat Earth, at MUMA, Monash University, Melbourne, was cancelled, as the exhibit as a whole was subject to ‘indefinite postponement.’

As I update this essay 6 May, I read students at Monash Art, Design, Architecture plan an ‘event’ 8 May. Titled ‘Abandoned Theatre’, the event ‘marks our collective stance against the Vice-Chancellor’s decision to postpone Flat Earth and expresses our unwavering solidarity with the artists Khaled Sabsabi, Elisa Taber, Simryn Gill, and Tom Melick, whose works were to be exhibited.’ Their statement continues : ‘We believe that the decision to postpone the exhibition reflects broader structures of systemic racism and contributes to the erosion of academic and artistic freedom…This moment cannot be separated from global efforts to suppress critical discourse particularly when dominant narratives and marginalised voices are raised.’

At Canberra’s National Art Gallery a large tapestry in the exhibit Te Paepae Aora’i - ‘Where the Gods Cannot be Fooled’ - was subjected (2024) to censorship. This group show was curated by the Aotearoa/New Zealand founder of the Pacific Indigenous Art collective SaVAge K’lub. The work included a number of flags, including the Aboriginal flag and the West Papua flag, along with Pacific peoples’ symbols and social justice slogans. Some flags were censored. Which? No surprises, the Palestinian ones.

The organisers were told these constituted a ‘high level’ security risk. The options offered were: remove the whole work (with its contributions from many different artists and regions), or cover the Palestinian flags. The latter option was reluctantly chosen. This reminds me of the Palestinians’ predicament after the June 1967 Six-Day War (after which US - Israeli strategic relations were bolstered). Palestinians were prohibited from flying the Palestinian flag.

That’s why an alternative symbol, the cut melon slice, was found (and frequently used now), its red, black, white and green colours those of the Palestine flag. Extraordinary however, that this cancellation was enforced in 2024, in Australia. But different rules from the norm can apply to the Israel/Palestine ‘conflict’. I wonder why? A rhetorical question, of course. Might this have to do with the sensitivities of Zionist entities wherever Palestinian flags are displayed, or with Zionist or Christian Zionist entities who may possibly be among the donors to institutions like universities and galleries? With many ‘western’ countries’ and much of their mainstream media embedded in a pro-Israel bias? Settler-colonial ideology enduring in the spaces of prestigious institutions? Who knows?

Of particular interest and concern to me, having followed the Aotearoa/New Zealand collective et al.’s work since the 1980s, was the recent impact of censorship on parts of their 20 - year self-constructed survey exhibition ‘epochal’, at MUMA, Monash University, Melbourne (October - December 2024). This now provides a prescient event in relation to the current ‘postponement’ of Flat Earth at MUMA. Involving film, many clusters of installations, text, and sound, the integrity of ‘epochal’, this major exhibit, was compromised. Like Mike Parr, the collective et al. represented their country at the Venice Biennale (2005). Unlike Parr’s dramatic, in-your-face, and video-d performance painting of wall texts, the ‘offensive’ components of et al.’s exhibit were small in number among many other references to a variety of other ‘epochal’ issues, including, eg. texts relating to the recent Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care (in Aotearoa New Zealand). They were also small in scale, and in fact were changes not obvious to the general viewer - including myself! - at the opening. This in itself is surely indicative of an extremely over-zealous brand of policing. None were texts constructed by the artists themselves.

What were they? One text, (replicated from a published source) on Gush Emunim, an extremist Zionist messianic movement, was deleted. The artists had asked Perplexity, the AI tool, to respond to that text (as part of the exhibition). The response included the following terms: ‘Illegal Occupation’, ‘Palestine’, Palestinians, ‘occupied Palestinian territories is illegal’ (sic), ‘Israeli settlements’, etc. These AI terms were redacted by MUMA and replaced by punctuation dashes. Oh dear. Interestingly, the artists opted to use the redactions as a document of censorship and requested that this censorship was indicated by a sign displayed during the duration of the exhibition. Neither MUMA nor Monash complied with this, thereby refusing to be held accountable for the changing or prohibition of speech within the exhibition. The institution was, then, arguably guilty of censorship.

Next? This concerns a play by acclaimed British playwright Caryl Churchill (Top Girls etc.): Seven Jewish Children, a play for Gaza (2009). The play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, by a Jewish cast and director, and has this year been staged in film form in London, also by a Jewish director. In the ‘epochal’ exhibit, this play was included in audio format. Its sound was turned down so as to be inaudible during the opening event. For the later duration of the exhibition the sound was lowered. The collective did not agree to either alteration. An object, a jar, requesting donations for medical aid to Palestinians, (as stipulated by the playwright in lieu of copyright fees), was removed. The accompanying exhibition room sheet omitted to mention this part of the exhibition and the playwright’s name. Et al. had, as noted in my ‘Report‘, the April 2024 part of this essay, incorporated this play back in 2010 in an installation in Khartoum Place, Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, with no ‘offence’ reported. Despite numerous requests by the artists and arts professionals to the Gallery, and to the university’s Vice-Chancellor, to provide a written statement explaining these deletions, alterations and omissions, this has not eventuated.

One ‘brighter’ note in contrast to the concerning catalogue of cancellations and restrictions above, has been work by major Maori artist Emily Karaka (Ngati tai ki Tamaki, Ngati Hine, Ngapuhi) at last year’s Sharjah Art Foundation Triennale (the United Arab Emirates). Frieze art journal reviewer Rahel Aima has this as ‘the artist’s first major survey’, (despite this acclaimed artist’s lengthy career), with ‘throughout Karaka (drawing) links between iwi rights and global indigenous struggles…in her new work Parallel Process Palestinian Horizon (2024), the slings and arrows of settler colonialism are more overtly referenced with Israeli and Palestinian flags and the slogan ‘the promised land’.

On my first, chance, sighting a reproduction of that work - knowing neither title nor context - I was immediately reminded of that iconic work The Promised Land, by Colin McCahon (1948) - not only from the use of the text component, but in the echo of the pictorial device of that earlier painting’s mound shape with its then ‘positive’ reference, to that ‘new’ Israel-named land and to the Pakeha notion of the ‘invention of New Zealand’. Karaka’s 2025 painting pointedly mourned that catastrophic event for the Palestinians: that brutal founding of the state of Israel, clearly identifying it with Aotearoa’s own brutal history of settler colonialism. This work in Karaka’s ‘Ka Awatea, A New Dawn’, at Sharjah, was not, unsurprisingly, subject to cancellation.

As I checked details in an earlier version of this essay - events are speeding by and where to draw the line shifts daily - my last ‘today’ was April 30, 2025. On that day, in this ‘Supplement‘ to my ‘Report‘ of a year ago, I read of the 16 April killing of Palestinian photo-journalist Fatima Hassouna alongside 10 members of her family, by an Israeli missile attack on their apartment building in Gaza. Hassouna’s documentation of the destruction in Gaza and Palestinians’ daily lives (and deaths) is the theme of Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s debut film then screening at a French independent film festival running parallel to Cannes, its title: ‘Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk’. The Guardian‘s headline on this Gaza photojournalist ‘killed by Israeli airstrike’ quotes Hassouna’s recent words on social media: ‘If I die, I want a loud death’.

Perhaps now that the art world generally is a lot more ‘woke’ regarding the increasingly concerning situation regarding the shutting down of freedom of speech and the elimination of so much creative practice - now particularly highlighted with Sabsabi’s cancellation, and Hassouna’s death - let’s hope a louder, more concerted resistance movement will gain traction…

Liz Eastmond, 30 April 2025/ 6 May 2025

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