These types of articles are multiplying:
'More Than 1,000 Artists Boycott Bristol’s Arnolfini Center Amid Palestine Censorship Controversy'
"Their actions are a terrible mistake, and a cowardly move toward a British arts ecology that has no genuine space for discussion, debate or dissent.
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This is not the Arnolfini I know.
We need an explanation...
Just last year I was part of the Bristol Palestine Film Festival there with Ken Loach and many great activists... And the event took place at Arnolfini, the international art centre of Bristol.
The event was titled 'Boycott', how ironic...
'Boycott': film + discussion at the Bristol Palestine Film Festival, Dec. 2022
Something must have turned wrong...
As the article reports, now:
More than 1,000 artists across the cultural field—including Ben Rivers, Brian Eno, Adham Faramawy, and Tai Shani—have signed a new open letter that accuses Bristol’s Arnolfini International Centre for Contemporary Arts of “censorship of Palestinian culture,” after the institution canceled two events that were part of the city’s Palestine Film Festival.
The signatories vow to no longer work with the Arnolfini or engage with its events and urge their peers in the field to join the boycott.
In November, the Arnolfini cancelled a screening of Farha (2021), a coming-of-age story set during the Nakba, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes during and after the 1948 Palestine war, by Jordanian-Palestinian director Darin J. Sallam.
The screening was set to be followed by a Q&A with the Palestinian writer and doctor Ghada Karmi. The center was also scheduled to host a poetry reading headlined by the rapper and activist Lowkey.
The screening of Farha will now be hosted at the cinema & arts charity Watershed, while the poetry event will take place at the department store and arts hub Sparks Bristol.
In Bristol, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, Massive Attack’s Robert del Naja, writers Alice Oswald, Nikesh Shukla, Shon Faye, Travis Alabanza and Rachel Holmes are among many artists who have written a letter accusing the iconic Arnolfini International Centre for Contemporary Arts of “censorship of Palestinian culture”.
As listed here: https://artistsforpalestine.org.uk/category/all/
The artists vow to take collective action and urge other artists and audiences to join them, saying:
“We must, reluctantly, refuse cooperation with the arts centre and will not participate in any of its events until Arnolfini publicly commits to consistently uphold freedom of expression, with no exception for Palestine, and genuinely engages with Bristol’s arts community to rectify the harm it has caused”.
They added:
“We want to make it clear that we stand fully behind workers at Arnolfini who’ve had no say in this. Our message is addressed to those in the management who made this damaging decision; the signatories of this letter expect better integrity, transparency and cultural leadership from Arnolfini.”
The letter continues: “Until the Arnolfini leadership publicly commits to consistently uphold freedom of expression, with no exception for Palestine, and genuinely engages with Bristol’s arts community to rectify the harm it has caused, we must, reluctantly, refuse cooperation with the arts center and will not participate in any of its events.”
Finally, Bristol artist and composer Nik Rawlings, who was in talks with the gallery to undertake a residency at Arnolfini, announced that they are no longer willing to do so.
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I hope we get to hear what really happened soon for these events to be cancelled.
We need to work with the venue for this to never happen again.
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Melissa Chemam
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