Last month the investigative group Forensic Architecture pulled a show from the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery after a statement of solidarity with Palestine was removed.
“Forensic Architecture stands with Palestine,” read a statement in the group’s Cloud Studies exhibition. “We believe this liberation struggle is inseparable from other global struggles against racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, and settler-colonial violence and we acknowledge its particularly close entanglement with the Black liberation struggle around the world.”
The group (which has been nominated for a Turner Prize for its digital models of crime scenes) was immediately targeted by a Zionist organization called UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI), who claimed that the note was “incendiary and by its very nature one-sided.” UKLFI has been targeting the Palestine solidarity movement since 2012 and has direct connections to the Israeli government.
“The level of nastiness is really outrageous,” Forensic Architecture founding director Eyal Weizman told Mondoweiss. “And we understood that we have to confront this group, because we are in a relatively stronger position than other cultural institutions and artists that are targeted by pro-Israel lobbyists in the UK. And that we are going to fight that one. It takes some mobilization, organizing. It also takes good lawyers.”
Pro-Palestine activists protested in front of the Whitworth and 13,000 letters were sent to the gallery in support of Forensic Architecture. The pressure forced the University of Manchester to reverse its decision. The note was put back and Whitworth gallery Alistair Hudson said it was important for the exhibition “to remain open in full.”
Forensic Architecture’s Senior Researcher Samaneh Moafi said that decision to shut down the exhibition over the censorship was something of a work stoppage. “What we did was kind of like a strike and it created the space for these protests. What happened shows that there are ways to fight back. There are ways to stand up and I hope this is taken as example.”
Weizman drew a direct connection between current Palestine solidarity action and recent Black Lives Matter protests. “[The protests] that erupted just a year earlier following the murder of George Floyd have provide a certain template. Beyond those people who are die hard activists, people closer to the liberal mainstream realized that they have to take a position on this struggle against apartheid in Palestine. People realized that we’re facing an entangled struggle against racism, entangled historically and conceptually. Anti-racist action sometimes has a blind spot if it doesn’t include Palestine.”
A 2019 Mondoweiss piece by Hilary Aked explained how a group like the UKLFI operates. Just like anti-BDS groups in the United States, UKLFI is a “lawfare” organization that targets pro-Palestine groups and, just like anti-BDS groups in the United States, any information about its potential connection to the Israeli government is murky.
Aked uses the case of the 2011 Gaza flotilla attack as just one example of the possible relationship. In that case, there’s certainly a lot of smoke:
Co-founder Jonathan Turner claims that UKFLI played a critical role in scuppering the 2011 flotilla of ships seeking to reach Gaza. The organisation, he asserts, advised Greek coastal police through ‘a top Greek lawyer…grounds on which the ships could be arrested’.
Also working to obstruct the flotilla was Shurat HaDin, an Israeli law firm whose extremely close ties to the Israeli state were revealed in a leaked US embassy cable which said it ‘took direction’ from Mossad and Israel’s National Security Council on which cases to pursue.
The 2011 flotilla incident is one in which Shurat HaDin is known to have collaborated closely with the Israeli government, as scholar Orde Kittrie has documented. It therefore seems very likely that during its work on the flotilla case, UKLFI co-ordinated with both Shurat HaDin and the Israeli government.
Weizman believes groups like Forensic Architecture have a responsibility to confront injustice, rather than just supply commentary about it. “The art world is not outside of politics, he explained. “It’s not a space from which you reflect upon politics. It’s a site of political struggle. The Gallery is traversed by different vectors of forces, one needs to both navigate and intervene in that force field. Art and cultural production need to gain more agency to become sites that could affect and change, rather than just simply comment upon it. And that’s our ultimate aim.”
The incident has been covered quite well in the the fine art Press. Art Review (?Aug.23) gives some details – the victory isn’t all that complete, since (I understand) you are confronted on entry to the exhibition by a quite detailed and conspicuous statement from a Jewish group in the city of Manchester saying in effect and in strong language that the main exhibition is a pack of lies, making various pro-Israel statements and inviting visitors to photograph it and carry it round with them as they tour the exhibits. This is only just short of censorship. If you aren’t permitted to make a statement on a controversial matter without a rebuttal then and there in the same space you aren’t given a platform which you can use fully. The other side should put on their own show.
Apparently this is the second recent incident of the kind involving the same Gallery.
Could you please be clear about what happened, as opposed to who is outraged and how that outrage is being expressed?
What was being displayed in this show? Photographs? Architectural models? Films? Paintings? Of Palestine only, or were other places included?
What is Forensic Architecture? The article describes it as an “investigative group”, but what does that mean? Journalists? Something like Wikileaks? Are its investigations limited to Palestine, or are they global? It does say here that one of its past productions was “digital models of crime scenes”, but what does that even mean, and is that what this exhibit was?
The lead sentence says “a statement of solidarity with Palestine was removed”, but the article doesn’t say who removed the statement.
You show a tweet from The Guardian that refers to “Statement on ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestinians”, yet the statement that you quote in your second paragraph does not use the phrase “ethnic cleansing”. You show another tweet with a video of someone nailing a printed piece of paper to a wall, but the text on the paper appears to be quite a bit longer than the statement that you quote here. Did you omit part of the statement? What would be the point of not quoting the full statement that was the source of this controversy, unless you’re trying to hide something?
You tell us that Forensic Architecture was “targeted” by UK Lawyers for Israel. That sounds disturbing, but what was the nature of this targeting? The only thing you’re saying that these lawyers did was to claim that FA’s note was “incendiary and by its very nature one-sided.” Who cares? People say that about Mondoweiss all the time. If UKLFI made any demands, I’d certainly like to know about them, but since this article doesn’t mention any, that leads the reader to infer that UKLFI didn’t make any.