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CONVERSATIONS
Do Cultural Institutions Repair or Reproduce Violence?
A conversation with Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Edwin Nasr, Rijin Sahakian, Zoé Samudzi, Maboula Soumahoro and Sanjukta Sunderason.
Edwin Nasr: In this round-table discussion, moderated by Sanjukta Sunderason, four prominent thinkers and artists—Maboula Soumahoro, Rijin Sahakian, Zoé Samudzi, and Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter—share their thoughts on the mediation of images and artworks featuring enslaved, colonized, and incarcerated peoples in museums, archives, and other publicly-accessible repositories, and contemplate whether images and artworks which record scenes of subjection can be repurposed for reparative purposes, or are doomed to reproduce the violence through which they came to exist in the first place. Considered alongside Soumahoro’s long-standing contributions to the French committee on the history of slavery and its mediation to future generations, Sahakian’s recent campaign to protect the right to dignity of incarcerated Iraqis in the context of the 12th Berlin Biennale, Baxter’s carceral experience and her denouncing of institutional failures pertaining to the dissemination of sexually explicit photographs of a Black child, and Samudzi’s visual studies curriculum and problematization of passive viewership (particularly by white people), the discussion equips us with generative modalities through which to render cultural institutions accountable.
Sanjukta Sunderason: I am a historian working with questions of modernist aesthetics and socialist thought in the context of twentieth century decolonization. Images of hunger, displacement, dismemberment – and the registers those images try to evoke in good or bad faith – continue to feature in conversations around realism and abstraction in art discourses. The first question that comes to mind here is, what do museums do with these images – and the questions they pose? How do such images operate, and how do we moderate their operation?
Maboula Soumahoro: These questions prompt reflection on the role of museums. And as a layperson on the subject of museums, a number of general questions come to mind regarding the operation of such institutions, particularly in the context of colonial legacies. Questions such as: What are the fundamental problems concerning the way museums operate and have operated? And what could they do to overcome these problems, what could they become, and how could they be transformed? This leads us to the central question of what museums are for? Are they for celebrating past glories with the aim of perpetuating the systems that begat those glories? Or are they for acknowledging and reflecting upon the problems inherent in those systems? Are they amenable to the idea of reappropriation, reinvention, and to the reimagination of what a museum could be or do? Are they solely for the cataloguing and presentation of past horrors? Or are they for preserving the records of those horrors, but also for championing the corresponding history of resistance and presenting a counter-narrative to the traditional displays of past glories?
I’m reminded of the South African collective Chimurenga, and what they did with their Library project in Paris, in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and the Bibliothèque publique d’information. Chimurenga noticed that the two institutions—Centre Pompidou and the public library—did not communicate with each other, even though they were located in the same building. They attracted very different audiences, with that of the library dwarfing Centre Pompidou’s. So they decided to intervene in the library, questioning and rendering visible their interrogation of its organization, its collection of books and other materials, and its omissions. The analysis of museum operations may actually be a waste of time; the more urgent matter is arguably their transformation, the determination of what they could be, or what we want them to be.
Sanjukta Sunderason: The necessity of transformative action, you mean? Incidentally, the library intervention calls to mind the concept of the para-museum, the museum as a medium. I think there’s a question here of who occupies the role of protagonist in a museum. Rijin, perhaps you could tell us a bit about your work and offer your thoughts on who you consider to be the museum’s protagonists.
Rijin Sahakian: My work to date has focused on collaboration and engagement with Iraqi artists and the recent history of Iraq’s capital in particular. I initiated a project in Baghdad in the ongoing aftermath of the Iraq wars. It ran from 2011 to 2015, aimed at supporting artists and art students who came primarily from the Baghdad College of Art and the Art Institute. My work is concerned with how Iraqi life is mediated through the relationship of the United States government and its main coalition partners in Iraq, and the centering of Baghdad in the scheme of global violence. Also, how this emerges with respect to psychological operations and its manifestation in the arts and what is generally understoodThe exhibitions, museums and proposals I’ve have worked with have almost become case studies of global perceptions of Iraq and Iraqi life, and reflections of its devaluation through the two Gulf wars. The incident at the Berlin Biennale[1] was the most recent visible example of this devaluation.
Sanjukta Sunderason: Regarding the Berlin Biennale, I, too, was surprised to find that we were still being forced to repeat arguments that Susan Sontag made over 50 years ago, being forced to remind people that when you fail to identify those represented in an artwork by name, you become part of the very project that instigates or generates and sustains violence. While you were speaking, Rijin, I was also thinking about the question of space and agency that we discussed with Maboula. And in the context of Iraq and the Berlin Biennale, is the original site of conflict and ensuing displacement the historical agent? Or is the historical agent the site that puts that violence on display? Is the body that was subjected to violence the historical agent, or is it the photographer, the curator, or the museum? I’d say there’s an inherent tension in these works, which, transposed in the context of global geopolitical dynamics, becomes doubly marked by the politics of difference and alienation because it involves racial violence.
A protest during a private VIP party at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in October 2019. Courtesy Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic.
Activists from the MoMA Divest movement protesting during a closing reception for the Theater of Operations exhibition on March 1, 2020. Courtesy Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic.
Rijin Sahakian: I think they’re inextricably entangled. There was a major group exhibition at MoMA PS1 in 2019 titled Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, which I was involved in. And on the day of the opening, it came to light that the chairman of the museum, Leon Black, owned a conglomerate that had acquired the company formerly known as Blackwater (a private US military company, renamed Academi in 2011), and also owned a host of other mercenary groups that had operated in Iraq and globally for years. As you’d expect, several people were keen to voice their opposition to this, and to use the exhibition as a medium of protest. On the other side of the issue were the institution and the exhibition’s curators, who supported the board’s position and did not like the idea of a protest. A peaceful protest was mounted on the closing day of the exhibition all the same, in the presence of legal observers, and the museum responded by calling the police on the protesters. The parallels between this and the treatment of Iraqis and so many others of “suspicious origin” by the Department of Homeland Security were hard to miss, as was the idea of the Iraqi as a subject to be silenced. This was essentially the criminalization of any form of Iraqi agency at the museum, a parallel to the actual Gulf Wars the show claimed to be centered on. Three years later, we have the incident at the Berlin Biennale, and an exhibition claiming to be centered on repair, again through the use of violence against those who the curator has determined require “repair” through force. Another institution backing the denial of Iraqi agency by replicating the same rhetoric used in the Iraq Wars. Not only do we know what is “good” for them (the occupied), but the only way for that hierarchy of control to be established is through the experience of, the viewing of extreme force. In both exhibitions, there was an attempt not only to silence Iraqi voices of protest, even going so far as to erase the work (taking down Ali Yass’s works from gallery walls, and in Berlin, refusing to the point that no Iraqi artists remained in the show, the only Iraqis left being those who had not consented to being exhibited at all), but to respond with accusations that those Iraqis did not understand how exhibitions “work,” that the protests were out of “emotion,” that they were, in fact, the source of violence. All of these accusations point to the victory of coalition forces and psyops in Iraq over the past 30 years in a way that attempts to extinguish solidarity or recognition of Iraqi people’s right to protest or be treated as equals when they do. We all recall the widely reported protests, rows and soul-searching that took place at Documenta 15. Was such and such work antisemitic or not? No such soul-searching by MoMA or the Berlin Biennale. Iraqis are denied the kind of recognition necessary for other artists or publics to locate solidarity. Just as authorship belongs to more than one party, culpability lies in the hands of many.
Sanjukta Sunderason: That also touches on the question of what museums are for, and who operates as their agents after a show. I’d like to return to Maboula’s point about the need for action. When action ensues at MoMA, the police are called in; and at the documenta, a mural is taken down. So, action in one form or another appears to be the necessary mode of contestation, because what is being opposed is a form of violence. But what does it mean to oppose or intervene in violence, whether physical or epistemic? How far will you take the political act? And I think these questions also apply to curation, to acting politically as an artist or curator within an institutional space. Mary, your thoughts?
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: I’m a multidisciplinary artist, activist and educator based in Philadelphia. My experience with going up against these structures often entails the pursuit of institutional accountability. My project revolves around the discovery of sexually explicit photographs of a prepubescent Black child on the website of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts last year. The pictures had been taken by famed white American artist Thomas Eakins in 1882. I began reimagining the photographs, recreating them as artwork, restoring the dignity of the violated, and producing something that people could actually look at, engage with, and enter into dialogue with the museum around their culpability in perpetuating what I feel is adultification bias, whereby Black girls as young as five are sexualized and criminalized as adults by society at large. The museum deleted the photographs, which was great, but they should have never been there in the first place. They wanted to delete them without discussion. Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten had already gone to great lengths to explain why these photographs were problematic. And, prompted by her engagement with this particular photograph, Hartman had published an entire book on agency and young Black women as far back as 2019, titled Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. So why in 2021 were these sexually violent photographs still accessible to the general public?
I came to them with all these questions and wrote an op-ed about it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a public outing of the Academy’s complicity in harboring these archives of violence. They put out a statement the very next day, but without formally apologizing for preserving and posting these images, without denouncing Thomas Eakins for his predatory legacy, which is well documented and includes the molestation of his niece and numerous accusations of inappropriate behavior and sexual misconduct, which the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts held against him in the 1890s, forcing him to resign. And that was it, aside from a closed-door engagement session with their students. No dialogue with the Black community and no apology. They did hire a Black president, their first in 150 years, so I guess they took at least one performative action.
Engaging with museums hasn’t advanced my fight for accountability, but it has helped me find allies in my community. These museums were built on foundations of blood and bones, and it’s going to take a lot of effort by a lot of people to cleanse these archives by returning their contents to the communities to whom they belong, to the conquered peoples from whom they were stolen. I began a repatriation petition that was signed by over 400 people in the art world, including museum directors such as Kate Fowle, Director of MoMA PS1, and the Guerrilla Girls. To no avail: the photographs have not been repatriated, and the museum hasn’t made a formal apology or done anything restorative. The petition also requested they commit to investing in the arts and cultural production of Black girls and women in the city of Philadelphia. But all institutions such as this do is subject you to violence, co-opt your language, and perform repentance.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Consecration to Mary, 2021, installation view.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, Consecration to Mary, 2021. The artist’s reinterpretations provide a counter narrative where she insert her own image in an effort to help shield the child from his predatory gaze.
Sanjukta Sunderason: Thanks so much for broaching the subject of apology and performative actions, which include the hiring of Black curators as cover without actually addressing structural problems, and the extension of invitations to Black speakers to participate in panel discussions. What do such panels achieve? Which traumas—methodological or epistemological—are the Black panelists supposed to represent and narrate once again? What would an apology look like in practice, and what would follow from this? And in the context of a museum and curatorial practice, how does one navigate the unequal resources assigned to different, say, exhibitions? What does it mean to go up against the very foundations on which these structures were built?
Somewhere between concept and exhibition, something is lost, the violence the exhibition was meant to address is sanitized to spare a particular type of museum visitor from embarrassment. And the politics of that sanitization is a major part of the problem, don’t you think? Zoé, your thoughts?
Zoé Samudzi: So, I’m a sociologist who unexpectedly ended up teaching at an art institution, which has been an interesting site of intervention for these conversations, as I work with artists who will be showing in these museums and institutions, and who are currently being socialized into the practices of creation and exhibition. A lot of my classes have to do with the politics of the gaze. One is called Looking at Violence, which is about atrocity images in relation to the development of the technology of photography. It specifically critiques American geopolitics and American visual politics, but covers a broad spectrum of documented events, from the earliest known humanitarian campaigns such as that of Alice Seeley Harris in the Congo and the efforts to bring survivors to the United States following the Ottoman genocide of Armenians to the phenomenon of the Vietnam conflict as a television war. We’ve just had a week of discussions on the Iraq war, during which we talked about Paul Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance and his concept of picnolepsy, in which an epileptic state of consciousness yields gaps in perception followed by the seamless integration of the moments before and after said gaps. I remember the incredibly traumatic and horrible escalation of events leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan, followed by the same for Iraq, and here we are today and it’s as if nothing happened, while at the same time everything’s happened. Consequently, my students often talk about how difficult it has become for them to be photographers. I don’t think this is a bad thing: if you’re going to make good photographic work, you ought to be haunted by the history of photography, the ontology of photography and the historical violence committed with it, as well as your capacity to perpetuate this violence. And it calls to mind Sontag’s book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, and Kimberly Juanita Brown writing in response to and pushing past Sontag’s humanist assumptions regarding the humanitarian image as existing to reify the effect of distance between the subject-object—never a person—and the consumer of the image.
For museums, the image appears to function as a means by which violence is specialized. Rijin already mentioned MoMA’s board of directors and their entanglements in military technology and mercenaries. This was followed by Kanders-gate at the Whitney, with the revelation that a museum board member was also the head of a weapons manufacturing company that supplies the NYPD and military units responsible for committing imperial atrocities across the world. Incidents like these have intensified our sense of frustration, to the point where we now demand the decolonization of everything, but to no avail.
You have to think about the museum through this lens of the ontology of the space of the museum and its archive. And to Mary’s point, pose the question of the history of the museum’s creation? I’m reminded of Ariella Azoulay’s statement in Guernica about the impossibility of decolonizing the museum without decolonizing the world, with which I couldn’t agree more. I think we’ll continue to have these critical moments of disruption, but I’m becoming increasingly doubtful of the possibility of transforming, even for a second, the museum’s imperial role and existence as the holder of all of these plundered life-worlds that are—as Azoulay puts it rather aptly—represented by objects and artefacts. And we also read Tony Bennett’s essay about the exhibitionary complex, and talked about the coevolution of the institutions of the museum and the prison, between which one can draw not-so-subtle analogies, including one regarding carcerality.
Protesters in May 2019 demanding that Warren B. Kanders be removed from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He resigned on Thursday. Credit: Jeenah Moon/ The New York Times
Sanjukta Sunderason: Certainly.
Zoé Samudzi: In which the museum, the gallery space, the exhibition space in its formation as a white wall does not serve an entirely different function to that of the prison. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this in the context of Dutch history—by virtue of my residency with Pressing Matter—and going through the Dutch archives to see what it contains on the country’s colonial history. The Dutch and the Germans don’t seem to know much about their respective countries in relation to European colonialism. My dissertation is on the German genocide in Namibia, but I’m also researching settler colonialism in Southern Africa—where we have the Dutch—and Angola and Mozambique, where we have the Portuguese, and, as a Zimbabwean, of course my eyes are always on the British.
I have so many questions about this idea of decolonization, repair and care, especially in the framing of the Berlin Biennale, and about the notion of offering a gesture of repair on someone else’s behalf. For when this gesture is refused—because it’s almost always a horrible one—you’re told you haven’t understood the way in which this olive branch of care and repair is being extended.
Sanjukta Sunderason: That ties in neatly with what Maboula began with: the need to act, the nature of the action, and necessity of talking about it.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: Yes to everything Zoé just said. Some of it calls to mind Nicole Fleetwood’s arguments in Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, specifically her thoughts on the carceral state and identification of the simultaneous development of penitentiaries and museums. Museums, she states, are the keepers of culture, institutions for the perpetuation of norms, and prisons are where you’re placed when you violate those norms.
Zoé Samudzi: I actually discovered Tony Bennett on reading the exhibition catalogue for Marking Time. And I really appreciate the fact that Fleetwood doesn’t pretend there’s nothing wrong with exhibiting these carceral aesthetics in museums, as prisons are implicated in this manipulation of space and time, for instance as they do the time incarcerated people are robbed of in the process of incarceration and dehumanization.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: Time as punishment.
Zoé Samudzi: And regarding the manipulation of space, there’s the rigidity of its use as well as the very specific ways that one is permitted to observe art within it. One can’t help but think of the museum in the same context as the prison, which is itself the context of abolitionism.
Sanjukta Sunderason: There’s a certain responsibility that comes with discussing these issues in a classroom. Because students are keenly aware of said issues and are emotionally drawn to the notion of the decolonial, which is a noble cause both morally and ethically. But once you start delving into history, you realize we’re still entangled in violence. And apologies might not suffice.
Zoé Samudzi: And how do you apologize for a violence that’s ongoing?
Sanjukta Sunderason: And to whom? And with reference to portraiture and the larger context that Edwin conceptualized for this discussion, who, then, is the face and body that bears the representational burden of my apology? When I joined the University of Amsterdam two years ago, I kept hearing words like apology and decolonize. And I had to tell my students: “Forget decolonizing anything; let’s first do the work.”
Maboula Soumahoro: If I may add something to that, it also has to do with the ignorance of colonialism and coloniality. It’s one thing to parrot statements like “Let’s decolonize this” or “Yes to reparations,” but I think we need to be clearer about what needs to be repaired and what has been or is affected by colonialism. Otherwise, we can’t work towards a solution. We can’t repair anything if we don’t know what it is we are repairing. And I think what Zoé said about the importance of the chronology of ongoing events and the blurring of those chronological borders remains crucial. Thus, a fundamental question is whether colonialism actually ever ended. As Saidiya Hartman’s work prompts us to consider: What are the present-day legacies of slavery and colonialism? If we’re not clear about the nuances and intricacies of the involvement of those western European nations, each of which is defined by a unique set of characteristics, then we have no way to understand the present. And if we don’t have that, we can’t decolonize nor repair anything.
Sanjukta Sunderason: It seems intellectually lazy, not to mention political regression.
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter: Of course, it is, but I think there’s also a political dimension to that laziness, in that it is organized. You don’t have to address the legacies of slavery and colonialism if your nation, or the one in which you find yourself, has not clearly positioned itself within that global history. The accepted narrative omits your role in history.
Zoé Samudzi: It’s a form of epistemicide. Colonialism isn’t just about plundering other people’s resources. In our first week of class, we discussed Azoulay’s essay on the origins of photography, which she locates not in the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839, but in 1492. And we have to understand that the politics of technology coincided with a sort of imperial rupture, and with the Enlightenment-era assertion that one has the power to see and therefore to destroy.
Sanjukta Sunderason: And that assertion and definition of the perpetrator and the violated happens conterminously, often in invisible ways. This is when the boundaries of the subject-object are so very consciously blurred, and when aesthetics forcibly tries to flatten power.
Zoé Samudzi: And that’s fascism, right? That’s what Walter Benjamin was talking about. Fascist aesthetics as the exacerbation of politics as usual, such that property relations aren’t transformed, but the masses are offered freedom of self-expression. And self-expression in its purest and strongest form manifests itself through war.
Sanjukta Sunderason: Indeed.
Rijin Sahakian: We saw a reflection of this in the events at Abu Ghraib, which introduced the selfie to a mass audience through the spectacle of imprisonment, war, and torture as a kind of enjoyable, everyday documentation of faraway exploits sanctioned through war. It continues a relationship of grotesque warning and sharing in torture, murder, as culture, going back in the US to lynching postcards. We saw entire populations made literally “invisible” with hoods placed on their heads, and destroyed on camera, which shaped the way news about the invasion and related events was reported and provided fodder for the information wars and so much that many assume began in the wake of Trump’s presidency but were actually established through video in 1991 and in other mediums long prior. The Abu Ghraib images mainstreamed for a new generation the portrayal of ordinary people as powerful. Releasing those images was, therefore, always going to be a safe way to demonstrate American dominance and forestall a public outcry, because the publication of said images was meant to establish not American, but Iraqi guilt and brutality, placing the non-Iraqi public in a position of dominance over those bodies. It was the establishment of a new power dynamic and structure that would henceforth be available to everyone. We see this in the relationship to the camera (phone), screen, keyboard.
We too see the replication of this very idea by museums, this reproduction of dehumanizing images without attempt at repair or decolonization. They’re images without context or mediation, only sexual and physical violence without consent. And so it was with the installation at the Berlin Biennale, a fantasy for the benefit of those who took the pictures and those who enjoyed seeing them. Thus, without examination, the idea of mass guilt is replayed as one for Iraqis to bear. Within this event, and far from reality, they are positioned as guilty of being unable to speak, to consent, to fight back, to protect themselves, even to live with agency outside the image. Berlin was so adamant about this refusal to accept that laws of consent and rape/torture extend to Iraqis, they accepted that the only remaining Iraqis in the exhibition were not the Iraqi artists who had shared works, each of which, in painting and in video, featured their own male youth in acts of agency and community, but the naked, tortured, and contorted bodies of those held illegally and without cause at Abu Ghraib.
Sanjukta Sunderason: Circling back to the issue of what the museum can do, I think the one thing we’ve each highlighted is the necessity for museums to give serious thought to identifying their modalities of action. And I’d venture, the panel has gone some way to de-fetishizing notions of care and repair. So, what does it mean to “act” as a critic rather than simply be critical? What needs to be done and undone? These, I believe, are provocative enough questions on which to end.
About the Participants
Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter is a multidisciplinary artist, advocate and educator who creates socially conscious music, film, and visual art through an autobiographical lens. Her poignant works offer a critical perspective on the challenges women of color face when they become immersed in the criminal justice system. Her work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, African American Museum of Philadelphia, Eastern State Penitentiary, among others.
Edwin Nasr is a writer and curator from Beirut now based in Berlin. His work is broadly concerned with art practice’s engagement with the anti-colonial Left, as well as its propensity to make legible spaces and forms of capture. He was curator at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts (2021-23), Assistant to the Director at Ashkal Alwan, The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (2018-23) and has held fellowships at de Appel Amsterdam (2021-22) and the Singapore Art Museum (2022). Recent writings can be found in Afterall Journal, Mousse Magazine, e-flux Criticism, n+1 and The Funambulist.
Rijin Sahakian uses writing, artmaking, and research to examine the relationship of images and rhetoric to experiences of violence. She founded Sada, an arts education initiative for Baghdad-based students, operating from 2010-2015. Sahakian’s work has appeared in Warscapes, Hyperallergic, Artforum, Camera Austria, the Beirut Art Center, Jadaliyya, Darat al Funun, Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, MoMA PS1, e-flux, n+1, Videobrasil, and the World Records Journal. She is an Open Society Art Fellow in Land, Art and Public Memory.
Zoé Samudzi is the Charles E. Scheidt Visiting Assistant Professor of Genocide Studies and Genocide Prevention at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg. Samudzi is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, The Architectural Review, The New Republic, the Funambulist, among others.
Maboula Soumahoro is an associate professor at the University of Tours and President of the Black History Month Association, dedicated to celebrating Black history and cultures. Soumahoro is a scholar and writer whose research focuses on the American and African American studies and the African diaspora (Black Atlantic). She is the 2022-2023 Mellon Arts Project International Visiting Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University and Visiting Faculty at Bennington College. Widely published within and without academia, she is the author of Le Triangle et l’Hexagone, réflexions sur une identité noire (La Découverte, 2021), translated into English by Kaiama L. Glover as Black Is the Journey, Africana the Name (Polity, 2021).
Sanjukta Sunderason is an art historian working at the interfaces of visual art, political thought, and historical transition during 20th-century decolonization. She is the author of Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020). Sanjukta is Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of Amsterdam and member of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. She is also the Humanities coordinator of the university’s Research Priority Area Decolonial Futures.
[1] From Rijin Sahakian’s open letter published on July 2022 in Artforum, “Beyond Repair”: “In the twelfth Berlin Biennale, images of Iraqi torture and sexual abuse victims have been blown up and arranged into a maze of crude entrapment. The walls of this maze reproduce the photos taken by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison and leaked in 2004, one year after the US-led invasion of Iraq. This edition of the Biennale is said to be centered on decolonial engagement, to offer “repair . . . as a form of agency” and “a starting point . . . for critical conversation, in order to find ways together to care for the now.” Yet the Biennale made the decision to commodify photos of unlawfully imprisoned and brutalized Iraqi bodies under occupation, displaying them without the consent of the victims and without any input from the Biennale’s participating Iraqi artists, whose work was adjacently installed without their knowledge.”
