Art and the political imagination

An ongoing exhibition in Paris upholds Palestinian right to statehood by displaying works by artists from populations uprooted or exiled by violence.

“Past Disquiet” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. | Photo Credit: Aurélien Mole/ Palais de Tokyo

“The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a ‘person’; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible…. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.”

—Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009)

In April 2024, partnering with Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS), the MurthyNAYAK Foundation, and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts co-organised a one-day symposium, “Camera South Asia II” (a successor to the well-received “Camera South Asia I” organised on campus in April 2023), co-chaired by the film/media studies scholar Professor Debashree Mukherjee of MESAAS. As stated on the poster, the symposium sought “to balance a focus on the contemporary with a long view of the past and to unsettle easy ascriptions of identity or authenticity, be it for individuals or for images”.

The date and venue had been scheduled months earlier, when no one could have foreseen the conflict that started raging on campus in April: the turbulent yet largely peaceful students’ protests against the genocide in Gaza, demanding that the state and businesses divest from Israel and stop supplying it with arms. Initiated at Columbia, the dissent spread to other US universities and then to campuses in Europe, and has been compared to the 1960s’ students’ protests against the Vietnam war.

The protest sites became nodes of solidarity and impassioned debates about political legitimacy, sovereignty, free speech, social justice, and human rights. Police intervention soon turned violent, and hundreds were arrested. Amidst the furore, through the efforts of Columbia faculty, our symposium was shifted to St Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem (considered a sanctuary space). While the students’ protests have now been significantly reduced by regular police action, the movement has left a deep imprint both on and off campus. As Osita Nwanevu remarked in The Guardian (May 13, 2024), an “extraordinary propaganda campaign” against the protesters is being “pushed by critics in the press and in office”, while, in fact, the media’s work should be “to change public opinion on the actual matter at hand—to make urgent arguments to the American public not about the plight of Palestine’s defenders on campus but the plight of the Palestinians. The students have done their part; they will be recognized in time. Now it’s up to the rest of us.”

“Past Disquiet” at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. | Photo Credit: Rahaab Allana

The “rest of us”: this includes the spectrum of arts/media practitioners, archivists, curators, gallerists, scholars, critics, technologists, designers, art activists, specialists (in arts markets, arts management, arts policy, arts pedagogy). A different, yet vital genealogy of transcontinental political dissent underpins the compelling documentary and archival show, “Past Disquiet”, related to the International Art Exhibition of Palestine, 1978 (IAEP), that I recently viewed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Creating awareness

On view until June 30, having travelled from several venues and different editions starting with the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2015, it aspires to create awareness about political sovereignty and Palestine’s right to statehood through themed displays of work by artists from populations uprooted and scattered via war or civil unrest, or in exile across refugee camps in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

A dedicated publication (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw/University of Chicago Press, 2018) with essays, interviews, and archival content also narrates how the 1960s and the 1970s witnessed the emergence of artists’ unions and associations across the Arab world with the aim of fostering dialogue and cultural intervention in the regional public sphere.

The poster for the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, Beirut Arab University, 1978, designed by Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi. | Photo Credit: Dia al-Azzawi 

“Past Disquiet” begins by tracing how, soon after the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, the Plastic Arts Section of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by the Jordanian artist Mona Saudi, organised the IAEP in March 1978 in the Beirut Arab University basement hall. Built on intensive, remarkable forensic research starting in the 1990s by the scholars Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, “Past Disquiet” explores how the IAEP (comprising work by 179 international artists and one collective from 30 countries, and able to tour via networks of politically engaged associations, collectives, and unions of artists) ingeniously connected artists in solidarity with four major liberation and social justice struggles (Palestine, Nicaragua, Chile, South Africa).

The PLO itself invited artists from many countries, and Saudi, the IAEP’s de facto custodian/curator, travelled widely to meet artists, requested artist participation through various embassies (Poland, Denmark, Romania, and the Soviet Union), and spread the word through Arab friends and colleagues. Artists eventually contributed from France (through collectives like L’Association de la Jeune Peinture), Italy (L’Alzaia and L’Arcicoda) and Japan (through the Japan Afro-Asian Latin American Artist Association, or JAALA) as well as through artist unions in Baghdad, Berlin, Casablanca, Damascus, and Warsaw. International artists who travelled to Beirut to attend the opening included Claude Lazar (France), Gontran Guanaes Netto (Brazil), Bruno Caruso and Paolo Ganna (Italy), and Mohamed Melehi (Morocco), to name a few. The exhibitors noted that, surprisingly, no artists were represented from the erstwhile German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, or Sweden, countries that were sympathetic to the Palestinian people’s struggle.

Highlights

• “Past Disquiet” is a documentary and archival exhibition that retraces the histories of political engagement and solidarity of artists within the international anti-imperialist movement from the 1960s through to the 1980s.
• It is running at Palais de Tokyo in France till June 30.
• It begins by tracing how, soon after the Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, the Plastic Arts Section of the Palestine Liberation Organization organised the International Art Exhibition of Palestine in 1978.

The IAEP was underpinned by the ideology of “Tricontinentalism”, forged through the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Cuba; it aimed to empower states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to challenge Western imperialism through an array of alliances that would benefit the Third World/Global South. Regional cooperation was fostered by individuals and institutional and para-institutional groups.

For instance, the curators mention how at the First Arab Festival of National Plastic Arts (Damascus, 1972), the Palestinian artist Samir Salameh lobbied museums to dedicate a space for fellow Palestinian practitioners as an act of support for Palestine’s claim to statehood; the General Union of Arab Artists, formed in 1972, organised a biennial of Arab art, with each edition to be held in a different city (Baghdad, 1974; Rabat, 1976, and so on); the Union of Palestinian Artists developed relations with JAALA that presented the IAEP at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in 1978 as well as in the Palestinian Poster Exhibition in 1984.

However, in 1982, during the Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut, soldiers raided research centres and seized archival holdings after shelling the PLO offices, destroying many of the works.

The artists Jamil Shammout and Michel Najjar painting the banner for the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, Beirut Arab University, 1978. | Photo Credit: Claude Lazar

In the Past Disquiet book, the Israeli scholar Rona Sela is cited for her belief that despite the 1993 Oslo agreements stipulating that looted materials be returned to the PLO, the Israeli army still holds crucial materials, including film reels and photographs. Kristine Khouri notes elsewhere that “the materials presented in Past Disquiet are mostly printed-out scans and digital photographs. These include pages from catalogues of exhibitions, posters, postcards, photographs, excerpts from newspaper and magazine clippings, books, pamphlets, art publications, and handwritten notes.”

The poster for Art Exhibition of the Palestinian Resistance, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 1980, featuring works from the collection. | Photo Credit: Abdalla Family Archives 

From curatorial, authorial, and viewer perspectives, the skilful design of “Past Disquiet” weaves a potent visual historiography that links to the fraught political moment in a deeply insightful manner.

It brings to light other ongoing exhibitions that have been forced to address questions of divestment like the Toronto Photo Festival sponsored by Scotiabank, or street exhibitions like “no-photo2024”, a sequence of large posters created by a group of anonymous artists and activists with the aim of highlighting the exclusion of Palestinian photographers (who captured the violence in Gaza) from the PHOTO 2024 international festival in Melbourne organised by Photo Australia.

Choosing to see

This exhibition also crucially reminds “the rest of us” that our responses to the ongoing atrocities in the region should at least have moved “past” mere “disquiet”. The juxtaposition of the redacted image and the textual description not only commemorates the efforts of Palestinian photographers but also prompts a broader reflection on the societal and ethical implications of selectively withholding images of atrocity from the public eye.

The poster for Palestinian Art/ Palestinske Kunstnere, Kuntsnernes Hus Oslo, 1981, and Christanssands Kunstforening in 1982, featuring works by Palestinian artists from the collection. | Photo Credit: Palestine Poster Archives

The accompanying collective statement of “no-photo2024” declares: “No photos of the war. No photos of its victims. No mention of the hundreds of photographers who have died taking them. We are a group of activists and artists who believe the future will be shaped by those who can see it. We stand together against the forces that refuse to let us. The future is being shaped by art festivals that choose what we see. Hiding behind the pretty face of diversity, while refusing to see the genocide.”

One of the points the exhibition of 1978 clearly reveals is that there are complications in institutional or state-sponsored forms of “protest making” that are relate-able to acts of diplomacy. As the 1978 exhibition was about creating a seed collection for a future museum in Palestine (a dream still unrealised), how would one, or can one, as the curators intimate, create an awareness and acknowledgement that also expresses radical grassroots politics, recentring motivations, and can the idea of the museum-in-exile—artworks donated in the name of people and movements, not institutions and power blocs—become a reality in order to safeguard autonomy, diversity?

Reference points for India

“Past Disquiet” also presents some incisive historical reference points for India. For instance, an exhibition text mentions how the artist Krishna Reddy participated in the IAEP as well as another exhibition in 1978 in Morocco, associated with the Asilah Cultural Moussem (or Harvest festival), which was a response to a call for artists to demystify art and retract from elitist circles.

Page from the catalogue for the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, Beirut, 1978 featuring the etching “Plants” by Krishna Reddy | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

It made me realise the importance of continually opening new spaces of collaboration and collective action, seeking new frontiers of multiple solidarity based on inclusion and freedom. Many events in the recent past, including peaceful demonstrations organised for Palestine in Delhi earlier in June, make us realise the need for continuing this dialogue—including the disbanding of the Documenta committee and the cancellation of exhibitions in Manheim, to name others.

Of late, even a member of the “Friends of Palais de Tokyo Patrons Group” resigned and discontinued her support, claiming that an ongoing show on Palestine at the venue was “dictated by wokeism”, a claim refuted by the institution itself, and by this author.

As the art historian Toni Maraini asserts in her previously unpublished 1978 essay about the IAEP (now translated and published in a comprehensive book by the curators):

“To preserve their dignity, people will protect their arts and creativity at all costs... this creativity flows like an underground stream, and is an undeniable (even if hidden) source of psychological well-being, equilibrium, and prosperity.... The elimination of cultural identity is a less tangible form of genocide, in that it destroys individuals’ consciousness of themselves, their history, their aspirations, spiritual knowledge of the world, and poetic sense of life... individual and collective human culture must guide the road to action; we run the risk of transforming into relics of history if we ignore it.”

Rahaab Allana is Curator/Publisher, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts (New Delhi), and Founder, ASAP/art.