COMMITMENT

We believe in liberatory futures, and in acknowledgment of the long Nakba - a catastrophic system of ethnic cleansing perpetuated against the people of Palestine - we join the global call for an IMMEDIATE CEASEFIRE in Gaza, the West Bank, and all of Historic Palestine.  

We believe that “The task of the artist is determined always by the status and process and agenda of the community that it already serves.”* As our communities mobilize in support of Palestinian liberation, we are assessing the ways our work, challenging the bounds of Black representation in the afterlife of Slavery, lends itself to a curatorial approach that explicitly addresses anti-imperial struggle.

We are committed to using our platform to  “renew and refine our own anti-imperial praxis” through the work of Black visual culture.* To do this means paying critical attention to the ongoing crises in Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, the Congo, and the rest of the ailing world. To do this means a commitment to slow work, and a political commitment to active, sustainable, long-term solidarity. To do this means interrogating how we position ourselves within a genealogy of Black artists and cultural workers making art in service to resistance.

We see this as an application of our mission to ADVANCE QUEER, LIBERATORY, AND ACCESSIBLE ALTERNATIVES TO THE CONTEMPORARY ART LANDSCAPE. 

We locate ourselves in active opposition to individuals, institutions and organizations that support zionist propaganda and we support the efforts to apply cultural, political, and economic pressure on the Israeli nation-state through the Palestinian-led boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign initiated in 2005. We commit to amplifying the calls of Palestinian cultural workers and cultural institutions, like the poet Mosab Abu Toha and The Freedom Theatre in Jenin. And we remain open to dialogue, revision, and collaboration with our communities about anti-imperial cultural work.

To accompany this Commitment we have created an on-going public resource list of essays, films, poems, and other materials that guide our study of Palestinian cultural work and resistance.

——————

* Toni Cade Bambara in conversation with Kay Bonetti (1982)

* “A Dam Against the Motion of History” - Fred Moten on Palestine & the Nation-State of Israel on the Milennials are Killing Capitalism Podcast