ADAM BROOMBERG

Cover Image. A girl incarcerated by the Khmer Rouge at S-21 (Tuol Sleng) “Security Prison” in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1975-1979)^{[1]OCTOBER 125, Summer 2008, pp. 3–23. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.}

S-21 is the name of a former high school in Phnom Penh that Pol Pot turned into a secret torture center and extermination camp. Between 1975 and 1979, 14,200 people were executed there.

For the sake of the regime’s bureaucracy, every man, woman, and child was photographed just before entering the center where they were brutally murdered. In order to complete this task, a fifteen-year-old member of the Khmer Rouge, Nhem Ein, was sent to Shanghai to learn photography, and, a year later, was promoted to the rank of “photographer-in-chief”.

In response to exhibitions of these mug shots at MoMA and Arles Photography Festival, Thierry de Duve published “Art in the Face of Radical Evil” in October Magazine in 2008. He was shaken by how images of genocide victims—originally produced for bureaucratic and violent purposes—were given “artistic” status by entering museums and their collections.

His central inquiry was whether “genocidal images” could or should be recognized as art.

Two decades later, the dilemma he proposed has inverted.

Since 1955, documenta, widely regarded as one of the art world’s most formidable events, has been held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The announcement of the artistic team of the next edition—accompanied by a corporate group photo—was widely praised: For the first time, the curators would be an all-female, POC team.

But for those of us who lived through the witch-hunts that were unleashed during and after documenta 15—accusations of antisemitism, death threats, cancellations, criminalization—or for anyone on the wrong side of Germany’s art world, the charade is obvious.

The reason why the last incarnation of documenta provoked such violent attacks is that Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that curated it, were committed to the true meaning of intersectional solidarity. They understood that to recognize feminist and queer interventions against heteronormative patriarchy, or Black interventions against the theory and practice of slavery, one must also include Indigenous interventions against settler colonialism.

For the German state, expressions of these concerns are tolerable—except any that display solidarity with the Palestinian people or criticism of the State of Israel.

Of course this made no sense to Ruangrupa. How could anyone claim to care about intersectional solidarity while throwing one group under the bus. As a result, the participating Palestinian artists, any artists showing solidarity with Palestine, or even any artist simply criticizing the State of Israel in their work were fiercely punished.

By recently adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, documenta has now enshrined the exclusion of any work critical of Israel as one of the fundamental criteria of its curatorial selection process.

The new code of conduct, which applies to the entire documenta organization—employees, exhibitions, and permanent facilities—was published on its website.

The IHRA definition is widely criticized for conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, even its lead drafter Kenneth Stern admits it has been “grossly abused” to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. Human rights groups warn it equates criticism of Israeli policy with hatred of Jews, erasing Palestinian voices in the process.

Despite this, the curatorial team has agreed to that code of conduct.

The group portrait was described by an exuberant art press as evidence of the radical choice made by documenta. Sadly a more convincing reading is of a team willing to be charged with producing state violence dressed up as avant-garde culture. The optics of an all-female POC team are a clumsy disguise. Identity politics are once again deployed by the German state to mask the true remit of documenta 16.

The content of the exhibition hardly matters. The real curatorial task of the team is the execution of omission.

To consciously elide any work that confronts a nation-state conducting a genocide is necessarily experienced as violent—not only for victims and survivors, but also for all those morally opposed to the atrocity—because silence or denial compounds the original violence rather than neutralizes it.

Genocide does not only annihilate people physically; it also seeks to erase their existence, memory, and humanity.

When acknowledgment is withheld, the perpetrators’ logic of erasure is extended: victims are treated as if they never lived, as if their suffering doesn’t matter.

This is not a new strategy deployed by the German cultural ministry. BiPOC cultural workers have long been used as their Trojan horses.

This year’s 13th Berlin Biennale, co-curated by Mumbai-born Zasha Colah, celebrates cunning, humour, and fugitivity as subversive artistic strategies used by artists against state imposed control. Coleh assembled powerful works from 40 countries, yet undermined the credibility of the entire project by refusing to confront Germany’s own repression—or to openly discuss the Faustian bargain required to secure the state funding. Colah would never have been given the role if she had been deemed a threat to Germany’s Staatsräson: its unconditional support for the state of Israel.

While the reality of life in Germany is widely acknowledged and documented: police crackdowns, accusations of antisemitism, targeted arrests, criminal charges, deportations, bans. Careers ruined. A policy of intimidation against those who dare show compassion for Palestine. With her recent claim to a journalist—“There is no censorship in Germany”—Colah seems to embody the Biennale’s logic of deceit.

Since arriving in Germany in 1997 from Cameroon with 300 Deutsche Marks, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung literally transformed the cultural landscape: By working in a pacemaker factory to fund the founding of Savvy Contemporary, he led a team that forced Germany to confront its dark colonial past.

In June 2021, on the night he was welcomed as the new director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the then-Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth took to the stage. She celebrated Bonaventure’s appointment, describing it as ushering in a new era of “inclusivity and a celebration of intersectional diversity.” She insisted that “…artistic decisions should not be externally controlled,” then, without pausing for breath, she proceeded to explain precisely how they would be externally controlled.

“We don’t fund events during which BDS is advertised or supported…BDS is antisemitic.”

Diversity, the Global South, LGBTQ rights and even reckoning with its colonial history—are permitted. Criticism of Israel is not.

Fred Moten reminds us that the defense of Israel’s “right to exist” functions as a defense of the nation-state form itself. He reminds us that nation-states don’t have rights; that they are instead supposed to protect the rights of people who live within them but never at the expense of those who don’t.

The consensus of the German art world is aligned with the status-quo of the State of Israel: Anything goes, except Palestine.

As de Duve wrote: “It belongs to the definition of genocide that the people it exterminates are annihilated in their humanity even before they are actually killed. Nhem Ein did not execute the victims; they were dead already to his eyes, reduced to things not spoken to, soon disposed of.”

Thierry de Duve wondered if there was space for “evil work” in art institutions—long assumed to be spaces of progressive politics and critical thought. That illusion has collapsed. Just as the genocide in Gaza shatters the illusions of international law and liberal democracy, it shatters the possibility of radicality in art institutions as we know them.