DEAN HUTTON

In February 2024 I arrived outside the Goethe Institute to protest against German complicity with Israel’s ongoing Nakba and Genocide in Palestine, and the silencing of pro-Palestinian cultural voices. I carried a new painting which read. FUCK APART HEID ISRAEL on the front, and on the back I asked “Who would you be under Apartheid”

In a speech I asked the crowd of artists and activists assembled there:

“Who would you be under Apartheid? What would another 30 years have done to you? Sink or Fight, it’s time to put our bodies, and our art practice on the line.

Nothing seems to be working. I am only here through the sacrifice of others. Today I can choose to fight my battles as an artist, with words, and aesthetics as my weapons. There is no love without justice. There is only Apart Hate.

Small sacrifices are no longer enough. Lets increase our call on artists and cultural workers to disrupt the normalisation of the Apartheid state and refuse the exploitation of an art industry that keeps us in scarcity and fearful of blacklisting. We literally have fuck all to lose at this point but our artist fees…

I was terrified to put on the Fuck White People suit again, made as part of my Masters of Fine Art project begun in 2016. When I shared it privately to my chosen family, they begged me to reconsider, knowing what wreckage responses to FUCK WHITE PEOPLE had done to my life and livelihood. I have just recently recovered my health, my body held the score of the vicious body-shaming, transphobia, death threats brought on by my sudden hypervisibility to the most hateful white supremacists on the planet.

So I made adjustments, HEID covered HATE, and I made sure to never be photographed with the front of the painting with my face. I had learned a few tricks about how to do the work a little more strategically. So many have been silenced by Hasbara that equates pro-Palestine action as anti-jewish hate – Just as my FUCK WHITE PEOPLE received charges of hate speech by White Nationalists. Today many continue to be silenced, or silence themselves.

The question of Who Would you be under Apartheid? also took precedence in my engagement, and my strategy shifted to inviting people to engage with the question by intervening on posters placed in various solidarity spaces and people projected who they would be considered to be under Apartheid, then or now.

Artists are on the frontline of the cultural war. What does it mean to be a white queer artist when the gay flag is made a hate flag and held aloft on bulldozed bombed lands rubble rubble toil and troubled.

What does it mean for a fat white queer artist to become hyper-visible as a dissident body?

How do we use what privilege we have, in among our soft vulnerable existences to advocate for others? ^{[1]Seduce them with purpose.}  What are our responsibilities to those that come after us, even if we do not birth them. What does it mean for us to take on the responsibility for cleansing our bloodlines? How do we forgive, amend, repair our deepest fear with our fiercest desire to live a meaningful life that gives purpose beyond our most intimate imaginings of family, friendship and comradeship? We start to organise outside of our comfort zones.

Over the next months I shifted my strategy to invite engagement with various publics by offering a larger print of the work to be displayed in various solidarity spaces and asking those present in the space to write on the poster, time and time again until the negative white spaces were filled with comments, projections, memories.