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. To complete this task, a 15-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 exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art 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 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 witchhunts 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, was 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 those 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 community 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 silenced.
Following the fallout of the last edition, Documenta published a new code of conduct ostensibly meant to “protect against anti-Semitism, racism, and any other form of group-related misanthropy,” posted on the organization’s website on February 3, 2025.
The code of conduct widely quotes the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) highly controversial working definition of antisemitism, which has been criticized for conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism — most vociferously by its lead author, Kenneth Stern. “When you are asking institutions and governments to adopt a definition — to enshrine it, to consult it, to use it in codes and procedures — that’s using the definition like a law,” Stern wrote in a 2021 editorial for the Forward. “IHRA’s zealous supporters often say that to combat antisemitism, one has to define it. In my view, that simply isn’t true. It has been primarily used (and I argue, grossly abused) to suppress and chill pro-Palestinian speech.” Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have also warned that the IHRA’s definition equates criticism of Israeli policy with hatred of Jews, erasing Palestinian voices in the process.
Sometime after June 24, Documenta added a parenthetical disclaimer to its website, qualifying that “the Artistic Direction and the Artistic Team of Curators are not subject to the Code of Conduct.” Reached by Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for Documenta reiterated that “artistic freedom applies without restriction to the curatorial work.” However, the Code of Conduct also states, in no uncertain terms: “Within three months of their election, the respective Artistic Direction of the Documenta exhibition shall present their curatorial concept … and explain how they intend to ensure respect for human dignity while safeguarding the constitutionally protected artistic freedom at the exhibition they curate.”
Since Documenta’s barometer for assessing the “respect for human dignity” uses the IHRA definition of antisemitism, it follows that the artistic and curatorial teams are beholden to the warped logic of that definition. Hyperallergic attempted to clarify this point with the organization and its new artistic team; Documenta declined to comment further.
However you spin it, the adoption of this definition of antisemitism effectively means that Documenta 16, the forthcoming edition planned for September 2027, will be required to exclude any artworks that are critical of the State of Israel.
The content of the exhibition hardly matters. The real curatorial responsibility 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 not only annihilates 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.
The announcement of an all-woman artistic team was celebrated by many in the art world as evidence of a brave and radical choice. But it is also true that cultural workers, among them women, people of color, and individuals from other traditionally marginalized groups, have long been used as Trojan horses for the German cultural ministry.
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. Colah assembled powerful works from 40 countries, yet undermined the credibility of the project by refusing to confront Germany’s own repression — or to openly discuss the Faustian bargain required to secure the state funding the Biennale relied upon. German institutions can only afford to engage individuals who pose no threat to the country’s Staatsräson: its unconditional support for the state of Israel.
Colah’s recent claim to a journalist that “there is no censorship in Germany” denies the widely acknowledged and documented reality of life: 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.
Savvy Contemporary, founded by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung in 2009, transformed the German cultural landscape. Alongside his team, he constructed a curatorial program that confronted Germany with its dark colonial past, racism, and xenophobia. 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,” Roth said.
Diversity, the Global South, LGBTQ+ rights, and even reckoning with Germany’s colonial history are tolerated. 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 advises 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.
“It belongs to the definition of genocide that the people it exterminates are annihilated in their humanity even before they are actually killed,” writes de Duve. “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 reserved for progressive politics and critical thought. Just as the genocide in Gaza shatters the illusions of international law and liberal democracy, it has shattered the previously long-held belief in the radicality of art institutions.
It seems the only way to move forward with integrity is to boycott these institutions and work together on the art of solidarity to amplify Palestinian voices.
