If you mark truth on a timeline, who chooses the starting point? Since October 2023, newsrooms and academic campuses particularly in the West, have been accused of taking sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. “I don’t think it’s the ‘Israel-Gaza war.’ I think it’s the ‘Israel-Palestine war,’” British data journalist Mona Chalabi told the audience when receiving her Pulitzer Prize. “And no one in this room is willing to mention the ‘P-word'”.¹  During the 1991 Gulf War, the American press decontextualized Iraq, subsuming its population into two words: Saddam Hussein, “as if Iraq could most appropriately be seen through the sights of an F-15 or a smart missile”.² In mainstream Gaza coverage today, all the destruction can be justified by one word- Hamas. Harrowing images of premature babies without oxygen, desperate doctors pleading, medics coining a new acronym WCNSF – wounded child, no surviving family, were presented in newsrooms with the question, “but do you condemn Hamas?” leading one academic to ask, why must Palestinians audition for your empathy?³

When 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times were tallied on their usages of certain key terms about Israel’s war on Gaza, it was discovered that terms like “slaughter”, “massacre” and “horrific” were reserved for the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians. Despite Israel’s war on Gaza being perhaps the deadliest war for children in modern history, there is scant mention of the word “children” in headlines.⁴ Awkwardly worded headlines had an ambiguity when it came to Palestinian victims. Israelis had children, while Palestinians were “18 and younger”. Israeli victims were “killed” while Palestinians were simply “dead”, often by an “explosion” with an unnamed origin.

It was in sharp contrast to the definitiveness of “Hamas’ deadly attack”, or when Russia “pounded Ukraine”. Palestinians exist ahistorically, untethered to reality.⁵ Israelis were hostages, Palestinians were prisoners. Israelis were victims, with difficulty brought upon them, unlike Palestinians who were complicit, guilty. A recent article in the NYTimes portrays Arab countries and Iran as tiny bugs — alien, pesky, while the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are mammals — intelligent, capable, with the U.S. likened to an old lion, which reigns as the “king of the jungle”.⁶ In a now deleted tweet, Netanyahu called Palestinians “children of darkness”.

Meta the company that owns Instagram, had to apologise because the platform was inserting the word “terrorist” into the profile bios of some Palestinian users.⁷. While Biden freely used the word genocide for Russia in Ukraine, South Africa had to approach the International Court of Justice (ICJ) UN Tribunal for Israel.

When politicians like Trudeau would say that Israel must spare the “women and children” there was a veneer of largesse, which concealed the belief that Arab men were guilty, and did not fall under the innocent civilian umbrella. Palestinian journalists like Motaz Aziz caused ruptures in this narrative, and created blooms of hope. Motaz’s 108 days of covering Gaza offered a “rolling case study against Orientalism and Islamophobia, in real time, where a living protagonist embodied the layers of manhood – from levity to love, softness to justifiable rage – seldom applied to our old men and young boys, fathers and sons”.⁸

Artists with pro-Palestinian views like Ai Wei Wei (long praised for his dissidence to Chinese authorities) and Samia Halaby had exhibitions cancelled or were pressured to modify works like removing the words “Palestine” and “exile” from artists Jenin Yaseen and Sameerah Ahmad’s installations at the Royal Ontario Museum⁹.

Edward Said said he had to go back again and again, to tell the same story, or “it will just drop and disappear” unlike other narratives that have a kind of permanence or institutional existence.¹⁰ The informal becomes invisible and often untrue, simply by the force of it not being enshrined in official circuits.¹¹ What follows examines this point, as well as the multiple streams of history that make up the past, through the lens of the criticism of Documenta 15.

Invisible Fruit

Grewia Asiatica: 1.9 cm in diameter, green when unripe, blackish purple when ready, spelt with an f in Pakistan, a softer ph sound in India. Falsa.

It fills Karachi streets in the summer, eaten with black salt or blended into red drinks. Falsas make you work: they ripe unevenly, require multiple pickings, spoil fast.¹² Cuttings are difficult to root. They must be sold within 24 hours, and hence need to grow close to markets. In their purest form, they elude commerciality, long voyages, trade, and the great world of commerce and supermarkets of the Global North. Instead, they slip into the space where titles like ‘vernacular’ and ‘dialectic’ come in. They have no English vernacular name.

By not being hardy, transportable and good for marketing, falsas haven’t journeyed far, confining themselves to Southeast Asia, dripping down to the Philippines. In Pakistan, the fruit is miraculous for heat strokes, and is said to alleviate inflammation. But she has not been able to enshrine herself globally, becoming synonymous with a condition or function, the way cranberries and urinary tract infections are inseparable, despite the research being inconclusive.¹³ When you are informal, you become invisible, and exist outside the world of truth.

A Right to History

Karl Marx’s sympathy for the misery of people faded when faced with Asia and the non-Western, suggesting England has to fulfil a destructive mission in India with the “annihilation of the Asiatic society”.¹⁴” In 2022, in the early days of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, media coverage disturbingly reminded us that the world is still viewed in vast generalizations where certain parts are portrayed as devoid of common as well as plural human realities.¹⁵

On the BBC, David Sakvarelidze, former Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine famously said it was very emotional “because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair … being killed”.¹⁶ In France, the journalist Phillipe Corbé argued, “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing of the Syrian regime backed by Putin. We’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours”.¹⁷ The sentiments implied that unlike Europeans, Arabs are an underdeveloped and doomed people,¹⁸ frozen in eternal conflict and backwardness. Unwittingly these journalists were following discredited Social Darwinian principles of us and them. “Cars that look like ours.” This “us” and “ours”, rational, developed, humane, superior, and conversely “them”, aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.

These incidents displayed which hemispheres of the past have been erased: Europe’s bloody history, and (among other things) Emperor Babur’s pools and pomegranate trees in Kabul. They are replaced by a peaceful and “civilized” Europe and its antithesis in Afghanistan.¹⁹

Is it correct to accept that unlike Europeans and Americans, the Global South have no sense of individuality, no regard for individual life, no values that express love, intimacy, and understanding? ²⁰ It’s convenient to forget that the Golden Age was tinged with violence: hand in hand with the Age of Enlightenment came military advancements. Galileo, Newton and Euler did not just peer at the moon and codify the laws of motion and calculus; they helped enable artillery to be more accurate, weapons more powerful. The frequency and rhythm of warfare was different in Europe to other parts of the world: no sooner would one conflict be resolved that another would flare up. This is not to say that aggression did not exist in other societies, but periods of explosive expansion across Asia and North Africa, were followed by long periods of stability, peace and prosperity.²¹

It is easy to think of the Renaissance, and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as ages of investment in art and culture, but just as paintings were produced in enormous quantities, so too were guns and grapeshot. The later horrors in the twentieth century had their roots in the deep past. Is it surprising that the worst targeted genocide in history had its origins and execution in Europe?²² Yet as media coverage of Ukraine showed, “European” was used as a self-explanatory term—a catch-all that emphasised the Ukrainians’ humanity, and the abnormality of their predicament. These people are not to be confused with those “fleeing North Africa” or Syria, they are “European”, they are “civilized”, “middle-class people” who “had the same kind of dog as I have” and “they look like any European family that you would live next door to.²³”  As though to elicit response from audiences, how could this happen to them?

They are also “healthier and better educated than those in the great refugee crisis of the past decade.” These comments normalise wars and civilian victims in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America and imply a dual-class society of refugees.²⁴ This suggests a lack of dignity is an inevitable destiny, that sympathy and justice are tied to geography and certain personal physical traits. This phenomenon is not confined to Europe.

One of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic minorities, the Hazaras Shias have been systemically discriminated against throughout history. Their Asiatic features and language set them apart from other Afghans. In the late 1900s, Pashtun King Amir Abdul Rahman Khan ordered the killing of all Shias in central Afghanistan, leaving tens of thousands of Hazaras dead; the Taliban proclaimed they could be killed as they were “not Muslim”.²⁵ Violence has dispersed Hazaras around the world, with families like those of artist Khadim Ali seeking sanctuary in British-ruled India. In 2013 when a bomb in Quetta killed 100 members of the community, mourners refused to bury their dead to protest government apathy. Artist Meher Afroz is one of the few to create emotional works derived from symbols and banners she saw at the protests.

The history of Shia persecution is glossed over or altogether ignored in mainstream Islamic literature, with perpetrators sometimes romanticized: rulers like Harun Rashid occupy a place of mystique, appearing in the fantastical One Thousand and One Nights. History books record his thousands of pairs of boots lined with sable and mink, but few speak of his paranoia, his torture and fifteen-year imprisonment and eventual killing of the Shia Imam Musa al-Kazim (as). ²⁶

They are of two kinds— either your brother in faith, or your equal in humanity

After the public opening of Documenta 15 in June 2022, the Indonesian collective Taring Padi’s 60-foot-long painted banner titled People’s Justice, was removed after an outcry from lawmakers and diplomats for its “antisemitic readings”. Prior to the unveiling, German press criticised the inclusion of the Palestinian collective The Question of Funding in the show.  After the uproar in June, artists at Documenta 15 accused the platform of projecting and transposing German guilt and history onto other anti-colonial struggles.²⁷

Today art institutions can safely criticise Modernist thinking characteristic of the colonialist era which essentially claimed “every culture but ours is wrong”.  We can see a “tragically flawed self-absorption”²⁸ on what was considered the norm at the time. But to be truly objective, one would have to pass judgment in what Thomas McEvilley calls “some extra cultural place with a clear view of every culture, including our own—a view unavailable from within any culture”. Clearly, no such vantage point is available to human beings. I propose to think of the art institutions to at least strive for that vantage point. The appointment of the Indonesian Ruangrupa collective for Documenta 15 seemed a start, because for all its experimental reputation, the show is also an institution steeped in the art-world culture of top-down curatorial propositions²⁹ and funded by the city. With its theme of the “lumbung,” or Indonesian collective rice granary, there were no hierarchical systems, no heroic single artist; there were groups mostly from outside the commercial art world, mainly from the Global South, in a roster that grew amoeba like. ³⁰

It featured a gathering of independent publishers and book makers in an open invitation to self-organize. One of their workshops created a beautiful metaphor for what would ideally be the role of an art institution: it included forming groups of two to three and visiting a public marketplace with the task of buying food to bring back to the group using only a few coins. Participants returned to see sparse contributions “transformed into a simple but sumptuous meal”. The metaphor of “the preparation of a collective feast with few resources” was an apt way to underline how many work –supplementing limited resources with the invisible synergies generated through communal settings. ³¹

Harnessing that energy in our age of climate crisis and financial strain is a viable solution. As a planet, our interconnectedness is inescapable: Pakistan is responsible for less than 1% of the world’s planet-warming gases yet is the eighth most vulnerable nation to the climate crisis.³² For Documenta’s critics to encourage frameworks that close conversations outside their sphere, is short sighted.

Globalization is not a sterile, tidy concept. For nations like Indonesia with a long history of colonisation, the process of thinking unmoored from institutions and norms, revisiting pain and subjugation, is an essential part of exploration and identity. Documenta featured artists bearing witness to raw, unmitigated effects of the globalised economy, those who labour at the bottom of its value chains, and those dealing with the hard legacies of earlier, darker times. In Sajjad Abbas’s Water of Life, videos made by former members of the Baghdad-based Sada group (2011-15), a young man recounts his narrow escape from the suicide bombing of a cafe; he talks, on the verge of hysteria, of finding the flesh of the bomber’s victims on his skin, pointing out blood and hair stuck to his shirt.³³ The response to Taring Padi’s banner People’s Justice, – created by members of the collective who had struggled under the military dictatorship of Suharto – sends the message that thoughts can only be expressed within a framework.

Non-Western parts of the world recognize the Holocaust as an immense tragedy; at the same time these spaces take a broader perspective of history. Places like Africa and the Global South are working through decolonization in their own spheres, seeing the Vietnam War, Rwanda, and (the ongoing crisis of) the Democratic Republic of Congo among others, as tragedies. In 2002, at Documenta 11, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar created a series of Lightboxes with just one word written in light, they included: “Kigali”, “Mibirizi”, “Butare”. ³⁴ These were names of places where between 5,000 and 100,000 people were killed in less than 100 days. He noted that none of these names have the connotation-the weight and trauma of names like “Auschwitz” or “Guernica”. Investigations like these should not be thought of lessening or taking away from victims and survivors, or – even worse – being antisemitic. The Holocaust sits deeply in Europe and North America, and with the various strains of survivors’ guilt and German politics, it stands fixed in the firmament. In Documenta 15 we saw these two world views, the Global North and Global South meeting face to face.

This essay by no means intends to condone racism or insensitivity; instead, it aims to ask the question, whether we can impose our structures and notions on societies with a different experience, and if so, will it propel our communities forward or back? The last several years would arguably not have seen movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo take hold of our societies if we stopped questioning power and narratives.

If artists are meant to intuit our future or offer ways to examine the past, how much space are we offering them? Are art institutions content with insular platforms where dissenting voices and thorny topics are to be avoided?  These questions are important because without them, we are keeping globalization out of art’s reach. “Because in order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.” ³⁵

Erich Auerbach, the great German scholar, cites the words of Hugo of St. Victor, the twelfth century monk from Saxony, for anyone to transcend the restraints of national, colonial or provincial limits: “The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place”. ³⁶

I began this section with a line from a letter written by Ali ibn Abi Talib (as) to the Governor of Egypt, Malik al- Ashtar in 658 CE,³⁷ instructing him to view his people as either brothers or equals. No one was a stranger, no one was inferior, no one was an “other”. This is not to pretend that divisions do not exist, but to be cognizant if we are unknowingly respecting certain structures at the cost of others. Can art institutions aspire to that vantage point – the one where the doors of possibilities are thrown open, without hierarchies, with trust and compassion for all? This moment is our great opportunity to find solutions to a planet in crisis, and hope for the disenfranchised and the invisible.

Title Image: Khadim Ali. Untitled I (Forlorn Foe) 2015. Gouache and gold leaf on wasli paper, 150cm x 55 cm. Image courtesy and copyright, Khadim Ali

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