By Janet Smith
Joburg-born Adam Broomberg is a giant of contemporary visual art credited with powers of clairvoyance about what is to come in this world. But a charged aesthetic is not responsible for the trouble he’s had sleeping lately.
Over the past week, Broomberg has shown very public solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli violence, and directed his gaze at a colossus: the mighty global art market. Among the ways he’s done it is by posting intimate letters online to a number of blue-chip peers about withdrawing their work from one of the world’s most valuable collections.
The London-based Zabludowicz Art Trust is that target. It has amassed a premier catalogue of more than 4 000 pieces, but its founders are connected to lobbying on behalf of the Israeli state through the controversial Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, and investment company Tamares Group, which provides services for the Israeli Air Force.
This has so angered Broomberg and hundreds of other top-flight art practitioners, that they founded Boycott Divest Zabludowicz in 2014 to expose how the Trust weaponises culture as a “soft power”. BDZ encourages artists to de-author work acquired by or exhibited through the collection – an intentional act Broomberg this week personally took to British titans Jake and Dinos Chapman, German Wolfgang Tillmans and the Belgian-born Francis Alÿs, among others.
Accomplished young artist Rachel Pimm, who was born in Zimbabwe, was among those who have now withdrawn their conceptual content. She posted an apology on Instagram, saying “if anyone else made this wrong decision.. please be in touch … for collective action”. Pimm detailed her decision was made “against the brutality of the Israeli state”.
“I believe this is a very easy mode of recourse to the way (the Trust) art-washes the Israeli state’s ongoing racism and violence against Palestinians,” Broomberg explains.
This reflected on a bout of insomnia he had in the early hours on Monday when he posted on social media as Israel prepared air-raids on Gaza which killed at least 42 that day alone.
The King David Linksfield-educated artist, who these days lives in Berlin, was reading foremost scholar Edward Said during his sleeplessness; drawn to Said’s views on “hallucinations Western people have about Palestinians”.
Broomberg quoted the former Columbia professor of literature, who was himself Palestinian: “(They) are a nuisance and occasionally a threat who have to be subjected to a structure of oppression. They exist as a danger and as an oppressed people”.
Noting he “wasn’t built to be a spokesperson or a politician”, Broomberg is nonetheless continuously affected by those “hallucinations”.
His support for the Palestinian struggle is not a late-breaking storm, and it’s not only the Zabludowicz Art Trust which is in his sights. He has been isolated by other robustly-funded platforms which seemingly equate strikes by Israel, a nuclear state with a sophisticated military, to rockets dispatched from Gaza which has no army.
Broomberg says his Jewish grandmother, one of only two survivors of six siblings in the Holocaust, would “have understood the impossible contradiction of violence committed by Palestinians”. It is “an essence that the self exists even if the oppressor seeks to deny it”.
The artist’s last week of being heckled for what is an integral part of his influential life, is thus a familiar state. He was a political-minded Jewish South African child when he was at school in the 1980s before he became one of the editors of the iconic Benetton Colors campaign magazine.
The other editor was Broomberg’s long-time artistic partner Oliver Chanarin, with whom he established a practice concentrating on photography that delivered shattering histories of racism and colonialism. Today, Broomberg is a professor of photography in Hamburg, and his work is in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
He has, however, avoided colluding as a practitioner with the capitalist global art market where arms dealers may masquerade as philanthropists.
“I never had a career in America,” he summarises, “because if you speak out (on Palestine), you don’t have a career in (that) art world. When we were living through Black Lives Matter, my media was choc-a-block with institutions there posting. Now, when I don’t see a word, it’s shocking, from the heart.”