A German museum has reportedly canceled a Candice Breitz show planned for 2024 because of the artist’s statements on the violence taking place in Gaza, where thousands have been killed in Israeli airstrikes.
On Friday, the Saarbrücker Zeitung reported that the Saarland Museum’s Modern Gallery had called off the show “in view of the media coverage about the artist in connection with her controversial statements in the context of Hamas’ war of aggression against the state of Israel,” as the foundation which manages the museum characterized its decision.
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Breitz, who was born in South Africa and is now based in Berlin, is Jewish. She had planned to show TLDR, a 2017 video installation focused on sex workers in Cape Town, South Africa; the work has been exhibited widely, including in venues ranging from the B3 Biennial of the Moving Image in Frankfurt to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
In an email, Breitz said she learned of the show’s cancelation from the Saarbrücker Zeitung report. “In most democratic cultures,” Breitz wrote, “those who are deemed guilty are given the chance to speak and defend themselves before they are condemned and de-platformed. But the climate in Germany at present is such, that many Germans feel absolutely justified in violently condemning Jewish positions that are not consistent with their own, in their zeal to confirm their own dedication to antisemitic principles.”
Breitz pointed to American philosopher Susan Neiman’s concept of “philosemitic McCarthyism,” as theorized in a New York Review of Books article about the state of Germany following Hamas’s October 7 attack, which killed more than 1,400 Israelis and involved the taking of more than 200 hostages. (At the time of publication, 69 hostages have been released, according to CNN.)
Breitz continued, “I would describe the decision to cancel the exhibition as deeply antisemitic. Like so many other similar decisions that have been made against artists, poets, musicians, theatre-makers and novelists in this country in recent weeks and months and years, it is a decision that casts Germans in a position of judgment over what Jewish people may say and/or think, without allowance for due process, let alone civil conversation. This is very much how Kangaroo Courts work.”
A Saarland Museum spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.
On social media, Breitz has previously called for a ceasefire in Gaza while also condemning the Hamas attack.
“It’s possible to reserve deep empathy for the brutally violated and murdered civilians of Israel, while holding zero regard for Bibi and his cynical henchmen (some of whom proudly describe themselves as racists and homophobes); politicians who casually break humanitarian law, cheer on illegal occupation and are now leading the inhumane and grotesque bombardment of Gaza,” Breitz wrote in one Instagram post from October. “It’s likewise possible to support the Palestinian struggle for basic rights and human dignity—including liberation from decades of oppression—while unequivocally condemning the horrific carnage exacted on 7 October, and the cruel stranglehold that Hamas exerts on Gazan civilians (to the advantage of Israel’s sadist leaders). Hamas is not Palestine.”
In October, a Berlin conference about National Socialism, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice that was being led by Breitz and scholar Michael Rothberg was canceled by a federal agency. The organization said it was “not in a position to lead and moderate this debate constructively” after the October 7 attack, a decision that Breitz criticized as being “short-sighted” in an interview with Monopol.
Other German institutions have called off exhibitions organized by and devoted to people who have made pro-Palestine statements. Shortly after the Hamas attack, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir said a talk she had planned to give in Berlin was canceled. This month, a German photography biennial that was being co-organized by artist Shahidul Alam was canceled because he accused Israel of committing a genocide in Palestine; the biennial said those remarks were “antisemitic.” And in Essen, the Museum Folkwang nixed a portion of an exhibition after that presentation’s curator, Anais Duplan, called for Palestinian liberation.
Meanwhile, Documenta, the biggest biennial-style exhibition in Germany, has been roiled by controversy after all the members of the selection committee for its 2027 edition quit. Israeli artist Bracha L. Ettinger pulled out, citing the situation facing her country, and Indian poet Ranjit Hoskote departed after being publicly denounced by Documenta for signing a letter comparing Zionism and Hindu Nationalism, leading the remaining curators on the committee to follow suit.
Elke Buhr, editor of Monopol, wrote this week that the cancelation of Breitz’s Saarland Museum show marked the first time that a Jewish artist had been so directly impacted by allegations of antisemitism following October 7. Noting that TLDR had nothing to do with the current conflict, Buhr wrote of the debate taking place right now, “It has long since ceased to be about art and its content, and there is no longer any talk of freedom of expression or freedom of art.”
Breitz said the situation in Germany, where the history of the Holocaust looms large, had “spiralled into a toxic climate driven by fear and condemnation, in which institutions and individuals are rushing to point fingers at those who they perceive to be antisemitic, rarely considering it necessary to produce any evidence to back up such allegations.”
“As with all manifestations of McCarthyism,” she continued, “the zealous sidelining, stigmatising and denunciation of individuals whose worldviews are inconvenient or uncomfortable in the German context, are driven by fear, the fear that one might be outed as an antisemite oneself. Ultimately, it is German sensitivities that are at stake, rather than a sincere desire to make Jewish and/or Israeli people (or anyone for that matter) live more safely in Germany. “