The artist and activist Nan Goldin makes no secret of her views about Israel and the wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
She has signed high-profile protest letters calling Israel’s actions in Gaza “a genocide.” She has marched with pro-Palestinian protesters and was arrested at a demonstration in New York. In a magazine interview last year, she said she had “been on a cultural boycott of Israel for my whole life.”
So a major exhibition of Goldin’s photo slide shows and films that opened over the weekend at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin seemed like a high-profile anomaly in Germany, where lawmakers have said that support for boycotting Israel is antisemitic, and where artists who have taken positions like Goldin’s have had museum shows canceled, prizes suspended and talks shut down.
But none of those artists were as famous or influential as Goldin, who has been an art-world star for decades.
“If an artist in my position is allowed to express their political stance without being canceled,” she said in a speech at the show’s public opening, “I hope I will be paving a path for other artists to speak out without being censored.” Goldin, who is Jewish and American, accused Germans of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism and looking away from the horrors unfolding in Gaza, which she repeatedly described as a genocide.
Tension built throughout the 17-minute speech, during which members of the public shouted an anti-Israel slogan, and its conclusion set off a reaction in the museum hall that snowballed in the news media.
As soon as Goldin finished, dozens of demonstrators in the crowd started chanting “Free, free Palestine” and waving Palestinian flags and banners they had brought into the museum. The protest drowned out a reply by Klaus Biesenbach, the Neue Nationalgalerie’s director, in which he disagreed with Goldin’s comments but stood by her right to express them.
Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, said in a statement that she was “horrified” by Goldin’s comments and the protesters’ actions. “As commendable as Nan Goldin’s art is, I reject the political activist’s intolerably one-sided views on Israel,” she said. The demonstrators had “come to the museum not to see art, but to shout down the director,” she added.
Others said Biesenbach had only himself to blame. An essay in Die Welt newspaper calling for his resignation said that allowing Goldin a platform had brought about “the saddest, most undignified and shameful moment” in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s history and represented “a new low point in German cultural policy.”
Germany’s arts institutions have been roiled by debates about Israel since 2019, when the federal Parliament passed a resolution urging regional and local governments to deny public funding to any group that “actively supports” the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S., which lawmakers perceive as questioning Israel’s right to exist.
In the years since, institutions have used that resolution to justify closing exhibitions and canceling concerts and lectures. After Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, many artists who had criticized Israel but never publicly supported a boycott complained that they, too, had been shut out.
This month German lawmakers passed a new resolution, reiterating their opposition to a boycott and urging regional governments and city authorities, which fund most of the nation’s arts institutions, to draw up “legally secure” regulations that make sure projects with “antisemitic goals or content” do not get funded.
The resolution already appears to be having an impact. Last week, the Schelling Architecture Foundation retracted a prize it was planning to award to James Bridle, a British writer, who signed a pledge to boycott Israel alongside authors including Sally Rooney, Percival Everett and the Nobel laureates Annie Ernaux and Abdulrazak Gurnah. In an email to Bridle, seen by The New York Times, the foundation cited the resolution, which it said “points the way forward for state institutions.”
Meron Mendel, the director of the Anne Frank Educational Center in Frankfurt, said that although some artists were still having their events canceled, fewer were losing work or prizes over Gaza as memories of Oct. 7 fade. Mendel, speaking before Goldin’s opening, said he had “no idea why” Goldin’s exhibition had not attracted lawmakers’ attention when other artists had lost opportunities.
The works at the Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition, which is called “This Will Not End Well” and runs through April 6, are not directly related to Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories. They focus instead on intimate relationships among Goldin’s friends and family, and within marginalized groups including people living with AIDS and transgender people. The show is on its third stop, after runs in Stockholm and Amsterdam, where it was well received by critics.
Goldin’s most high-profile work in recent years has been in the field of activism, as she campaigned for museums to renounce sponsorship from the Sackler family because of its links to the opioid crisis. Goldin and her supporters staged attention-grabbing stunts against the Sackler family at institutions including the Louvre, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The artist declined several interview requests for this article and has previously said she is boycotting The New York Times, which she sees as biased toward Israel.
As part of the events program around the Neue Nationalgalerie show, the museum announced a daylong symposium to discuss how the conflict in Gaza was polarizing artists in Germany. But the plans for the symposium were almost derailed this month after it emerged that Goldin had not approved the idea. (In an interview, Biesenbach confirmed that he had not asked Goldin’s permission to include the event in the exhibition program.)
Hito Steyerl, the German artist who was supposed to be event’s keynote speaker, pulled out, and other panelists followed. Strike Germany, a pro-Palestinian group, said in an Instagram post that the symposium was “dominated by genocide-denying Zionists,” adding, “Shut it down!”
The event went ahead on Sunday with a reduced speaker roster, a strong police presence outside the venue and security guards searching visitors to rout out potential protesters.
Some of the event’s loudest applause went to Ruth Patir, Israel’s representative at this year’s Venice Biennale, after she said that she did not agree with canceling pro-Palestinian artists, but that boycotting Israeli culture would never change the situation for Palestinians.
“I really think being in conversation, and letting people speak is the minimum we can do,” Patir said.
Across the street at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the exhibition was at capacity, with a long line at the entrance as people waited to get in. Selina Schaffner, 27, a medical student, said as she left the show that Nan Goldin was “controversial, I guess, but she gets people to talk and she’s a great artist — that’s a good thing.”
Biesenbach said on Monday that the uproar at the opening had not made him regret putting on the show.
“I only hope this highly visible exhibition of a very prominent and outspoken artist will be a catalyst for more to happen, ideally turning challenges into opportunities to talk, to feel empathy,” he said. “I hope it will keep doors open and trust in the lasting power of art.”
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