Breaking up with the State Library
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I’m terminating my current exhibition contract with State Library Victoria.
Today, I sent the following as an email to Paul Duldig, Chief Librarian and CEO, and Rebecca Batties, Director, programs and exhibitions.
to: pduldig@slv.vic.gov.au, rbatties@slv.vic.gov.au
I’m writing to formally withdraw from State Library Victoria’s Community Trails exhibition, for which I have been commissioned to produce a body of artwork.
SLV has unambiguously aligned itself with the zionist colonial project. As such, my ongoing relationship with the institution is untenable.
In particular, I note that SLV has ‘indefinitely postponed’ a scheduled series of writing workshops for teenagers.
In attempting to explain this decision, the library lied, stating:
The library strongly rejects the view that it deferred the teen writing boot camp because of presenters’ political views.
Principled library staff, however, have since revealed what many had already correctly assumed: the workshops were scrapped precisely because writers contracted to facilitate these workshops were advocates for Palestinian liberation.
I also note that SLV cited ‘child and cultural safety’ as a reason for scrapping these workshops. To date, these concerns around ‘safety’ have not been explained.
Clearly the library’s true agenda is to uphold zionist interests.
The library’s weaponisation of the language of ‘cultural safety’ is both disingenuous and professionally damaging to the writers concerned.
The library is enacting the very same program of career sabotage that we all saw being plotted and coordinated in the recently leaked zionist group chat.
This same strategy of censorship, intimidation and manipulation has been employed by zionists within cultural spaces for decades.
From 2019 to 2020, I worked at SLV as the library’s Children’s Literature Fellow. I was awarded this fellowship specifically to examine the history of Australian children’s books as they reflect, inform and reinforce colonial power structures.
More recently, for the library’s Community Trails exhibition, I have been contracted specifically to produce a body of artwork confronting colonial hegemony within Chinese immigrant experiences.
In both cases, it has been a pleasure to engage with some excellent library and curatorial staff, whose values are genuinely liberatory.
However, these activities also illustrate the way in which SLV — as an institution — extracts cultural capital from anti-colonial programming, furnishing itself with a veneer of progressivism. The library’s willing capitulation to the zionist colonial project reveals such programming to be little more than costume.
What, then, could explain this grotesque hypocrisy?
It was no surprise to learn that SLV currently lists the Gandel Foundation as a ‘Naming Rights Donor’. This zionist organisation directly funds and collaborates with the most violent colonial expansionist entities and occupation lobbyists. The foundation’s patriarch, John Gandel, recently asserted that Israel has ‘no choice’ but to go ‘all out’ in Gaza.
We continue to witness the very atrocities for which the Gandels openly advocate, and to which their foundation materially contributes, including the horrifying aftermath of this week’s massacre on al-Shifa hospital.
Similarly, it was no surprise to learn that zionist organisation Schwartz Media is currently listed as SLV’s ‘media partner’.
It is under the guise of progressivism that zionists launder their genocidal colonialism, weaponising their power and influence to amplify occupation propaganda, while steering cultural narratives away from Palestinian liberation.
I now consider my current exhibition contract and relationship with SLV terminated.
Image via @librarystaffforpalestine_naarm