A legal smear campaign has ousted a museum director over the inclusion of a pro-Palestinian statement in an exhibition examining the work of Forensic Architecture at the University of Manchester.
Artnet News is reporting the forced resignation of Alistair Hudson following a concerted lobbying effort on the part of several prominent local barristers who form the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).
Hudson has been the director of the university’s Whitworth Art Gallery since 2017 and became the target of the pro-Israel group’s effort after allowing the statement as part of a show called Cloud Studies that focused in part on the activist group’s study of poor air quality and human rights in areas that included the occupied territories as well as Louisiana and Beirut.
In a statement, Forensic Architecture’s founder Eyal Weizman said the saga “makes clear yet again that the anti-colonial struggle in support of Palestine and elsewhere has to be fought within and sometimes against our public institutions, including universities and art and cultural spaces,” before adding that, in light of the measure “no conscientious curator could now take over Alistair’s job, and no artist would want to show their work within the stifling walls of the Whitworth.”
The FA text itself was taken down and then reinstalled in August after a pro-Israel onslaught of complaints directed towards the museum, which was accused of sharing a “one-sided” message that also decried the IDF’s criminal activities during their three-week incursion into the Gaza strip this past May.
The re-installation then led UKLFI to call on the University of Manchester’s vice-president, Nalin Thakkar, to enact punitive measures against Hudson, who also serves as director of the Manchester Art Gallery. The letter-writing campaign appears to have not affected his other title as of this writing. Weizman said the resignation was “the last in a series of bullying actions by the University, which initially aimed at silencing our solidarity with Palestinians” in a statement provided to the Guardian.
The university has declined to comment on the incident. The exhibition will remain on view in its new temporary home in the West Wing of Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery until February 27th.
4 Comments
Forensic Architecture is wholly devoted to presenting facts, yes? I mean, they recreate actual events based on data and evidence, not propaganda, yes? Why is that problematic to anyone?
because everyone is allowed to have alternative facts now ?
Why? Because if you don't kowtow to Israel, you must be an anti-semite.
That's my impression of their work too - they try to present a factual recreation of events, frequently mired in a lack of information, using technologies like LIDAR. But I guess the issue of contention is the statement that was put up rather than the FA project? Is the statement part of the project? What does it say?
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