Published by Tribune. Original article here.

[image|Alt text|image link]

It had been so long since I’d had my work hanging in a gallery, and having a selection of my ‘Women of Discord’ on display in not just any gallery but a proper one in central Manchester did give me the feeling of being back on track after so many years of artistically floundering.

Amongst those I chose to include in my wall hanging were my all-time hero, the Socialist Suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst; Asenath Barzani, the first female Rabbi (that we know of) from Kurdish Iraq; Frida Kahlo, the iconic Communist Mexican artist; my best friend, disability and asylum rights activist Manjeet Kaur who died in 2020; Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist who was killed by the Israeli military in 2003 in Rafah, Gaza; and Queen Nzinga who fought the Portuguese colonisation of Angola, amongst others.

At the 2024 Open Exhibition, the walls were alive and busy, not just with some beautiful and fascinating pieces but also with many overtly political works — pieces championing feminist ideals, LGBT+ perspectives, and anti-austerity politics.

It was the height of irony when HOME cancelled Voices of Resilience last week, a sold-out Palestinian literature event featuring Maxine Peak alongside Palestinian speakers. Following a campaign by pro-Israel groups, the venue suddenly declared itself to be a ‘politically neutral space’. It’s not out of the norm to see institutions hide behind the political neutrality argument, but I don’t think that facade has ever been more conspicuously transparent than with HOME.

An open letter signed by hundreds of theatremakers and cultural workers highlighted the hypocrisy of HOME suddenly declaring itself a politically neutral space while showing countless films, theatre productions, and exhibitions centred around political events. A statue of Engels himself stood right outside, the colours of the Ukrainian flag still not entirely faded from his surface.

Days after up to 1000 people demonstrated outside HOME in protest at their decision to censor Palestinian voices at a time when they could not be more urgent, I and dozens of other artists gathered to remove our art en masse from the venue’s exhibitions. One artist, Freya Wysocki, justifying our actions, explained: ‘We are removing our art pieces to support the event producers and, more importantly, to support the Palestinian people whose stories must be told.’

The message of our action was clear: we will celebrate the fight for human rights and against colonialism and tell the stories of those who fight for their rights when it matters most, not only after the dust has settled and popular opinion has changed. Too often, the establishment and wider society are only willing to side against injustices once they are resolved, like how the same people who labelled Nelson Mandela as a terrorist later declared him to be a hero.

Many cultural institutions want to celebrate a sanitised version of Manchester’s radical history while they distance themselves from present-day politics. Our history was born out of the struggle, suffering and sacrifice of the people on the ground; Mancunians from across the political spectrum will boast about Manchester as the place of unions, abolition, Marx and Engels, Suffragettes, and Peterloo. It’s safe to do so when the consensus has been established, and the struggle is deemed no longer relevant and is just another page in history that we can boast about.

But right now, Palestinians cannot wait for the world to sit around pontificating about Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ versus the people of Gaza’s right not to be slaughtered in their thousands.

Thanks to the protests of artists and public pressure, HOME has pledged to restore the cancelled event, claiming in a statement: ‘We support Palestinian and all community voices, and acknowledge that we can learn from how this was handled. We regret that this has had such wide-reaching impacts.’

This success is to be celebrated, but we are under no illusions that it makes no material difference for Palestinians pulling the remains of their entire families out of the rubble of Gaza and huddling in Rafah, wondering if they are about to be massacred any minute.

If Voices of Resilience is, as promised, restored and is a sell-out event where people throw roses at the stage, that’s nice. But it won’t bring down the occupation and stop the genocide in Gaza. The most it will do is show the creatives behind Voices of Resilience that there are those who will leverage their platform (in our case, the few inches to a few metres of gallery wall each of us could call our ‘platform’) to fight for Palestinian voices.

It may even show those who attempt to get any and every Palestinian event cancelled with quite often bizarrely spurious accusations of antisemitism and terrorism that they can’t behave like this. Perhaps it will help people realise that no one owns the word ‘genocide’. It may even encourage more events focused on Palestinian stories.

But whatever the outcome, this is our own corner. Small and insignificant as it might be in the grand scheme of things, I hope our act of removing our humble art from the gallery walls does at least demonstrate that we are willing to walk away from Omelas.

The term ‘Scapegoat’ stems from Ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions. In the Biblical text, an actual goat is prepared as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of the populace by having it ‘carry’ their sins out into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement, removing sin from the community. The original term ‘azazel’, means ‘for removal’, or ‘sender away of sins’.

In modern usage, ‘Scapegoat’ or ‘Scapegoating’ refers to the practice of singling out a particular party for unmerited blame in society. As a political tool, we often see the scapegoating of distinct social groups. Throughout recent history, such group range from Trade Unionists, the Jewish community, migrant groups (such as immigrants from the West Indies and Eastern European migrants), Irish Travellers, the unemployed, the Muslim community and refugees. Such scapegoats are often propagated by mainstream media, who neglect important facts about these communities, twist visual representations and appropriate situations to the advantage of the worldview that they are selling – often in favour of those who seek to profit from social division.

Working with refugees, asylum seekers and other displaced peoples, I have seen first hand how scapegoating can affect communities and individuals. It results in social isolation, mental health issues such as depression and a lack of awareness about your rights. It also brings about stereotyping, racial tensions, prevents accountability, legitimises harmful legislation targeting certain groups, hate crime and violence.

With a delegation from RAPAR human rights charity, I arranged a workshop which would give victims of scapegoating, some of the most persecuted and voiceless individuals in our community, an opportunity to actively confront the media that is used against them by politicians and tabloids, by cutting apart the hysterical headlines, ill-informed quotations and propaganda to tell it like it is…

“I had no idea how therapeutic that could be, cutting up all those offensive headlines!”

– Nahella (Workshop Participant)

“We have all these untruths and biased opinions of the politicians and newspapers which have some really hurtful affects on these communities, we did not simply say ‘this is your opinion, but we think…’ it was about saying ‘your opinion is wrong, and here is why…’.”

– Workshop Participant

“The power is in the words and its how we use them. So we took the negative words and made them positive, and so can we do with our lives and society, to not to feed our younger generation with harmfully biased views, but with positive and welcoming attitude.”

– Manjeet (Workshop Participant)

“I think it was a very empowering exercise for us. I think these headlines are highly discriminatory, and I hate how they just get away with saying these things.”

– Workshop Participant

“I liked having the opportunity to express myself so that people will know we are here to contribute, to help this country not to hurt it. It is often hard to get people to understand this, but our work today made me feel better about confronting this attitude”.

– Abiola (Workshop Participant)

The delegation consisted primarily of asylum seekers (people who have claimed asylum after fleeing persecution in their own country). For them, the important aspect of this workshop was that the participants- rather than simply talking or writing about their own stories, were actively ‘Re-writing’ the propaganda used against them in a direct way.

They were able to not only challenge this media, but to challenge it in a way that would give them an outlet for not simply expressing themselves, but to do so in a community setting that would enhance their participation and dialogue about their perspective, their stories and how their existence should be acknowledged and understood that these communities are given space to speak out for themselves.