On the Propelling Normalization of Violent Structures and the Imperative for Liberation

SMW: Silencing of critical voices in artistic research, complicity of so-called critical studies with structures of normalization of violence and discrimination of anti-colonial voices and practices in European art contexts and academies.- Three years ago, I would have never thought I would write this in a sentence summing up a reality for young artists in an educational context. Now it is a cruel reality. Even if this might be one of the first cases where it was revealed how personal and brutal the situation is, we also know this is not a singularity but a pattern of oppressing critical anti colonial voices.

 Could you tell us a bit more to get started? 

NS: On October 9^th, 2024, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna wrongfully terminated my employment as a PhD candidate with immediate effect. Simultaneously and independently, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) terminated my doctoral fellowship (ÖAW-DOC) with immediate effect and without a fair procedure, halting my doctorate project funding that was agreed to last through February 2026. 

The dismissal was made due to a re-posted story against Israel. This was not written by me, but I shared it for less than 24 hours on my personal Instagram account. The story is from disorientalizing[1]s Instagram account and it says: “death to Israel” is not just a threat. It is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution. may the entire colony burn to the ground for good.’ I shared this story while Israel was carpet bombing Beirut, when my friends, comrades and research participants were in danger. My neighborhood in Damascus, where my family lives is constantly attacked by Israel. Israel is also simultaneously committing a genocide in Gaza and systematically destroying the Palestinian educational system. However, I am the one who is accused of being a threat, for speaking out against the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza. 

While the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna officially fired me for “‘important reasons’”, the Austrian Academy of Sciences terminated my fellowship because of the Instagram story with immediate effect. This means that they refused to give me the 14 days period to challenge the decision in the labor court, or to change the PhD host institution. In their view my behavior “‘contradicts not only decency and morality’”.  At the same time, they claimed that it is ‘against existing penal legislation’ and this is completely baseless. 

The dismissal happened without respecting my rights as an academic worker, and I was not given a chance to defend myself or to speak. This causes me a lot of harm, and it sends a message to my colleagues: she is a ‘bad migrant’ don’t be like her, otherwise you will be next. Until today I am constantly defamed and criminalized by the rectorate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. For instance, they have sent an email to my colleagues who are standing in solidarity with me that I am calling for ‘violence, terror, and inhalation etc.’, and accusing me of ‘spreading hatred’. As if all the harm that was done, and the institutional violence that I am facing during this unjust procedure is not enough. They also did the same in a public statement, in which they referred to me as ‘a project employee’ without mentioning my name. Criminalizing me is in fact a crucial part of this institutional violence -even though the firing was not officially based on these accusations because they are baseless without a juridical process-. I was reported to the police by a politician because of the story I shared. However, the case was closed, they did not find anything against me, and the charges were dropped by the public prosecutor. These accusations are ridiculous, and they are obviously citing completely out of context. The story I reposted on my Instagram page is a political slogan and it is against Israel, not against Jewish people in Austria as it was claimed in the report. I am calling for the end of settler colonialism in Palestine as a solution against the violent death machine, to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. 

The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna also completely ignored that I was feeling unsafe when I told them that they should protect me from the Zionist defamatory social media trolling campaign that started more than year ago. It is as if according to them I don’t have the right to safety because I am a woman of color. 

All the above reminds of what Sara Ahmed calls ‘being the problem’[2] in her book ‘On being included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life’.

Here she says: 

‘Racism is treated as a breach in the happy image of diversity; racism is heard as an injury to the organization and its good will. To even use the word “racism” can mean to become the subject of ill will to become what makes the organization ill, what compromises the health of the organizational body or what gets away of institutional happiness.’[3]

When I took legal action - claiming that my dismissal was completely unjustified and based on racial prejudice - The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna rejected this. They even insisted I was the problem, stating that my claims only confirmed their decision.

What is happening to me is structural; institutional discrimination and racism are structural even if their manifestations target individuals aiming to separate us. I mean the racialized, tokenized others who work in European Academia in institutions that claim to be ‘diverse’ but they are still dominated by White men. My dismissal happened while the anti-migration post-Nazi far right party FPÖ has won the election in Austria for the first time since World War II. My dismissal also happened after a series of cancellations. Many events were cancelled, such as, the lecture of the queer theorist Dr. Walaa Alqaisyia, the lecture of the Marxist climate scholar and associate professor of human ecology at Lund University Dr. Andreas Malm in 2022. 

Ironically, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, uses de-, post-colonial theories. But these theories are used only to uphold a good international reputation, and not put into practice. This leads to the continuous silencing of Palestinian voices and their allies.

A group met on the seventh of October and discussed the consequences of my social media posting. Members of this group included: Rector Dr. Johan F. Hartle, Dr. Jakob Krameritsch, and Univ.-Prof. Dr. Sabeth Buchmann works with and teaches about decolonial, post-colonial, critical and Marxist subjects and studies. And Univ.-Prof. Mag. Christian Kravagna teaches Postcolonial studies and co-curated the exhibition Avant-Garde and Liberation: Contemporary Art and Decolonial Modernism, at Mumok that was shown from (June-September) 2024. It is absurd! 

SMW: “With immediate effect” …while we have had stories and events of devastating censorship in art and science especially since 7 of Oct with this harshness. The details and established structures are what is the rocket shock for me. Comrades of the non-art world have told me this; it is not a new pattern. We both know that the ripples and effects of this are: larger than the institutions as it’s also causing a pattern to spread in the cultural field. But still some of Christian Karavagna`s[4] texts we were reading making our final graduation at the HBK Braunschweig. The close dynamics and complicity are very sneaky here.

In Oslo we had the major art criticism platform (kunstkritikk.no)[5] featuring the Palestine solidarity camp at the art school already at the time when it was set up, while exactly at that time a curator from Vienna visited and told us first case witness that the attempt to set up a camp in Vienna was taken down immediately by the police. In Austria and Germany, nearly all the artworld is complicit with silencing any critical voice: which you contest in the power figures you have encountered as the propellors of censorship. However, it’s a personal existential attack as well as an alarm.

It might not be in the right words: but your story to be told and retold needs to counter the violence. Which stories are told matters. I would say Palestine is, and has been, the defining issue for many years Palestine is the defining issue. While so many countries show the ongoing or further ignited colonial forces like Haiti, Congo or Sudan, Palestine is still not seen at the same level as a colonial enterprise by Germany and Austria, and there I mean its art critics and art theorists especially. How would you describe this?

NS: Yes, Austria and Germany are the birth places of the Nazi regime that killed 6 million Jewish people in the holocaust, and where anti-Jewish hatred is a real problem. Today, parties with Nazi ideology are politically represented in governments. But migrants from the SWANA region are accused of importing ‘anti-Semitisms’, silenced, fired from their jobs, and even arrested for demonstrating against the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza. These places did not deal with their histories properly. Instead of taking responsibility and learning from their past(s), these places have not dealt with their histories. They are supporting and funding a genocide once again against the Palestinian people. The hypocrisy is frightening. I remember how on January 13^th, 2024, Namibia’s president condemned Germany’s decision to support Israel at the ICJ ‘because of their history’ and reminded them that Germany committed a genocide against the indigenous Herero and Nama people between 1904-1908 in Namibia. The fact that Germany has a genocidal and colonial history does not give them moral superiority, it should be the opposite. 

Regarding global solidarity, it is clear liberation is a global issue. Our freedom is intertwined with that of the freedom of Indigenous, Black and POC communities. The call to freedom and liberation includes Palestine's land, as well as others - for example Turtle Island.

But in Austria especially, ‘leftists’ tend to pick and choose the political issues they support; they pick issues that are far away, that don’t require unlearning, and that don’t shake their comfort. For instance, they support the Kurdish struggle for liberation, while completely ignoring the rich history of solidarity between Kurdish and Palestinian people. They speak about the anti-Black racism in the USA, while ignoring the anti-Black racism in their communities. As artists, we are expected to speak about liberation in art spaces, and in theory. But we are criminalized while we speak out against colonialism, oppression and land grabbing in our countries.  

When the defamatory campaign against me was in its peak, I did not want to speak about it. This is because I only want to speak about Palestine. I felt like what is happening to me is irrelevant in this moment in time, when my people in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine are experiencing horrors daily. But this repression is a crucial part of the same system of oppression. Genocides happen not only because of the people who are actively committing them, they happen because many people choose to stay silent and continue their business as usual. To the people who accept the status quo and choose to worry about their fundings: liberation won’t be funded, and actual change does not happen within Western hegemonic knowledge systems that are built on extraction and that did so much harm to Indigenous people. In telling my story I would like to always remind the people who listen, that this is part of a bigger issue. I hope to prevent more harm towards people like me who work in these institutions in the future.  

SMW: So, while complicity on the epistemological and material is sharpening this deadly drive, one also sees the personal is political. If complicity is the force, then we could only work across the divide on international solidarity. And that is about humanity and the imperative to not stop analysing the dynamics. 

But it’s a combination of analysis, deduction, empathy, observation and action. What we call sensing and making sense. When I read one of your last interviews[6] my first reaction was a big sympathy as you mention that you stopped going to the studio in October 2023. We also slowed down studio production in Germany refusing to go on with a more than complicit machinery and some of my comrades suggested a collective hunger strike on top of our usual organizing for solidarity at the end of 2023 and during 2024. Its idealistic and pathetic to some but it’s also the demonstration of the difficulty in navigating this complicity of growing imperialism to huge dimensions and the eroding common sense and ethical basics. Can you say a bit more about the refusal of your PhD and the aftermath? How have things changed now (in your career) following this?

NS: For me, as a politically engaged artist, I think my role is to leave the studio and be in the streets when people are demonstrating. I want to do something that could be more useful to my community in such difficult times. I cannot produce works to be exhibited, while I am witnessing a life-streamed genocide. I had to think about how to use my tools and reshape my practice, which is becoming clearer now. As an educator, I teach about Palestine, I could also work on strengthening my community in diaspora. My world changed forever after Gaza; it is the defining issue like you mentioned. I can never continue my life as usual while I see Palestinian people burning a life in their tents on my screen., I live with an enormous grief that moves me. For instance, I am surprised I am being called an ‘activist’ lately - while I don’t define myself as one, it is as if I need a special title for speaking out against settler colonialism and genocide. However, a lot of my work has always been around Palestinian embroidery, which is a practice that emerged out of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. I believe it is my role as an artist and researcher, to use my platform to speak out against injustice while questioning the status quo. As James Baldwin beautifully said: ‘The role of the artist is the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I must make you conscious of the things you don’t see’[7]. Gaza showed me how many western intellectual and most institutions are complicit, all they care about is securing their jobs, and funding, while extracting the knowledge of the people they dehumanize. 

Regarding your question about the hunger strike: these strategies do work and have worked for centuries but they are not enough. I think each of us should use our skills and platforms from our own positions. For example, as a professor at the university you could organize with your colleagues on an academic level and give a space to Palestinian academic workers and their allies who have been censored and criminalized. What is happening to me shows me that there is a lack in cultural organizing on an institutional level to protect each other in academic spaces, even though there is a lot of international solidarity. 

SMW: Yup thanks that’s what we are doing! But, again, is it enough when the violence progresses? And there is complicity in the context here as well.

These mechanisms of extraction in academia and the art world are fueled through the power relations you speak about and so many of the agents in that claim a kind of impunity within.

And it’s easy to put the finger on the leftist intellectuals so then it fuels for the right -wing leaning of the whole society. Is it not more relevant to analyze the dynamics a bit wider? The art world has been very happy in Germany and Austria drawing loads of exhibitions and artists to the post war cultural hub, but the history and conflicts persisted. Now the divide is drawn, and the bourgeois middle class feel deprived. The expat cultural worker is angered that the funding stops.

So, a tool from our artistic practice has been to ask: who is benefitting from this? And, again, since October 2023, a lot more “sensible” artists have recognized that German guilt is part of the problem. The same ones, who were in complete denial one year ago, see that the connection to the imperialist structures of suppression is not made: as there is Christmas money to be spend, babies to be made and holidays to be planned. More and more I see the gap widening instead of mobilization across the divide. The institutions in art and education that spoke up supporting Israel after the 7 of October attack: none of them apologised or pay an effort to correct the wrongs. Now it’s obvious that Israel - with the help of Europe and USA - is fueling the humanitarian disaster on purpose. And that is based on the widely supported de- humanizing. So, the connections are not made since it reveals the intended and prolonged abuse of power in higher education and avoids accountability.

NS: This ‘guilt’ is weaponized to suppress people, and it is full of ‘White fragility’[8], and a refusal to take accountability of past crimes to prevent more harm in the future. In Berlin, anti-Zionist Jews are also fired and arrested for speaking out against Israel. I have read that in 2023, of the 84 cases of deplatforming or cancellation documented by the German Diaspora Alliance, a quarter (25%) targeted Jewish individuals or groups with Jewish members. While Jews represent less than 1% of the population. 

Who benefits from this? This is a great question.I ask my research participants from the Palestinian embroidery community in Lebanon: ‘what should be studied?’ ‘How can my work be beneficial to your community?’. These last months have been so difficult, I remember transcribing some interviews I did in Lebanon, while worrying about my research participants’ safety. I asked myself this question a lot too: who is benefiting from this? And why am I writing today and for whom? 

SMW: Crafting the community. In “Whites, Jews, and Us” Houria Bouteldja often brings in this sentence interrogating herself: Why am I writing this book?[9] While this was written in a different time, it is a fantastic and crude analysis of the revolutionary love. I recently went back to because of a conversation with a friend: crafting the community is also making alliances specific and seeing connections and differences but with a specific blueprint: Who is the alliance benefitting?  You can find this in the writings and practice of Aimee Cesaire and Franz Fanon how fascism is a colonialism now applied to Europe, what previously was a strategy for the colonies.  It’s what I find a more accurate description of the necropolitical[10] dynamics repeating while we are socially and politically in Europe. It’s a strong relation between fascist and colonial tendencies but slightly different packages at the time we witness you might say. Yet oppressing systems constantly disguised in variations in the past and in the present: So, it’s the dynamics we must see and what they do, for whom. In your case we have scholars and government employees calling themselves post-colonial, who are employed for life in higher education and responsible for firing you but gave you a high-ranking fellowship first.

The material conditions are traceable and reveal strategies of suppression only to a certain extent, they are tools, bringing us back to material artistic practices that connect communities to the past and ongoing traditions. These build solidarities through cultures while remaining rooted in a specific one. And a beautifully coded system of embroidery or a clear message in your work don’t have to exclude each other. Instead as a counterstrategy against the structures of censorship and oppression they rather strengthen each other and the community.

Would you like to tell a bit about the specifics of Palestinian embroidery? As we heard, there is the connection to your community and forms of research infused in artistic material practices.

NS: People in our communities are not political by choice. Their whole existence is political, because even their bodies are deemed violent. So, an intimate activity which is mostly done by women such as Palestinian embroidery carries this. Embroidery before the Nakba in 1948 reflected the socio-political and economic conditions of the embroiderer. After the Nakba, it reflects the life and anti-colonial resistance of Palestinian women in Palestine and diaspora. It is a fragile, deep, and complex counter-archive. It is also personal and intimate at the same time because of the relation to the embroiderer’s body. It is a language but an anti-colonial language, and a tradition of the oppressed that appears clearly in moments of immediacy, which are full of revolutionary possibilities. It challenges the power structures and limitations of a written language. The continuity of such slow practice in occupied Palestine or in diaspora is itself political too, in my case it also required a lot of unlearning. I wanted to speak about practices of resistance in relation to class and displacement, so I learned embroidery from my grandmother and other women I met in Damascus and its suburbs. A lot of times words fail me, so I embroider.

SMW: So, there is a very personal and a shared community part here.  In cultural heritage and in craft traditions (especially where one can locate a sense of growing superpowers) for the under commons to connect the pessimism of the mind with optimism of the soul. Another aspect that can be listened to again and again are the songs connecting to land. This connects all living and formerly or future living in non-verbal and anti-colonial relation to land and all it nurtures.

……

Nour and Susanne’s ways crossed in Oslo in 2024, at the time of the ongoing Palestinian genocide.

Both artists are engaged in structures of solidarity and liberation through dialogue and workshops on methodologies. 

Nour Shantout is an artist, researcher and educator. Born in Damascus, she now is based in Vienna. Her work is situated in continuity with the political application of Palestinian embroidery, a practice that emerged out of the struggle for Palestinian liberation. 

Susanne M Winterling is focusing in research and education on art and ecology as well as art and science. Both are branches of one tree, where we observe power structures defining our times and conditions from future to past and vice versa. They/them are professor of material and medium based arts.