Collectors Withdraw Art in Response to Barbican's Palestine Censorship
A pair of quilts by Loretta Pettway were removed from the exhibition.
Artworks were pulled out from the Barbican in London in protest of the cancellation of a lecture titled “The Shoah after Gaza” by Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, as per a report by The Guardian. This move sparked a response from collectors Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet, who demanded the removal of two quilts by artist Loretta Pettway from the exhibition Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art.
Leviste and Mayet expressed their discontent with the Barbican’s decision, labeling it as an act of censorship. They reached out to the curators of “Unravel” to provide clarification regarding the lecture’s cancellation. Subsequently, Leviste and Mayet published their entire email exchange with the Barbican online after the quilts were taken down from the exhibition, as reported by Artnet.
The Barbican had originally withdrawn from hosting the lecture in collaboration with the London Review of Books (LRB) after discovering the talk’s title and its focus on Israel’s ongoing conflict in Gaza. According to the Barbican, the LRB had prematurely advertised the event, preventing them from giving the topic the proper consideration they believed it required. However, Leviste and Mayet rejected this explanation, criticizing the Barbican’s use of ambiguous language such as “care” to justify what they viewed as an arbitrary suppression of speech.
In solidarity with artists confronting oppressive systems, Leviste and Mayet withdrew the quilts from the exhibition. The Barbican’s curators acknowledged the absence of the quilts with a brief statement, indicating their respect for the lenders’ decision. Pettway, the artist behind the withdrawn quilts, did not offer any comment on the situation.
