Stop art washing genocide!

Could you please start telling me a little bit about who you are, where we are, and what is going on?

We’re an action group. We don’t have to fight the university bureaucracy. Many societies are hinged on rules. For instance, they have to book spaces when they want to be somewhere, or there are rules that keep them open.

It is not free, and the university can stop or restrict them from engaging in political activity. However, because we’re an action group, we can bypass that. We didn’t book this part of the building; we reclaimed it as our space. We’re paying over £9k in tuition fees a year, and we’re unable to just come and sit in our space and politicise our education to engage with students?

This campus is Central Saint Martins. We organised an occupation in solidarity with Palestinian students. It’s one of the many UAL campuses. However, this campus matters a great deal to the university because it has notable alumni, particularly from UAL Students for Justice. It’s a good target because the fashion courses are sponsored by L’Oreal, one of our divestment targets. At UAL, in many fashion courses, students must participate in a catwalk sponsored by L’Oreal to graduate.

L’Oreal has factories on occupied land in Palestine and fuels the ongoing genocide, land theft, and apartheid. It also goes against what UAL claims to stand for. A lot of universities like to use buzzwords like sustainability, ethics, and diversity, but they never uphold them. We’re saying that if they claim to be a sustainable university that cares about students across the globe, they should put that into action rather than just on their website to seem palatable, right?

That leads me to my second question: what is the university’s complicity in genocide outside of L’Oréal?

UAL has partnerships. One is L’Oréal, and another, also central to our campus, is LVMH. Again, many fashion courses are sponsored by LVMH, which has factories on occupied land, in addition to unsustainable practices such as diamond extraction methods. UAL is banking with Lloyds. We’re aware that Lloyds has invested in arms manufacturers. We’re asking them to find ethical alternatives.

You might have noticed that many university organisers are asking their universities to disaffiliate with the National Union of Students. That’s where our students’ unions are organised, but they conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, which goes into another demand: for UAL to drop the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, and implement an anti-racist charter.

We understand that though we’re organizing for a free, liberated Palestine, an end to apartheid, an end to Zionism, it’s intersectional to other causes. These partnerships also affect ongoing violence and genocide in Sudan and Congo.

Another thing is that with Palestinian students, their education shouldn’t be conditional on whether they’re able to leave their homeland. They should be able to access education wherever they are, and it should be in their homeland if they want to stay, right?

There’s an organization called the Committee for Higher Education in Gaza; they have a campaign outlining ways universities in the West can rebuild and support higher education in Gaza. One of our demands of UAL is that they make a public pledge to support rebuilding higher education in Gaza.

Could you give me a list of your demands?

They’re separated into four subsections. Declare, defend, divest, and redress. UAL should call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, and make a public declaration condemning the murder and displacement of academics, students, artists, designers, and craftspeople, and the destruction of universities in Gaza.

We demand UAL divest from investments or financial interests that make the institution and its members and institutions complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people. We want direct divestment from complicit institutions, and for them to move investments to banks aligned with UAL’s mission of social purpose.

It is crucial to defend freedom of speech within the university, and with the implementation of an anti-racist charter, there can be more support for students of every minority: Jewish, Muslim, Black, and Asian students, and queer and trans students, too.

We need a charter that supports everyone, but also that represents everyone, because we also have a lot of students, Jewish students within our movement, who feel and have told the university that the IHRA doesn’t represent them, yet UAL doesn’t listen. That’s the defense section, which concerns the dropping of the IHRA.

They also have to clearly state and condemn the ongoing genocide backed by the UK and the United States. A genocide that, for more than two years, our tuition fees have been going towards and paying for.

Our demands target divestment so we have a more sustainable university that isn’t compensating the genocide, for example, in arts, culture, finances, and all of that. We’re asking for more because, when you break down these systems, you also need something in place to ensure we can sustain ourselves.

That’s the redress. But also, again, the student scholarships, rebuilding higher education in Gaza, and UAL creating a cultural institute for Palestinians within our university. It’s an arts university, and we want an archive or center for Palestinian arts and culture. Our university has many kinds of archives, but none for Palestinians.

We’re asking for our university to implement a scholarship specifically for Palestinian and displaced students, so that they can study at UAL with waived tuition fees, and it’s more accessible to them when they’re going through genocide.

You had the protest about a week ago for Palestinian scholarships. Is there any way in which the university censored you, or was there pushback?

Many other universities are very repressive in the sense that they shut down student protests or have a police presence on campus, like SOAS and KCL. But UAL is sneaky in how they repress us. For large fashion show protests, organisers hire extra security and deploy a very aggressive police presence. However, for day-to-day protesting, they’re not repressive because they care about their image. UAL is a university centered on its image in the larger arts and culture sphere. But when we negotiate with them, they deflect and don’t create change.

They seem to be a university – this is a quote from them – for troublemaking, which is hypocritical and untruthful, and a way for them to co-opt our movement. Because of that, they’re not repressive when it comes to day-to-day organiaing or on the rally we had last Thursday; they don’t want to appear in the news as a university that curtails freedom of speech.

We were also asking management for a scholarship for Yazan Qasim, whose exhibition we have here in one of the tents. And they did nothing to reach out. We kept asking. They sent out one call. They decided on a time, and then he couldn’t join it because he’s being bombed every day, they didn’t establish any other time. They’re not updating us on the situation.

So one of our demands for this event is to have a sculpture for him and have a place for him at UAL.

Do you see this link between art and politics being diminished by UAL altogether? You cannot make art if you’re under occupation, you cannot make art if you’re under a genocide.

One hundred percent. You know, the idea that this is an arts university that doesn’t focus on the political aspect, you feel like it diminishes. As student organisers, we understand art and politics cannot be separated. As you said, you cannot create art if you’re under genocide. The ability to use art as escapism and not talk about ongoing genocide, ongoing land theft, and occupation is immoral. We only have this ability because we’re in a space of privilege where we’re able to talk about anything else.

For the people in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, and Kashmir, they don’t have that privilege. For an institution that commercialises art and brings it to a level where it’s operating under capitalism, it can move away from politics and create capital that just generates money and income without creating change.

Therefore, UAL can separate arts and politics in its curriculum. Many students would agree that our lectures and our day-to-day education in the university are not politicised, and discussions on Palestine or any form of politics outside of neoliberalism and white feminism are precluded. I am saying that as a journalism student at the university. And also, UAL is able to weaponise its money and social standing within the arts and culture. They’re able to diminish what we’re doing here and just say that it’s some kind of performance they’ve allowed.

But we’re trying, as best we can, to say that we don’t want to exist within their bureaucracy, and that art is political. We shouldn’t art-wash genocide, and as artists, we should stand up for all the artists in Gaza and the globe who haven’t had the opportunity to express themselves freely. We should acknowledge our privilege. There are so many artists in Gaza who aren’t given that opportunity, which is disgusting.

Our friend Yazan Qasim, a student from Al-Azhar who, before the escalation of genocide, wanted to study at Al-Azhar University, and he only got to study at the university for one day, when his house was bombed. They don’t have time to create art because they’re trying to escape constant bombing, they’re trying to live through an enforced famine, they’re trying to look after their family, or grieving because they’re real human beings, they’re martyrs who have lost a mother or father at a young age.

You realise that privilege when we’re living in the West, and you know, try and fight so that those in Gaza can create too, but also learn from their steadfastness because our actions and the phrases that we use, we’re learning all of that from Gaza, we’re learning from the first and second Intifada.

So they move away from politics to be a neutral university that stands for all. However, that’s unfair and untrue; they repress us when we talk about Palestine. That is not a neutral stance. People are welcome to visit the university and speak positively about the IDF’s occupation.

They’re able to come into our institutions from within the Zionist entity in occupied Palestine and Israel, whatever you want to call it, the fake state, right? And they come here from places like that, and freely talk about art in a way that uplifts those systems. But when we talk about Palestine, they turn us down.

Prevent guidelines are supposed to stop students from turning to terrorism. However, as student organisers, we’re able to see how Prevent guidelines are co-opted as a space for anti-Arab students and Islamophobia.

We have a case study within UAL where we invited Palestinian organisers to teach an introduction to Palestine at UAL; it was meant to define terms like occupation, settler colonialism, and indigenous or indigeneity, so people can have the right language to talk about the things we do in our activism. UAL used Prevent guidelines against us so that we weren’t able to facilitate that event. In the past, they’ve also called the police on our activists and threatened us with suspension. Where’s the neutrality in that?

Another instance, which highlights the importance of an anti-racist charter, is when UAL sent out a letter to all Muslim students saying not to be anti-Semitic and to be mindful after October 7th. We can provide proof of these things. That is racism. And then they’re saying that there’s no need for an anti-racist charter, and what they have is enough. They always say what they have is enough, that the sanctuary scholarship is enough, which is just two places anyone can apply for; it is still not accessible.

To clarify, our universities aren’t small, underfunded organising spaces lacking researchers or academics to support their research, such as finding new ethical alternatives. They’re institutions with million-pound endowments, and they keep on acting as if they’re children. They won’t hold themselves to account.

They won’t be responsible for what they’re doing. It’s frustrating because our universities often act as if they don’t have a say in culture, society, or academia. But then, if you don’t, what are you even doing? If you don’t have enough academics to support decolonizing your curriculum or implementing new sustainable partnerships, then how can you even call yourself a university if you don’t have all of these systems in place? Then you’re just a building with things going on.

I feel like one thing that I really want to say is that I really want to target this to students. I want students to understand that this isn’t something far away or disconnected from them. Like one of our signs says, no tuition fees for genocide. When we’re paying these extortionate amounts to study, our money isn’t going to fixing the toilets here that don’t work. Our money isn’t going towards securing the new resources we desperately need.

Our money is going towards fueling occupation, fueling genocide. Allowing for these infrastructures to just continue, you know? We have a really good chant we use all the time that I feel kind of sums it up. It’s money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation. UAL is so fast to make staff redundant because they don’t have enough money to pay them, but they’ll gladly put some money into some arms institution, right? money in the po

My closing argument is to name and shame those in our management. So I want to say shame on you, Karen Stanton, the vice chancellor of our university. Shame on you, Clive Myrie, the chancellor of our university. Shame on you, Mark Crowley, our dean of students. Shame on any higher management people within the University of Arts London who are not taking action when they know that their university, which they fight for, is complicit in genocide. When they go home at night, how do they look at their family without feeling guilty, given their complicity in the ongoing occupation?

How do they sit with their family and in one breath say, “Oh, I’ve got work tomorrow,” and then in the next breath see people in Gaza being bombed, people in Gaza being denied their right to education, denied their right to food, denied their right to protest, and feel comfortable going into work the next day? And I want to say that every one of my convictions towards anti-imperialism comes from the students in Gaza. I am inspired by them.

You have seen students in Gaza, primary school students within the West Bank, who have been denied the opportunity to go to university. IDF soldiers have blocked the way for primary school students, six, seven, ten years old, denied the right to go to school, and they’re being met by grown adults with guns. Yet they’re still standing up for their right to education.

Everyone here who has privileged access to UAL looks at the students who have nothing, are denied everything, and still stand up for themselves. That’s what I would say.

Another UAL student statent

I want to send a message to the fellow students organising in the West because everything we have is the result of exploitation, and we should hold ourselves accountable for that, even if it feels hopeless. We have to be trying. We have to be present no matter what, even if it feels like it’s not changing anything.

It’s scary to imagine walking through those silent, complicit buildings, made to maintain the status quo. We should challenge them at all costs, even if it doesn’t seem to be working. There will be no outcome we can measure.

There’s always a place for everyone in any organising group. We all need people in our group. We need everyone to be involved to see liberation, and to oppose the global rise of fascism. The only way is for everyone to get involved in organising, in whatever capacity they have. And something we say within our meetings all the time is the guilt that you feel right now, don’t be complacent in that. Go and use it and move it into action. Put that emotion somewhere productive.

Stop art washing genocide!