Covering Dissensus: Institutional Mediation is not about Institutional Comfort

Savage Klub Image 3
SaVĀge K'lub: Te Paepae Aora’I – Where the Gods Cannot be Fooled. Photo by CIMAM.

5 May 2025

The global weakening and questioning of the principle of freedom of expression resulted in the Museum Watch Committee recently focusing during its discussions on both the ethical position of museums and that of the relation between artists and institutions.

While this is a broad phenomenon, not limited to specific topics, censorship cases of Palestinian artists and of artists advocating for the Palestinian cause have been particularly poignant markers of this development. One of the recent and broadly mediatized of these cases was the termination of Khaled Sabsabi’s commission as a representative of Australia for the Venice Biennale.

There is another recent Australian case that we felt it was meaningful to share, because of its utter simplicity, which may allow us to skip complex discussions and focus on the basics.

The Palestinian flag is not prohibited in Australia, as it is not prohibited to advocate for a free Palestine. All the same, the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) recently asked the Pacific Indigenous collective SaVĀge K'lub, to cover two Palestinian flags that formed a tapestry comprised of protest T-shirts of emancipatory cultural symbols within a larger installation on show in the NGA titled, SaVĀge K'lub: Te Paepae Aora’I – Where the Gods Cannot be Fooled.

Because of the importance attached to sustaining relations in their culture, the artists decided to work with NGA by exploring alternative possibilities rather than removing their work entirely. The eventual compromise was to cover the Palestinian flags with a piece of white cloth, and it is this solution for the two flags that makes this case so enlightening.

While it is tempting to interpret these pieces of white cloth as a flag of surrender, they may also be seen as an undefined absence, a blank space, or the image of a piece of virgin paper. The outcome of the negotiation is not without merit because it is so straightforward and clear. It puts a spot on the problem of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What is this problem exactly?

A statement published by the NGA earlier on states: Consideration was given to past protest activity and vandalism at the National Gallery, the volatility of the environment and reported violence, vandalism and threats in Canberra, and across Australia at the time.

Indeed, in 2022, the NGA was hit, like several other museums worldwide, by climate change protesters. In the NGA, the activists glued themselves to Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, or actually, more precisely, to the glass protecting those.

Retroprojecting the present act of pre-emptive censorship to that moment, the NGA would – if it would have anticipated the danger then – have had to cover the glass protecting the Campbell’s Soup Cans, and that of all the other works protected by glass, with white cloth, evoking the image of an uninhabited house where the interior has been protected by covering the furniture.

We stand with the principle that artists need to be able to express themselves as freely as possible.

We understand that museums may sometimes have to carefully stage presentations and contextualise them, in order to respect not only the art but also their audiences, and that they may sometimes even be unable to show certain works for good reasons. It is their core mission to mediate between artistic proposals that ought to be as free as possible and the sensitive limits of the societies they serve and address.

We feel that collaboration between artists and museums on such sensitive topics is a crucial aspiration and a positive event if it leads to a just, calibrated outcome. Such collaboration, however, needs to start with an articulated position by the institution outlining the limits it feels ought to be considered and how they may be addressed.

Here, the artists have been marvelously open, but the statement of the NGA doesn’t offer much in reciprocation.

Any perceived risk of damage could have been resolved through processes of security and, crucially, in keeping with museum best practices, mediation.

We are therefore surprised that the NGA was, in this case, unwilling or unable to defend the art, the artists, or the work they were showing. The Palestinian banners were merely an element in a broader installation of works that continues to be on show. We don’t understand why this particular identity had to be erased.

The quality of the reflection and mediation of contemporary art museums today is in the degree to which a museum succeeds in extending the space of what can be presented and represented, which is the opposite of taking out and covering anything felt to be potentially sensitive to particular individual visitors. Institutional mediation is not about institutional comfort. In no way ought museum mediation to surrender to fear of dissensus.

In representation of the CIMAM Museum Watch Committee, integrated by:

  • Zeina Arida, (Chair) Director, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar.
  • Bart De Baere, Director, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium.
  • Amanda de la Garza, Artistic Deputy Director, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS), Madrid, Spain.
  • Malgorzata Ludwisiak, Ph.D., Museum Management Expert / Freelance Curator / Academic Teacher, Warsaw, Poland.
  • Agustin Perez Rubio, Independent Curator, Madrid, Spain.
  • Kitty Scott, Strategic Director, Fogo Island Arts / Shorefast, Toronto, Canada.
  • Yu Jin Seng, Director (Curatorial & Research), National Gallery Singapore, Singapore.

CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art – is an Affiliated Organization of ICOM.