Whitney Museum Axes ISP Performance Centering Palestinian Mourning
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, last week canceled a performance by a group of participants in its prestigious Independent Study Program that had taken Palestinian mourning as its subject. Titled No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, the work featured a score of texts by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe, and Brandon Shimoda, and was to be performed by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi on May 14 as part of the exhibition “a grammar of attention,” organized by the ISP’s curatorial cohort of Bea Ortega Botas, Kennedy Hollins Jones, Tamara Khasanova, and Ntshadi Mofokeng. The show is one of the capstone exhibitions presented by the ISP’s various cohorts at the end of the year.
ISP associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió was told three days before the work’s presentation that the Whitney had canceled it, after a video came to light of Tbakhi introducing the same work in fall 2024, at a staging organized by the Poetry Project and Jewish Currents. In the video, Tbakhi delivers a speech in which he outlines the beliefs to which audience members must hew if they wish to watch the performance, telling those who believe in Israel or America “in any incarnation,” as well as those who “would like to encourage people to vote” and those who felt it was “important” that the artists “condemn violence” to leave. The museum in a statement cited Tbakhi’s introduction, which it said conflicted with its “zero-tolerance” policy for harassment or discriminatory behavior, as the reason it terminated the event. The Whitney called out the artist for valorizing “specific acts of violence and imagery of violence” and said that there was “no instance when we would find it acceptable to single out members of our community based on their belief system and ask them to leave an exhibition or performance.” The museum also noted that other works in the ISP exhibitions address the conflict in Gaza, as have previous works displayed in the Whitney itself.
“Canceling the performance No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom was not a decision the museum took lightly, but it was clear and necessary,” explained the museum. “This decision was not about the topics discussed, but because their presentation violated the standards agreed to by all members of our community, including ISP participants.”
Nadal-Melsió told Hyperallergic and Artnet News that the introduction was not part of the performance, additionally telling the latter platform that her attempts to bring museum management into conversation with the event’s curators had been consistently rebuffed.
Founded in 1968 and absorbed into the Whitney in the early 1980s, the ISP has long served as a renowned incubator for artists, curators, and critics. Nadal-Melsió in a statement affirmed that the program “stands by the rights of artists to express themselves and embodies the duties of artists to think and discuss freely. Its foundational premises are that it is independent—free from outside influences that would dictate what to think or discuss—and a place for study—to learn with and from others.”
“The Whitney’s decision to cancel the show does not come as a complete surprise, as for almost the past three weeks, our capstone projects, across all ISP cohorts, have undergone an intense level of scrutiny from the senior administration of the museum,” wrote the exhibition’s curators in a statement published by Artnews. “We, as curators, stand by the works of all the artists in our show, and condemn the museum’s actions.”
Tbakhi, Fakhouri, and Maghathe told Hyperallergic that they stood by the original introduction. “The only purpose of continuing to make art in this moment is to galvanize audiences towards acting to stop the machinery of genocide,” said the trio. “If this cancellation does that, then we have succeeded.”
