Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz has created a clothing campaign to boost funds for Gazan journalists and media employees. All earnings are being donated to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS) — a non-governmental skilled group representing approximately four-fifths of Palestine’s media workers. In May, the PSJ was awarded the annual UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, the one journalistic freedom award given by the United Nations.
Since Hamas’s October 7 assaults final yr, the Israeli army’s bombardment of Gaza has killed upwards of 134 Palestinian journalists and media employees, in line with the Committee to Protect Journalists. Breitz’s marketing campaign, which launched final week, options black t-shirts, sweatshirts, and different objects bearing a design with blocked textual content that reads, “Never Again Means Never Again” in a palette of blue and white, conventional colours in Judaism, and crimson and inexperienced, colours within the Palestinian flag.
The artist, who’s Jewish, initially shared the design on Instagram for Holocaust Remembrance Day in January. Each merchandise is called after a outstanding Jewish determine like thinker Nancy Fraser, poet Tomer Dotan Dreyfus, and filmmaker Nan Goldin, who was arrested together with some 200 activists throughout a sit-in for Palestine exterior the New York Stock Exchange final month.
Breitz stated in an e mail assertion that every determine has “faced scorn in Germany over the last year” over expressing assist for Palestine, including that the nation’s “unhinged crackdown” on pro-Palestine voices has not solely affected Jews.
Over the previous yr, Breitz has been vocal about her condemnation of the German authorities’s assist of Israel’s assaults on Gaza, which has strained her relationship with cultural establishments throughout the nation. Last November, the Saarland Museum confronted backlash when it axed a presentation of Breitz’s 13-channel video set up TLDR in response to on-line feedback the artist had made decrying Israeli violence in Gaza. The museum stated in a press release to the Guardian that it’s going to not “offer artists a podium who don’t recognise Hamas’s terror as a breach of civilisation,” nor work with artists who “consciously or unconsciously suspend the clear distinction between legitimate and illegitimate action.”
Four months after the cancellation, the museum’s director resigned from her post.
“It is crucial that we find ways to express our support for journalism on the ground, as it is crucial that we continue to receive information from and about those who are most directly and grotesquely impacted by the ongoing and widespread humanitarian catastrophe in the region,” Breitz stated in an October 30 Instagram post concerning the new marketing campaign. She added that supporters can even contribute by ordering reward playing cards for family members upfront of the vacation season.
