The policing of what can be said and shown in Germany and Austria (we should not forget about Austria) is only becoming more stringent, as the hegemonic Mehrheitsgesellschaft imposes its one-sided social contract on critical voices. Many of those happen to be racialized, read as Muslim Others; in any case, it is often those critical voices who pay a real price for refusing to be complicit in a leaden culture of fearful, complicit silence that is accompanied by insistence that only institutions and think tanks run by white Germans can properly define key concepts (colonialism, apartheid, genocide), and by grotesque denials and distortions of facts. As veteran journalist Dominic Johnson acerbically noted, “Some Germans are spending a lot of energy asserting it isn’t cold enough in Gaza for babies to freeze to death, as was reported. The last time so many Germans tried to work out the right temperature to die of cold was during human experiments in Nazi concentration camps.”

Under these circumstances, exhibitions that cannot happen may be more significant than exhibition that do take place. On the one hand, you may have a major Frankfurt retrospective (which will travel to Vienna) by a veteran of institutional critique that focuses on an indeed impressive career. In an accompanying interview, the artist’s body of work is presented as a sequence of triumphs of criticality, without the kind of acknowledgement of the current context that would make the work truly resonate and turn it into a critical tool. The elephant in the room is studiously avoided, apart from one question tucked away in the “Frankfurt Poll” devised by the artist: “In the Middle East conflict, whom do you sympathize with?” The use of statistics and infographics in institutional critique is an interesting subject in its own right; here, the aesthetics of administration serves as a tool of neutralization (there is an abstract “conflict” between two sides, and one may sympathize with one, or both, or none) that allows for business as usual to continue. Catalogues and reviews are published at the cost of turning critique into its own simulation (along the lines pioneered by Texte zur Kunst), and some of the most vicious McCarthyite newspapers in Germany published grudgingly respectful reviews (see here and here). The social contract of white supremacism rebranded as “anti-Antisemitism” has been upheld. Praise be.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, an artist with far less access to the property that is whiteness cancels an exhibition at the Belvedere 21 because she was expected to show the kind of “joyful” work and “cute stuff” that got her invited, rather than addressing a certain geographical location or colonial regime, or enter into collaboration that “might imply solidarity with this or that human.”

I don’t know the details of the exhibition proposal and the ensuing negotiations, and indeed do not know Rabbya Naseer’s work beyond this video—a lecture-performance of her letter of refusal, available online in two versions. This is the kind of work that can still be produced and shown when infrastructures are compromised, precarity is intensified, and “cancel culture” morphs from a culture-wars trope into a dismal reality. There would be more to say this, about what is “not allowed” or “not possible,” and how this letter and this reading constitute meaningful historical practice in the contested present.

At the end of a year that has been gruelling in all too many different ways, I cannot pursue this line of inquiry right now. I would just say the following: Sometimes it’s better not to have a museum show. If you cannot discuss the elephant in the room, get out of the room. Look for different rooms; create Denkraum and Handlungsraum wherever possible. Silence = Death. Strike Austro-Germany.