Assembly

This is a lightly edited transcript of the final session from Ibraaz Mission Gathering 00: Why Now? which took place on 21–22 February 2025.

Moderator: David Velasco

Respondents: Shumon Basar, Stephanie Bailey, Gaurav Sinha, Werner Binnenstein-Bachstein, Evan Ifekoya, Adam Broomberg, Tai Shani, Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso, Al Hassan Elwan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Jaya Klara Brekke, Anjalika Sagar, Sumayya Vally, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Myriam Ben Salah, Françoise Vergès

David Velasco: It’s been very moving for me to be in this space all day. To see the light and then the dark. To watch the transformation. To be in a room with people whom I guess you would call ‘the university of the cancelled’, as it was phrased, which is very beautiful, and could be the beginning of a mission statement, or could be in the notes. Just that alone has accomplished something that I don’t think I’ve had until now.

Certainly, I’ve felt very siloed in the kinds of work that I’m interested in doing – and it’s just incredible to have a physical space, for this reason: to just be with other people who may feel similarly in this larger struggle, against all these forces.

I was the editor of Artforum from 2017 to 2023. Before that, I’d worked for the magazine for 12 years. I was there 18 years in total: actually, to the day. I think it was very strange to have experienced infancy to maturity at this place. On 19 October 2023, I published an open letter signed by 8,000 cultural workers calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and the liberation of Palestine. I did this naively at the time, thinking that the ground invasion had not yet begun. I thought: you have to do something – this is the moment at which you have to speak or use your platforms. I thought maybe this would change some sort of popular opinion. I don’t know – you do what you can. I was fired about a week later.

It’s a funny story, because Artforum had been independent until it was acquired by Penske Media in December 2022. There were things that I think I could have gotten away with, and probably did get away with before, that, under the auspices of corporate media, were no longer possible. You can see the way that speech is immediately impacted as the news enters into these corporate settings, which is also why it’s so incredible and very meaningful to have these other spaces that are opening up in the wake of all of these cancellations and firings – even the things that aren’t happening, the people who aren’t being hired, the various other censures.

Shumon Basar: Part of that flexing, of that violence, has been explicitly to make people unemployable. And now that threat, to my understanding, will potentially be retroactively applied to every student that made themselves known, on whichever American university campus. There was a famous WhatsApp group, during the encampment at Columbia, of various billionaires, which included Joshua Kushner and Bill Ackman, who is another very important main character in this whole dramatis personae. This group was set up to ‘change the narrative’ on Israel, and censure students who took part in anti-genocide protests.

This session is really about messaging, and to help us at Ibraaz with our language. Because words really do matter. We’ve talked a lot about images, but words arguably matter just as much, and a single word or a single emoji in this climate can also tip you over that line.

Stephanie Bailey: That’s why we wanted this session to be an assembly and why we have all of these microphones here now; and this is why we asked David to emcee, because really this is an editorial meeting now. Our notes towards a mission statement are in the programme, but you’ve obviously heard words and you’ve raised questions and issues with certain words, and we’d like it all to come out now. This is an opportunity to say what you think, and we wanted David, with his editorial skills, to manage the situation!

David Velasco: I mean, it’s not usually how I work, to be honest. We certainly wouldn’t look at a piece of paper together like this and say, ‘What’s wrong with it?’ We would probably send some messages back and forth. But it is interesting to talk about words. Of course, the word ‘network’ has come up a lot as something that people have some bones to pick with. Nadja [Argyropoulou] had some beautiful possibilities for how else we could read it, and Jaya [Klara Brekke] also spoke to this problem of networks becoming a surface for attack, and I think that’s very true. That very quickly gets me to this question of audience, which I think is important, and I would like to hear people talk about that.

Throughout the day, I keep hearing this vacillation between ‘Ibraaz should be for everyone’ and ‘Ibraaz should be for us’. I feel like that’s really the thing that it swings between. Of course, I don’t have an answer for what that should be, but what has been interesting to me, or the way I’ve come in, has been feeling like Ibraaz itself is an audience, and that’s maybe what’s most valuable for me.

For example, when I was running the magazine, people would ask me all the time: ‘Who are Artforum’s audience?’ and I was like, ‘I don’t fucking know.’ That’s numbers. That’s spreadsheets. That’s something completely dehumanising. I don’t know what that is. What I do know is I can be the perfect audience for my writers. I know how to become that. If I can just supply that, then that will attract the kinds of audiences I want. That was what I held up in my mind, and I think that model could in some ways be useful here. How is Ibraaz an audience for all of us? How can we use Ibraaz as a destination to actually write towards, make art towards? To appeal? To aspire?

Stephanie Bailey: ‘How is Ibraaz an audience for all of us?’ is a really good open question.

David Velasco: How is it for us? Do people feel like it’s an audience for them? Do you feel like you’re a part of it? Do you feel like you would like it to become a space where you would enter, make things for? Do you feel like Ibraaz is potentially an audience for you? That it’s something you would direct your energy toward?

Gaurav Sinha: I’d say yes. I think it’s also important to ask if there was only an audience of one, who would that person be? That sort of sharpens the pencil a little bit. Instead of trying to be all things to everybody.

Stephanie Bailey: But also, the beauty is the design of the space – it can be all things to different people. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the building has to operate in one way for one bloc, right? 

Werner Binnenstein-Bachstein: Today, when I was listening, I heard a lot about ‘safe spaces’ for us. Now, I refer to Eyal [Weizman], who says we are always in these dilemmas, because a safe space can be a bubble too. I’m not sure whether you have the right answers, whether a safe space is only for us, because that also builds walls to an outside world. To play with the whole question of periphery and centre and all these things, to play a little bit with these kinds of ambivalences or dilemmas, could be very attractive. I would be very careful about being just a safe space – because we are also a bubble. As much as I love this bubble, and I felt so good just to be here today, the question is also: how can we open this space and bring voices in who are not represented here? I know we are always saying this, but to play with these dilemmas could be very interesting.

David Velasco: There is also the beautiful thing that Evan [Ifekoya] said about learning to bring safety with you.

Evan Ifekoya: For me, it’s about inviting people to think about safety that comes from within. How do we cultivate that? To be honest, it takes discipline. It’s not something that just happens. It’s something that has to be practised, and it’s something that people have to make a commitment to. A couple of words have come up today, even in the last conversation: ‘prayer’ and ‘divination’, which for me are practices that are very much a part of my life but in a very offline way. I’m curious what a prayer is and what a divinatory practice is today, when really these are practices that come from religious traditions but have morphed.

But I’m also – again just loose thoughts – thinking about the proposition of there being a prayer room at the top of the building. Thinking about this moment, what does it mean to create or hold spaces for religiosity, for spirituality, for faith, where we’re also thinking about our relationship to discipline, to commitment? Usually, in the moment of training that I’m in, you’d be in a monastery, you’d be tucked away. But I’m here, in this moment, in all white, not allowed to touch anyone. Technically, I shouldn’t be out after dark, but I’m navigating this, making the commitment in the real world, because that’s what I’ve chosen to do and that’s what my faith asks us to do: to bring our faith out into the world.

I’m also thinking: what could a space like this invite and offer up in terms of that? Because we do need more spaces where people can practise faith, and I’m thinking if the room is going to be there, who’s stewarding it? What does the chaplaincy of a space like that look like? Because it will need to be held. It’s one thing for it to exist, but then how is it stewarded and how can people feel supported? So that it’s not just this momentary dropping in thing, but something that people can maybe come back to. Something that people who otherwise wouldn’t be in a space like this would know there’s a space where they can come and reflect – or where I can come and be with myself, be with my faith, be with my fear, be with my suffering, but also be held. For me, prayer, discipline, faith: they’re all connected. So here we are now.

Shumon Basar: As a writer, I’m obsessed with words, and words require lexicons. I wonder whether in this session we can put together a provisional lexicon. If I could ask any of you who wish to contribute, to maybe propose a word that either you’ve heard today that somehow is staying with you, or a word that you haven’t heard today that you would like to put forward? 

It would be an amazing exercise for us to put together a lexicon and put that into ChatGPT and say ‘write our mission statement’ – the dream collaboration. But anyway, you don’t have to be limited to that, but I think it would be a really interesting exercise for now.

Adam Broomberg: A word I haven’t heard uttered in the room over the past few days is the word ‘race’. I just want to bring a cautionary tale about identity politics into the room (said the white South African). An old friend of mine in Berlin, who arrived from Cameroon as a young man in 1997, dedicated all his time to founding an independent space that would insist on bringing the uncomfortable issues of colonial crimes, xenophobia, racism, and homophobia into the German cultural sphere. Alongside his team, he managed to really change the discourse. When he was offered to join the establishment as the director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2021, I warned him that he was potentially being placed there, by the German state, as a Trojan horse. On the night he was welcomed as the new director, the then-Minister of Culture, Claudia Roth took to the stage, proclaiming his appointment as ushering in a new era of ‘inclusivity and a celebration of intersectional diversity’. She insisted that ‘artistic decisions should not be externally controlled’, then, without pausing for breath, she proceeded to explain precisely how they would be externally controlled. ‘We don’t fund events during which BDS is advertised or supported … BDS is antisemitic.’ Diversity, the Global South, LGBTQ rights, and even a reckoning with its colonial history are permitted. Criticism of Israel is not. In order for Bonaventure [Ndikung] to secure and hold his position he has had to betray the very essence of intersectional solidarity. The reason ruangrupa received such violent attacks is because they understood that to recognise feminist and queer interventions against heteronormative patriarchy, or Black interventions against the theory and practice of slavery, one must also include Indigenous interventions against settler colonialism. And that means Palestinian artists or anyone showing solidarity for the people of Palestine cannot be thrown under the bus.

David Velasco: It reminds me of something Hannah Black wrote once for me that relates to both race and safety, which is ‘whiteness is a violently upheld dream that safety is real’.1 That runs through my mind probably once or twice a day. I would add a couple of words to the list. Tai [Shani] said ‘pleasure’, and I want there to be pleasure in the actual statement. There should be some pleasure in reading it. ‘Disruption’, which Francesca [Albanese] brought up. And ‘excess’, which I heard from Eyal.

Tai Shani: I think maybe it’s worth taking a step back and thinking about what the proposal is actually for. Is the proposal to create a cultural space that is open and progressive, that can hold events, exhibitions, talks, conversations, where there is no censorship? Or is there an actual activation that the space wants to do in terms of somehow contributing to a culture of resistance and protest against the unfolding genocide? Because we all have talked about the genocide today, pretty much, and I think even some of the organisers said that a lot of the thinking about this space comes out of that. So there are very pragmatic things that can be done.
 
Is it a space that people can organise in, where they can book this room and have a meeting? Because when we ask how to bring people in, I don’t know if that’s the right question. What can we offer them? What can we offer to infrastructures that already exist around resistance, instead of thinking about how we make people come and see an art exhibition?

Shumon Basar: I love that this comes from an artist.

Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso: I’ll start from where there could be abundance. A word I’ve heard a lot is ‘siloed’, and this is what we want to counter: that we are very siloed. London has become very effective at siloing on a systemic level. What this space can very much offer and practise is interconnectedness. There are so many groups navigating the cultural sector and we have formed successful partnerships and alliances, but we’re nomadic because it’s not easy to find a single space of belonging. When it comes to ‘who’s my audience’, can we think in multiplicities and across pluralities, as in audiences?

Al Hassan Elwan: One phrase I also heard, and I remember Shumon saying it when we first entered, was ‘covert ops’. This is what I immediately think about when I think of Ibraaz and its mission, because there’s a lot of allure to the idea of direct action and mobilisation and that sense of pragmatic and material solutions. But I feel, like you were saying, the system we’re in already stifles the institution as an entity, so maybe an entity can work in that idea of covert ops.

To Tai’s point, maybe I’m thinking about this in terms of propaganda and so on – what a cultural institution can provide. I think the US is an example of this in terms of how right-wing propaganda works. It’s basically just really deep pockets with zero shame pushing their narratives into many channels. So now their audiences are almost 10 times what a normal progressive audience would be. I always say that we need to protect apolitical people, because they’re kind of the most vulnerable to right-wing propaganda and it’s always this hack of showing that a conservative view or reactionary thought is common sense. I feel we are most equipped to combat all these ways that ideology works.

Ashkan Sepahvand: Just as a little prelude to my words, which are really quite simple words – I wanted to share a list that I’ve been making of all the things this institution could be. Some of them are summaries of different concepts that have been floating around so far. We have: a public printing press; a private-funds public redistribution scheme; a tech equipment timeshare; a meme account; a podcast studio; a legal advisory office; and just jumping off what you just said, a parapolitical spy agency. But it’s also okay to just be an arts institution. I think what’s interesting is to own that; just to own being an arts and culture institution. Throwing these around as a prelude to my words, I think really what’s at stake and what’s really been present in this room today are three things: ‘intelligences’, particularly emotional intelligence; ‘antagonism’, actually being able to disagree; and ‘guts’, like really thinking with your stomach, not with your head.

Jaya Klara Brekke: You kind of pre-empted a lot of things that I was going to say! I work in the tech industry, but in the ancient past, I was a little bit in the art world context as well. Being here today, I kind of realised that there’s a certain habit of the art world to somehow get anxious about its own elite status and want to not do art or be an art institution. Or you come up with all these words to try not to be the thing that you actually are. It frustrated me back then and it still frustrates me, especially now, because coming from the tech world, it’s very clear to me what culture does and how important it is. So one word that I would like to contribute is ‘curiosity’, because that to me seems to be at the core of what it means to be creative and be a cultural worker – you approach the world with curiosity, and that feels like such an important remedy for a lot of attitudes today.

Speaking to this point about just being a cultural institution, the other word I wanted to suggest is ‘unashamed’. There’s also something there that relates to this idea of bringing the security within yourself that you, Evan [Ifekoya], articulated so well. The way that I interpreted it, and maybe I’ve got it wrong, is around discovering yourself in an authentic way and being honest about that and meeting the world with that honesty and with that integrity, which somehow – speaking of posting online – also seems to be the most effective way of gaining followers.

There’s this curious thing when you post online: If you do the real thing, the authentic thing, and you’re not trying to be popular or cool or cringey, and you’re just having the guts to be your witty, weird, authentic self, that’s when the audience builds. That’s when people are attracted to the space. Also, I like what you said, David, about when you were writing or editing for Artforum, that you were speaking directly to people or to yourself actually, and allowing yourself to be authentic in that sense. 

Anjalika Sagar: To the jubilant cry of the World Social Forum, I’d like to add the jubilant cry of all these different organisations in London that have existed for many, many years. And Sumayya [Vally] has done a good job of collecting a lot of them together in this outline of various different forces that have been at play for a very long time in relation to how forms of solidarity and internationalism have been maintained, despite the neoliberal framing of everything and the fear that people now rightly have of the internet and of Facebook and Instagram and all these platforms.

I think one of the most important things is to maintain alliances with all these different organisations across not just London, but across the country. There are many. You could add New Beacon Books to your list, John La Rose’s organisation in Finsbury Park. That great figure, John La Rose, in this country, who brought the first International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books together in London. The George Padmore Institute, that’s a very important institution to think about. There are countless in Birmingham. One of the most important things – I’m going to keep saying it – is class, because this subject has been considered ‘out’ in the neoliberal art world. That term was never really thought about or discussed in these neoliberal biennial circuits.

I’m quite excited about this idea of London as this place that has had a long history of progressive anti-colonial movements and it’s extremely important to remember that in relation to thinking about this present, because this is all consuming. Part of me really feels like one has to go underground, leave the phones at the door, and think without the interference of these horrible people out there. There is a need in some way to strategise.

I wanted to bring that up because the right wing is extremely sophisticated, and we’re just giving it all away all the time. There have been many groups here in the UK, many libraries. Earlier salons – as I said, I grew up next door to one – where people would meet to strategise: Sarah Vaughan, Stokely Carmichael – figures from the past. And we have been doing it in our house over the last 23 years. I think Berlin is a very different situation to London. When you think about race, we also have to think about class, to invoke Stuart Hall. There are many organisations in London and I sometimes think about a kind of World Social Forum for all these organisations that are now all under threat.

Sumayya Vally: I really just want to echo what Anjali is saying. It’s one thing to say we should just be an arts institution, but I think there is a really important question to ask: What does an art institution that is generative for us look like? Shumon’s been teasing me that I’m middle-aged now, so I hope I don’t sound cynical, but I think what I’m experiencing professionally at the moment is that if one tries to bring about a different way of being or way of thinking in the world, that is very quickly stamped out in favour of someone else who maybe ticks the diversity box but is willing to toe the line and willing to practise and operate in ways that are palatable to white institutions. I think white institutional structures really do drown out our gut ways of thinking, and if I resonate with what you just said now, it’s because some of these institutions, like the George Padmore Institute, like New Beacon Books, operated with entirely different institutional logics. An example that maybe everybody knows about is The Mangrove in Notting Hill. It had the presence of food that people were familiar with or that engendered a sense of belonging; smells, music, and sounds that were from geographies that people resonated with; and the mix of people that came through the doors, everyone from Nina Simone to neighbourhood aunties, that meant that it became a hub for cultural production, a community centre. So what are those ingredients that we need to have here – and we’ll talk about it tomorrow – on a building level, on a programme level, on a furniture level, on a food level, that bring that sense of belonging for the institution that we aspire to be?

Guy Mannes-Abbott: Just some words for the list which resonate for me. ‘Buoyancy’ and ‘errancy’, linked to pleasure, amongst other things. The relationship between the word ‘object’ as a verb (to object) and object as a noun – i.e. what are we making and why? London is a forest and forests have different spatialities. Forests are not interested in centres and operate or enable periphery-to-periphery relations – maybe that’s one way of thinking. ‘Sanctuary’, as in for outlaws, and most important of all, ‘residue’.

Myriam Ben Salah: There are four words that Basma [Al-Sharif] said earlier: ‘for us, by us’, and then you talked about a space that should be mainstream. I do think that maybe the space is biased, but it should be mainstream and it should be for everyone. And I feel like there shouldn’t be a self-ostracisation of becoming a kind of ghetto – you know, ‘this is the leftist POC space’. This isn’t how we should be perceived, and I don’t think we should abide by the identities that are projected onto us from the outside. A lot of the words that we use, even ‘safe space’ or related words, have been weaponised and used to separate people. Fanon said that the revolutionary is the one that inserts themself among their people without noise, and I don’t think we should be screaming who we are or what our identities are.

Françoise Vergès: The far right, the conservatives, have absolutely no imagination. What they do have is an absence of fear to exercise force and to kill. But we have imagination, so I think imagination is very important, and they are very afraid of imagination. They are absolutely afraid of imagination, and right now we have to imagine a lot. We really have to play like children, and not be afraid.

I wanted to say, also, that we have never been completely free. We live in a world of unfreedom. But we are able to carve spaces of freedom, so this place can be a space to rehearse freedom. Every time we are here, we rehearse what it is to be free, so we get more knowledge of what it is to be free when we go out into the world. So the question could be also: how do you think about education, a place of education, in the right way? Collective education – how do you do that? How do you put collectively, in common, all these different experiences that already belong to us? I mean we, who are people outside, we have so many experiences and so much knowledge with us here. If we exercise it, that would already be a lot.

Nadja Argyropoulou: Instead of a word, I will suggest a substance. Take everything that Ibraaz could be with a lot of LSD. And I am borrowing the acronym from this great artistic collective The Callas, to tease us into thinking beyond our comfort zones. LSD, where ‘L’ is for ‘Love’ – love in fight and fight in love with everything you do. ‘S’ is for ‘Solidarity’, which is the only way to work on making the social otherwise. And ‘D’ is for ‘Death’, for ending – killing every structure, every institution, every habit that doesn’t work, that enslaves and holds us down and apart.

David Velasco: Fabulous note to end on.