Peter Murray views work by Eltiqa, a collective of Palestinian artists attempting to achieve a cultural autonomy free from ‘toxic philanthropy’
In 2019, a group of Palestinian artists met at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in Ramallah, some seventeen kilometres north of Jerusalem. Led by Yazan Khalili, artist, architect and director of the centre, they decided to found The Question of Funding, a collective dedicated to building a sense of community and self-help among Palestinian artists and to lessen years of dependency on international aid agencies. The initiative was timely. Although well intentioned, the funding options offered to artists by overseas agencies, with their accompanying conditions of conformity, were increasingly seen as restrictive rather than liberating. Recipients were contractually obliged to avoid addressing underlying political and military issues, with the result that the appearance of political stability became more important than the reality. Critical thinking amongst cultural practitioners was suppressed, and even use of the word ‘Nakba’ was prohibited. (‘Nakba’, meaning ‘catastrophe’, refers to the violent displacement and dispossession of Arabs that followed the 1947 partition of Palestine.)
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