why I’ve pulled out of speaking at LACMA this November
This summer, I was invited to give a talk on my work that addresses space and colonialism as part of a broader exhibition at LACMA. I was planning to present on Mars imagery and connect it to colonial legacies of frontier imagery and art, as well as the political economy of space technology, as most Mars exploration and research technology is developed by companies profiting from the ongoing genocide in Gaza, perpetuated by Israel and its allies.
Then I found the sponsor list — the event is paid for by Hyundai. Hyundai has been a target for BDS campaigns for over 20 years, both internationally and among Korean solidarity movements with Palestine. Countless images of the escalating raids by the IOF and settlers in the past 342 days show Hyundai equipment being used to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
Between August 28, when the Israeli military officially declared “Operation Summer Camps” — a large-scale military invasion of the West Bank — and September 6, Palestinians in the northern districts of Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarem, and Tubas faced either partial or full lockdowns. Although the Israeli military has conducted dozens of invasions and raids on both the city of Jenin and the refugee camp within it over the past two years, this month’s operation was by far the largest and most wide-spread across the district of Jenin and offers a microcosm of how Israel is not only capable, but willing to widen its genocidal practices against Palestinians in Gaza to the West Bank.
— Mariam Barghouti, Drop Site, September 9, 2024
Upon inquiring, it was made explicit to me that my honorarium, flight, accommodation, and per diem would be coming from Hyundai due to the company’s sponsorship of the program at LACMA. It was also suggested to me that my contribution would still be valuable and disruptive due to its subject matter.
However, I could never accept money made from profiting off of the genocide of Palestinians (and climate change) while also promoting the name of this company to the public — all while also promoting my own work. I pulled out of the event as a result. Below, I explain why and share an exhortation of my fellow creatives.
LACMA’s relationship with Hyundai
Hyundai and LACMA hold a 10-year financial contract to support programming at the museum:
LACMA and Hyundai Motor Company (Hyundai) today announced a major new 10-year partnership — the longest and largest programmatic commitment from a corporate sponsor in LACMA’s history. Under the umbrella of The Hyundai Project, this unprecedented partnership allows LACMA to make significant strides in two important fields, Art + Technology and Korean art scholarship. Hyundai’s support in these areas will encompass acquisitions, exhibitions, and publications through 2024.
The BDS Movement lists Hyundai as an “divestment and exclusion target,” defined as:
Divestment and exclusion targets — The BDS movement works to pressure governments, institutions, investment funds, city councils, etc. to exclude from procurement contracts and investments and to divest from, as the case may be, as many complicit companies as practical, especially arms companies and banks.
The movement therefore calls on us to push public institutions — like LACMA — to act in conscience and drop these genocide profiteers as sponsors & vendors.
LACMA has a chance to do the right thing (especially in light of the latest ICJ ruling on the West Bank), since its contract with Hyundai is due to expire this year— it could simply choose to not renew this relationship, and, further, commit to no longer accepting sponsorships by companies profiting from genocide and/or climate change.
About Hyundai’s role in genocide
While the Hyundai VC expresses that “Art is a creative expression
of human values that transcends age, gender, race, and culture” and that “The Hyundai Project at LACMA seeks to support global art communities” in the press kit about Hyundai’s partnership with LACMA, the IOF is using Hyundai bulldozers right now in escalating raids across the West Bank to demolish Palestinian homes as well as roads and water infrastructure. This relationship is not new. Hyundai is listed on the BDS Movement’s website going back to 2013, referring to ongoing complicity for at least the past 21 years.
Apartheid Israel has used HD Hyundai bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta, Silwan and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, incl. East Jerusalem, and across historic Palestine.
— BDS Movement, November 20, 2023
The past 342 days of the genocide — an extension of 76 years of settler colonial genocide of Palestine by the zionist entity — have seen an unprecedented rate of seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank:
The Israeli government has seized about 2,370 hectares of land in the occupied West Bank this year alone, culminating in the largest land grab in over three decades
— Middle East Eye, June 3, 2024
2,155 Palestinians across the West Bank have been displaced after Oct. 7 with the rise of sweeping raids, settler attacks and a marked land grab by the Israelis.
— Quds News Network, August 11, 2024
Palestinians have been documenting the occupation’s use of Hyundai equipment in this project of ethnic cleansing for years. In July, Mohammad Hureini reported, alongside images of Hyundai bulldozers:
Ethnic Cleansing and forced displacement policies are taking place in MASSAFER Yatta!!
Today, the Israeli occupation forces demolished a house in the village of Al-Tuwani, a tent in the village of Al-Jawaya, and destroyed the water network for the villages.
MASSAFER Yatta under an official write of demolition.
Massafer Yatta and other Communities in the West Bank are Under the threat of being erased by the occupation, your silence about these crimes indicates that you have become accustomed to the scene. Gaza is under Bombardment & Genocide and the West Bank is under the military rule and the attacks of terrorist settlers !Take Action Now !!!!
On August 5, 2024, he reported again of demolitions taking place in Massafer Yatta, where Hyundai bulldozers were used in the occupation’s continued campaign to ethnically cleanse Massafer Yatta of its more than 1,000 Palestinian residents, destroying a family’s water well.
In 2022, Ramzy Baroud reported for Mondoweiss on the Israeli government’s May 6th court ruling to annex Massafer Yatta and expel its residents, and how it indicated a new strategy of annexation and ethnic cleansing (the article is pictured with a February 2022 photo of the occupation using a Hyundai bulldozer to destroy a water well). Palestinian activists have been calling on the world to show solidarity with the residents of Massafer Yatta as the government attempts to expel these families from their land.
When Palestinians state that the Nakba, or Catastrophe — which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins — is a continuous, unfinished project, they mean exactly that. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the endless torment of Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab and, now in Masafer Yatta, are all testaments to this reality.
— Ramzy Baroud, Mondoweiss, June 2, 2022
A continued theme in these eliminatory campaigns is the targeting of water infrastructure and services — e.g., blocking water supply to hospitals in Jenin in August — which the occupation is carrying out across all of Palestine, not just in the past 342 days, but historically.
The average Palestinian in the West Bank can access only one quarter of the water available to the average Israeli each day, and 30 liters less than the World Health Organization’s minimum recommendation. From 2012–2020, Israeli authorities demolished 506 Palestinian water, sanitation, & hygiene (WASH) structures in the occupied West Bank, according to OCHA data.
Israel has intentionally targeted the infrastructure of water and sewage networks during its ongoing devastating war on the besieged Gaza Strip for ten months, destroying 42 water wells completely, 16 wells partially, and 70,000 linear meters of water networks, according to the municipality of Gaza.
— Hadeel Abu Nassar, Quds News Network, August 3, 2024
(You can donate to Municipality of Gaza’s urgent efforts to restore water, sewage, and other vital infrastructure in Gaza City here.)
Visualizing Palestine recently shared two graphics — “Targeting Childhood in the West Bank-By Distance” and “Targeting Childhood in the West Bank-By Area,” whose titles I will allow to speak for themselves.
As the occupation has escalated its invasion of the West Bank since August 28th, I firmly believe no one — artist, scientist — should be romanced by pretty words or large honoraria when our cultural institutions burnish the reputations and financial portfolios of companies that gleefully participate in genocide. We also must be conscious of how these institutions lure us to abandon principled solidarity, tantalizing us with opportunities to burnish our own reputations and finances built on the imperialist subjugation of others.
Arts of refusal
It is our duty to interrupt the supply of technologies — whether social, cultural, political, or material — that are enabling the ongoing genocide on all of Palestine. This is what Palestinian trade unions are asking us very specifically to do.
As a space scientist, my whole line of work is a reputational project, a propaganda campaign for the war machine, where “dual-use” is really single-use — empire — regardless of where I have worked, regardless that I have managed to avoid employment at defense companies. If we are not manufacturing the tools of genocide, we are manufacturing consent for it.
And I consider that a powerful position: it allows us to withhold our labor, reputation, and consent from institutions built on genocide. Rather than accepting these relationships as fatal, all-encompassing, and immutable, we are the very joints and nodes in their operation, and we can make it break.
LACMA must be shown that creatives of conscience do not accept genocide profits. LACMA must understand that it will lose talent & public trust so long as it willingly partners with companies that are participating in war crimes and destruction of the planet.
Meanwhile, we must ask ourselves what solidarity means — is it a neat record of acts to which we can conveniently refer when asked to be accountable to our Palestinian neighbors? Is it a constant series of trade-offs, a little resumé enrichment here and there, as long as no one probes into where the money comes from? I am not perfect in this. All of this must be continued work that we do, endless questions that we have to ask ourselves. The planet — and I say this with the full might of my accolades as a planetary geologist — literally depends on it.
I close with a poem I wrote in April — the scientists and poets, indeed, will know. Do those scientists and poets have a price for silence? What happens if we say there is no such price?
TWO FLOWERS in a BOX
for the two men who suffocated in a box or car trunk after the occupation kidnapped them from Gaza in April 20241 — NASA [1] has paid 39 billion [2],[3] US dollars to 27 [4],[5],[6] genocide profiteers, [7] amounting to 50.2% of its expenditures to current contractors [8]
A geologist reports [9]
that this is the end.The Earth [10] will be cracked
in order to senda missile, to the Moon.
The scientists will know.
The poets will know.The earth will be cracked in two.
Rover [11], watch the sun —
iron sights from
the best gun [12] to buy —set on your lonely
empire.— — — — —
[1] An arm of the state
[2] 0.13 the total number of stars in our galaxy
[3] 0.36 the total number of people who have ever lived
[4] The percentage of the universe composed of dark matter
[5] The factor by which the Earth spins faster than the Moon
[6] The number of bones in the human hand
[7] Companies that provide, for example, armored vehicles to the occupation
[8] Palestine Space Institute, March 2024
[9] Persaud, D. M., personal communication
[10] The land has always been free
[11] Twelve genocide profiteers have supplied six Mars rover missions
[12] Two of these companies supply ammunition to the occupation; two supply the chemical weapon white phosphorus to the occupation
