Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie Canceled Due to Alleged Antisemitic Social Media Posts by Bangladeshi Curator Shahidul Alam

On November 21, 2023, managing director, Yasmin Meinicke, and the board of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie canceled its tenth edition of the photography exhibition, together with authorities from the German cities of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen, and Heidelberg, where the event was to take place in March 2024. The reason was that one of its co-curators, Shahidul Alam, criticized the Israeli military offensive in Gaza on social media.

On his Facebook page, Dhaka-based photojournalist Alam shared posts which called for a ceasefire in Gaza (Nov 15, 2023) and an article covering a lawsuit filed by three Palestinian rights groups with the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging the body to investigate Israel for acts amounting to “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”, including “genocide” (Nov 9, 2023). According to the Biennale’s press release, Alam’s posts “have given a platform to content that can be read as anti-Semitic and anti-Semitic content.” The press release specifically mentioned “an uncommented interview by Shahidul Alam with the Palestinian ambassador to Bangladesh, a comparison of the current war with the Holocaust and accusations of genocide by the state of Israel against the Palestinian population in Gaza.”

In the statement, the Biennale Board and management as well as the Cultural Departments of the organizing cities of Mannheim, Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen wrote that they sought dialogues with Alam and the festival’s other curators, Bangladeshi photographers Tanzim Wahab and Munem Wasif. The reason was to “sensitize the curators to Germany’s special historical responsibility for the state of Israel and its right to exist”; however, Alam continued to post pro-Palestinian content because he “sees himself as an activist and demands freedom of expression.” The Biennale was canceled following Wahab and Wasif confirming that they would not participate in the Biennale without Alam.

The Biennale’s main sponsor, BASF SE, is the largest chemical producer in the world. It was reconstituted in the 1950s from the corporation IG Farben which played a central role in the Nazi war economy and is widely known for having produced Zyklon B, the toxic pesticide used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The 2024 Biennale would have been the first edition with no European curators. In a co-signed statement by the curators following the Biennale’s cancellation, published by Art Asia Pacific, the curators stated that “Our difference of perspective–shaped by our colonial past–in reading history and its contemporary fallouts is seen as a reason to educate or ‘sensitise’ us. We were invited to curate the Biennale because they claimed they wanted our voice, and our perspective on how we see the world. But in a moment of crisis, it has appeared that our voices were only invited on their terms, subservient to their conditions.” Their statement was accompanied by two separate statements from the two curatorial advisors of the Biennale, Yasmine Eid Sabbagh and Tanvi Mishra, which respectively highlighted “the incapacity of Germany and its institutions to deal with its own past, to deal with conflict, and to question its self-awarded chronic superiority and entitlement” and expressed “full solidarity” with all three curators.