At the opening of her retrospective exhibition, This Will Not End Well, at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie on Friday the artist, photographer and activist Nan Goldin made a powerful speech condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza.

Goldin opened her remarks with a period of silence in honour of the 44,757 people killed in Palestine by Israeli forces, the 3516 people killed in Lebanon, and the 815 Israeli civilians killed on October 7. “Are you uncomfortable?,” she asked the audience. “I hope so. We need to feel uncomfortable, to feel our bodies under siege, even for a moment.” She went on to acknowledge that, while these are the official figures, other reports suggest that the direct and indirect death toll from the war may be closer to 180,000.

She then took aim at the German government, police and cultural establishment for suppressing solidarity with Palestine, pointing to the many examples where artists, writers and teachers have been censored, in some cases for actions as banal as liking Instagram posts. “Germany is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Yet protests are met with police dogs and deportation and stigmatisation,” she said.

As a woman of Jewish heritage, she argued that criticism of Israel has been conflated with antisemitism. “Anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism,” she said. She described this as a “false equivalence” which is being used to maintain the occupation of Palestine and suppress those who speak out, as well as having the effect of making Jews less safe by “making it harder to define and stop violent hatred against Jews.”

She went on to reference the fact that, the day before her speech, the highest criminal court in the world (The ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes of starvation as a weapon of warfare, crimes against humanity, and the widespread and systemic attack on the civilian population of Gaza. “This is a war against children, directly targeted, shot in the head,” she said. 

She described the assault on Gaza as “the first genocide that’s ever been live-streamed” and a clear case of “ethnic cleansing”, while criticising Germany’s reluctance to use these terms. “Why are you afraid to hear this, Germany?” she asked. Finally, she called for an arms embargo, and for people to channel their grief and anger into action by taking to the streets.

While Goldin’s words were greeted with applause throughout her speech, and she walked off stage to chants of “free, free Palestine”, she was criticised afterwards by several figures of the German establishment. Hermann Parzinger, president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, condemned her remarks, saying, “This does not correspond to our understanding of freedom of expression.” German Culture Minister Claudia Roth described Goldin’s speech as “unbearably one-sided“ and said she was “appalled“ at the audience chanting “free Palestine”.

But Goldin, a seasoned activist who was involved in ACT UP and whose heroic campaign against the Sackler family for its role in the opioid crisis was captured in the 2022 documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,  is unlikely to be deterred by the backlash. Watch the speech in full below.

Update 09/12/2024: After publicly accusing the Neue Nationalgalerie of censorship last week, Nan Goldin has added a message about Gaza and Israel to one of the artworks featured in the exhibition. In an interview published in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Goldin claimed that the museum had initially refused to allow her to add the statement, which reads: “In solidarity with the people of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. And with the Israeli civilians who were killed on October 7.”

Godin said, “the museum obviously didn’t want to allow any reference to my politics – of space for mourning – within the exhibition.”

After a heated back and forth with the museum’s director,  Klaus Biedenbach, the statement has now been added, albeit with different wording (it now reads “in solidarity with the people of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the Israeli victims of October 7.”

Asked for a comment on the new statement, Biesenbach insisted that the museum “stands by the fact that artists have a right to freedom of expression as long as it complied with our Code of Conduct.” The museum has also claimed that Goldin's initial statement did not mention October 7 victims.