Over 1000 artists call on Tate to divest from donors with links to Israel

More than 1005 artists and art workers have signed an open letter calling on Tate to take a clear stance “against the artwashing of genocide and apartheid” and divest from organisations which are “deeply complicit in the Israeli regime”. The signatories include Jasleen Kaur, a current Turner Prize nominee, as well as previous winners Charlotte Prodger, Helen Cammock, and Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Artists Jumana Manna, Sophia al-Maria, Gala Porras-Kim, Evan Ifekoya and Dala Nasser have also signed.

“When I accepted the nomination [for the Turner Prize] I also accepted the responsibility of holding the institutions we are choosing to work with to account in various ways – one of those ways is the open letter. I hope Tate listens,” Jasleen Kaur, an installation artist who was nominated for her 2024 solo exhibition,  Alter Altar, at Tramway, Glasgow, tells Dazed. “The total destruction of life in Palestine and now Lebanon makes it very clear what is needed from all of us.”

The letter is framed as a response to Israel’s “brutal onslaught of killing, maiming, displacement, and the near-total eradication of cultural heritage, homes, hospitals, universities, schools, roads, and food and water infrastructure”. Published ahead of the Turner Prize ceremony on December 3, it calls upon Tate’s leadership to divest from Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Zabkludowicz Art Trust, and Zabludowicz Art Project. It names the founders and directors of these organisations, Candida Gertler and Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, and outlines their close relationships with Tate (they have all been members of Tate’s International Council since at least 2008, while Gertler has been an Executive Member of the committee for over a decade). According to the letter, the names of all three are highly visible across the galleries, and 21 works from the Zabludowicz Collection are listed on the Tate website as being on long-term loan to the Tate’s collection. “These ongoing associations are deeply troubling and incompatible with Tate’s proclaimed values,” the letter reads.

Both Zabludowicz Art Trust and Zabludowicz Art Projects are subsidiaries of private investment firm Tamares, which – according to the letter — has “well-documented economic and ideological links to Israel’s oppressive regime”. These links include a long-term partnership with Partner Communications, a company with a record of providing telecoms infrastructure to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including several on privately owned Palestinian land. 

The least we can do as artists and culture workers is bite the hands that hold us in complicity while feeding us, in fact, very little. Our collective role as artists, culture workers and visitors to museums and galleries, is to recognise the power of the BDS movement and enforce the cultural boycott from below – Strike Outset

The letter also documents the links between Outset Contemporary Art Fund and the Israeli state, which include working as a corporate partner with Leviev, a diamond company implicated in human rights abuses whose founder has profited from illegal West Bank settlements. Both Candida Gertler and her husband Zak are close personal friends of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Zak has donated to both Netanyahu’s reelection campaign and the Jewish National Fund, an organisation which funds illegal settlements, the Israeli military, and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

The letter continues, “It is undeniable that Outset’s partnership with Tate provides them with institutional legitimacy, protection, and power, which allows for the continued artwashing of militarised settler-colonial operations in Palestine.” These associations inspired the formation of STRIKE OUTSET, a campaign set up earlier this year in recognition that Outset is – as its working group tells Dazed – “a clear and important target for boycott under the guidelines of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.”

“Outset’s funding is distributed in a way that is wide but shallow; giving relatively small pots of money to many institutions and projects worldwide and pulling them into complicity with the Israeli state in the process,” says STRIKE OUTSET's working group. “In ‘art worlds’ including the UK where the public funding of arts and culture has been dramatically eroded, this pattern can make their funding seem inescapable. In the face of apartheid and now ongoing genocide, however, the least we can do as artists and culture workers is to bite the hands that hold us in complicity while feeding us, in fact, very little. Our collective role as artists, culture workers and visitors to museums and galleries, is to recognise the power of the BDS movement and enforce the cultural boycott from below.”

Tate has previously divested funds from organisations with ties to oppressive governments, most notably in its decision – announced in 2022 – to refuse to work with or maintain relationships with anyone associated with the Russian government. Its failure to apply the same principle to Israel is clearly a double standard, particularly now that the world’s highest courts have ruled that Israel is responsible for apartheid and racial segregation, and issued arrest warrants to its leaders over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

The letter concludes by calling on Tate to act on the demands of its community, rather than taking the line dictated by the UK government, and to “take a firm and unequivocal stance against the artwashing of genocide and apartheid by securing Tate’s full divestment from Outset and the Zabludowicz Art Trust”.

Following the letter’s publication, a coalition of groups – including the White Pube, UAL Students for Justice in Palestine, Workers for a Free Palestine, Goldsmiths for Palestine, and Artists and Culture Workers LDN – have announced a protest to be staged outside Tate Britain between 6-8pm on Tuesday 3 December, the night of the Turner Prize ceremony. Additionally, you can sign the open letter here.