Wednesday, August 28, 8:30 AM EDT - Zoom
Public webinar and Fundraiser: Decolonizing Funding: Building agency and resilience in the Palestinian arts and culture sector
Speakers: Iman Aoun, Artistic Director of ASHTAR Theater, Soheir Asaad, Owneh Initiative and Yazan Khalil, co-founder of The Question of Funding Collective - Online panel.
Presented by: The Palestinian Arts and Culture Solidarity Collective (PACSOC)
The war in Gaza is entering its 10th month, with 142 000 of civilians reported killed, injured or missing. The unimaginable loss of lives have included prominent Palestinian artists and cultural workers, alongside the destruction of heritage sites and intangible cultural practices in Gaza.
Some cultural organisations and funders in the Global North that have presented themselves as bastions of artistic freedom have quickly fallen in line with national agendas by censoring, defunding and delegitimizing artists critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the genocide in Gaza.
In Palestine, the local sector’s dependency on some of these same international organisations for funding and support has meant that many Global North instruments of culture and soft power have, for decades, influenced the shape and form of artistic and cultural practices locally.
Even before October 7th, Palestinian artists and cultural workers in Palestine and beyond have been working to expose the underlying power structures and dynamics of arts and culture funding stemming from the Global North.
This panel presents insights from three Palestenians who are involved in some of these initiatives. Soheir Asaad is a member of Owneh Initiative, a collective of 28 arts and civil society organisations in Palestine which aims to build a new community fund and share resources. Yazan Khalil, the co-founder of The Question of Funding Collective, is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist. Iman Aoun is the Artistic Director of ASHTAR Theater, whose Gaza Monologues has successfully platformed Palestinian voices on the global stage. The panel will be moderated by Kathy Rowland, an arts worker based in Singapore, and a memeber of PACSOC