In this series of original, non-commissioned essays published by Art Industry Insights With Reena Devi, arts journalist and editor Reena Devi explores our collective capacity to critique, to create, to advance, even as the very foundations of our public and creative life collapse and collide.
During his 1933 inaugural address, during the depths of The Great Depression, American President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
Today, fear is everywhere.
When The Pillars Of Society Tremble
This July, American technology journalist Casey Newton surmised in his widely read newsletter The Platformer, “Despite an unprecedented siege on their profession, trust and safety leaders have been remarkably quiet.”
He observed that the past year saw no tech industry leader quitting their job in protest of policy reversals on hate speech, misinformation, and other issues, at least publicly. Newton noted a palpable shift in the field’s priorities from human rights-centred practices to a more pragmatic compliance regime.
In words never more harrowing to read than in these times, Newton states: “…whatever the causes for that silence, it looked to the outside world like surrender.”
The tech industry is not alone in this “surrender”. Major law firms, universities, and media companies in the US have capitulated in the face of political pressure. If you think there is no sign of such fear or compliance amidst American cultural institutions, think again.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., recently drew attention for removing information regarding US President Trump’s impeachments from an exhibit detailing all the presidents who have been impeached in American history.
The museum denies any involvement from the administration but March 2025 saw President Trump signing an executive order titled ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’, explicitly spotlighting the Smithsonian and placing Vice President JD Vance, who sits on the museum’s board, in charge of removing “improper ideology”.
This comes on the heels of several US museums capitulating to the erasure of programmes fostering diversity and inclusion earlier this year.
When We Fear The ‘G’ Word
It must be said though, the ongoing climate of fear and acquiescence is not tied to one political leader, or even one country. As far back as early October 2023, the long-held anxiety about repercussions for discourse around Palestine became more intense and widespread, so much so even private conversations seemed dicey.
During that time, there was reportedly a “crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech and activism on European campuses.” Support for the Palestinian cause was “often equated with support for Hamas, while accusations of anti-Semitism were readily made against people expressing criticism of Israel or pro-Palestinian sentiments.”
That fall, Artforum published a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and Palestinian liberation. The letter was signed by thousands of artists as well as Artforum editor in chief David Velasco and other staffers. It immediately drew ire across the art world for initially failing to acknowledge the attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023 that killed 1,400 Israelis and took around 200 people as hostages.
A statement about the attack was added into the letter on 23 October, along with a disclaimer that the document published “reflects the views of the undersigned individual parties and was not composed, directed, or initiated by Artforum or its staff.”
The fallout included Artforum reportedly firing Velasco, four Artforum staffers resigning, former senior editors criticising the magazine on social media, and hundreds of contributors boycotting the publication, as well as other platforms[1] owned by Artforum’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation.
Fear and compliance have only gotten worse since then.
Currently, mainstream discourse is beginning to accept that genocide is happening in Gaza and according to multiple news reports, UK, Canada, France, and Saudi Arabia are pushing for a two state solution.
However, “the climate of fear around speaking about Palestine is so pervasive, that an influential person voicing an unequivocal criticism of Israel’s conduct will still make the news.” Even as Palestinians are being starved in Gaza, Amnesty had to reach out to the UK police this August to urge them not to arrest protestors supporting Palestine.
It bears stating that these anxieties, however corrosive, are distinct from the sheer terror of those existing close to and within wars happening in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and more.
When Their Fears Become Ours
The abovementioned reprisals and crackdowns happening in historically established western democracies, typically known for their advocacy of human rights, free speech, and nonviolent protests, add to the global climate of fear.
Concurrently, it highlights the exigency of decentring western institutions, voices, and perspectives, particularly across the Global South and its related diaspora, while pointing towards deeper roots for our contemporary caginess – our colonial pasts.
Most modern social systems our great grandparents, grandparents, parents and ourselves grew up with, especially in various parts of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, were put in place by western regimes. They intended to control populations and cultures they would never really understand, as well as enforce the illusion they are inherent experts about our diverse, nuanced indigenous and diasporic cultures.
While western colonial powers may have rescinded our lands back to us, their ill-fitting social systems built for instilling fear and divisiveness, as well as their delusional aura of expertise about our worlds, have long persisted into our current era of artificial intelligence.
“Despite the fiction of a post-colonial world, Western perspectives continue to dictate what is aspirational, which values are important and what futures are possible…As we’ve globalised, the world has become limited in our ability to imagine different futures,” according to a team of researchers from University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, reimagining the futures of our natural world via decolonial lenses.[2]
Published in 2024, their paper states: “This narrow focus is detrimental ….as it misses the diverse possibilities that local cultures and traditions could offer, and it does not allow for the creative imagining of radically transformative alternatives.”[3]
It seems we have become too frightened to chart our own path or write our own history or show our own art. Particularly, if it decentres the west and its gatekeepers.
When We Listen To Our Blood
Our fear of disrupting the status quo and sacrificing our generationally hard-earned stability has made us wholly ill-prepared for facing the current historical threshold between past and future.
Yet, our own diverse histories from disparate corners of the world, the stories we tell about our lands and people, previously considered inferior forms of knowledge, may hold the key to a much-needed recalibration in our outlook.
Basing the book’s traditional mysticism and beliefs on those of the Igbo people, which she is a part of, Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor’s science fantasy novel, ‘Who Fears Death?’ (2010), depicts the natural world and traditional practices as dangerous and flawed, but also as guides, with the female protagonist finding her way through desert storms and a disturbing come of age ceremony.
Across the globe, Hong Kong artist Stephen Wong Chun Hei’s solo exhibition at Gallery Exit last year, ‘The Star Ferry Tale’, featured vibrantly colourful acrylic landscape paintings with the famed Star Ferry crossing the Victoria Harbour as a small spaceship, transforming Hong Kong’s iconic skyline into a cosmic possibility.
The works were inspired by Wong literally reframing his perspective on death and displacement by using Google Earth to look at his native city during the Covid-19 pandemic, when many were leaving Hong Kong.
Instead of focusing solely on apocalypses, we need to view our individual and collective lives through expansive, nonlinear trajectories of time—where death, resurgence, memory, and myth coexist as infinite, mercenary, and buoyant possibilities. [4]
Only then can we openly acknowledge all the humans and nonhumans who are suffering and have already suffered catastrophic ends due to capitalism, colonialism, racial violence, and more.
Their stories are written in our blood after all.
Footnotes
[1] Disclosure: This writer has reported extensively, but not exclusively, for ARTnews, one of the publications owned by Penske Media Corporation.
[2] ‘Inviting a decolonial praxis for future imaginaries of nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree’ by Naomi Terrya, Azucena Castro, Bwalya Chibwe, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Codrut Savu and Laura Pereira from Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Swede. School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Published in Environmental Science and Policy, 2024.
[3] Terrya et al., ‘Entangled Time Tree’.
[4] Terrya et al., ‘Entangled Time Tree’.
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