The Pavilion of Apathy

As Desmond Tutu best put it: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Not too long after The Pavilion Downtown Dubai email blast went out, blaring in All-Caps glory “TOMORROW: THE CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT at The Pavilion Downtown Dubai | Saturday 13 October 2012 10am-6pm” in a public Twitter contredans with Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada, Iraqi-Canadian rapper The Narcicyst declared his withdrawal from the event.

Creative Time Summit 2012, which had been staring me in the face every day as I walked past the NYU Skirball Centre for the Performing Arts on the south end of Washington Square Park, is a New York-based festival of public art, speeches and forums by names like Slavoj Zizek and Martha Rosler. It is also an event that boasts as one of its sponsors, the Israeli Centre for Digital Arts (ICDA), an institution in Holon funded by the Israeli government.

“I find it painfully ironic and now understand that this summit may serve to further normalise the condition of occupation, amongst other issues, as a talking point and not a reality. This is something I couldn’t stand for. So I stood for Palestine and its good people in solidarity with the BDS movement. Word to Edward Said,” The Narcicyst later wrote in a statement on his position.

The Narcicyst’s refusal to moderate an irony-laden discussion session on Occupation follows a parallel move by Rebel Diaz in New York just a few hours prior. The hip hop duo backed out of the precariously subtitled “Confronting Inequity” Creative Time Summit when they learned of its partners announcing “solidarity with the Palestinian community” in a YouTube video.

Spearheading the solidarity pullouts was Egyptian collective Mosireen (Arabic for ‘Insistent’) a week earlier when they rejected an invitation to participate in the Summit. The group cited “our own conscience as a political collective based on principles of social justice, equality, anti-racism and anti-Zionism” as motivation.

The withdrawals from Creative Time Summit 2012 stand in solidarity with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement launched by Palestinian civil society in 2005, which calls for the boycott of events and institutions funded by the state of Israel. Modelled after the South African boycott movement, which played a key role in ending apartheid, BDS is a strategy that allows people of conscience to play an effective role in the Palestinian struggle for justice.

So when I get an email announcing that the Pavilion, which is located in the heart of a country that does not even recognise the state of Israel, will be hosting a satellite extension of the contentious event, I cannot help but be unhinged.

Its space in Downtown Dubai has quenched the thirst of the many residents of Dubai and beyond for an incubator of social good initiatives and creative energy. The Pavilion Downtown Dubai has long filled in the gaping holes left unoccupied by much-needed cultural institutions as harbingers of change, social justice and awareness.

Even more surprising is the fact that the Pavilion, with its trailblazing track record of Palestinian solidarity and consciousness-raising events, is playing host here. It’s impressive roster includes hosting a Palestinian Film Festival, a talk by the founders of the Free Gaza Movement, the site for TEDxRamallah’s live-stream and the venue for ADFF@ThePavilion’s Mapping Subjectivity series on Palestinian films.

The expectation here is not for demonstrations to form or for stencils of Handala to start appearing on the Pavilion walls, nor is the expectation for mock checkpoints and rallies to start forming left right and centre to raise awareness.

The object here is to embolden the cause not through apathetic inaction and simply jumping into the arms of every attractive global gimmick with a ring to its name, but through strategic action. Such assertions by the likes of artists, institutions and thought leaders embolden the grand march towards such social justice. In effect, strategies like BDS, perform a litmus test like function attracting like-minds into an agora wherein the common goals are tracks on which the mission moves ahead, charging forward.

The events of Creative Time 2012 ended last Friday, 6:45pm EDT, and all the rest was history, but this is a conversation that must not follow suit. Let the cultural hubs of Dubai continue to foster an environment of social justice, engagement and most importantly, conversation.

Let us be apathetic no more. In the spirit of The Narcicyst, “Word to Edward Said” indeed.

Butheina Hamed Kazim is a New York-based Fulbright Scholar of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.