As a chairperson of Kunsten ‘92, Jeroen Bartelse introduced the conversation by emphasizing the various forms of pressure against artistic freedom which the sector is facing today.
“The theme of this debate is Under Pressure. The title of that iconic song by David Bowie and Queen, about the pressure that shakes society. There are the well-documented concerns of zionist threats against Paradiso, where we are hosted today, after programming an act like Kneecap. There’s the often anonymous cases gathered by artists’ advocacy organisations such as Kunstenbond and Platform Beeldende Kunst, where freelancers share that speaking out for Palestine costs them gigs and thus their livelihood. A similar pressure is felt by art workers and online platforms who are being cancelled by the social media platforms owned and controlled by Meta, which reveals how much power our national and European politicians have given away in the name of the so-called free market. There is the pressure felt by us as Kunsten ‘92, where we have recently been summoned by the Ministries of Culture and Defense, where we received orders by people in suits and military uniforms on what is expected from us as cultural sector in preparation for the next war in this country.[2] I must admit our delegation was baffled, and we did not know how to respond… So yes indeed, the question is not whether these freedoms are under threat, but: what do we do with them.”
As director of the Mauritshuis, Martine Gosselink was invited to share how a cultural institution of such standing has been dealing in recent years with social pressure on their cultural and artistic values.
“Thank you for this opportunity to speak on such an important issue. We have been learning a lot about the complicated relationship between social pressure and artistic freedom. I am proud to share these insights with you here today. Also, fair warning, these lessons came at a cost, which would make it a waste not to share them more widely with you here today.
As you may remember, three years ago, two activists from the group Extinction Rebellion (XR) glued themselves against the frame of what may be our most valuable and famous work, the Girl with the Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer.[3] Through this action, they wanted to call attention to the ongoing man-made climate crisis, which is not in the future, but happening right now, and actually has been killing humans and non-human entities for centuries. The relationship between colonial capitalism and the climate crisis is eloquently related in the book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) by the author Amitav Ghosh, whom we have invited as a guest curator to reframe our collection in 2026.[4] The intervention by Wouter Mouton and his comrades with XR was a provocative yet careful alignment of the precarity and vulnerability of our planet with the similar condition of the arts – whether it is the physical vulnerability of a 17th century painting, or the material precarity and the social pressures faced by art workers today.
But I must be honest, as is customary between people working in the cultural sector. Of course I was also shocked by this action when I first learned of it. Of course it also felt as an assault. Art is so defenseless. I feel a responsibility to protect it: the arts in general, and in particular those works that have been placed under my care. So yes, I also felt shaky and disappointed and angry. And that was not just me, those feelings were present within our organisation, and throughout the country. At Mauritshuis, some of us even wanted to report the incident to the police, which may seem hard to believe now. At the same time however, other staff members were deliberating which category of the Guideline Artist Fees applies to give the activists a fair pay for adding another artistic and cultural layer to the heritage of what our PR department likes to call: ‘the most famous girl in the world’, making the work relevant in unexpected ways.
From me, these divergent responses within our team and within myself required the moral leadership as Karin Amatmoekrim just phrased it. It requires that we listen, that we have the uncomfortable conversations, and that we check in with our core values. For Mauritshuis, these are clearly stated in our mission: ‘to connect the present with the past, to interpret this impact from an art historical, scientific and educational perspective, to have an ongoing dialogue with a diverse audience, to contribute to contemporary issues and public debate, placing the collection which grounds us in a context of varying themes and perspectives’.
As we reaffirmed this as our moral anchor, it became clear that the XR activists had done us an enormous favor. Through the reflections within the team and with our partners and stakeholders, we have now pushed our own mission beyond what we show into how we work. Or: from the representational to the institutional. In the years before the incident, we were already committed to a more critical reflection on our past, when we removed, or rather replaced the statue of our namesake Maurits due to his involvement in slave trade.[5] Now we understand better that the values underlying this representational gesture should be foundational to the core of our work as a cultural institution.
In our new course, we want to work with the cultural capital of the Mauritshuis to sustain an ongoing public debate about other extractive practices in the Netherlands and abroad. We now focus on how Dutch society is and has been entangled with colonialism, with slavery, and with the extraction of life on this planet as accelerated by the global addiction to fossil fuel. We draw attention to the implicated companies and ideologies of the past, the present and the future. We advocate actively for the many amazing and real alternatives.
This is not easy work, as there are many regulatory constraints, and we feel political pressures. The new course taken by Mauritshuis is considered by some influential ‘stakeholders’ to be too ‘woke’ or ‘activist’, whereas it really follows organically from our mission statement as quoted before. We feel pressure to soften our stance in this reaffirmed commitment.
Yet again, honesty requires me to admit that it also took a little pressure for us to get there. We can not take exclusive credit for these insights. They are the result of a vulnerable process of learning, instigated by pressure from courageous activists that took a serious risk, because as I mentioned before, I must admit with still a feeling of shame, we almost reported them to the police…
There will always be pressure. Because no museum and no human being exists in a vacuum. There will always be pressure, for better and for worse, and in our work and in our lives we need to distinguish between the pressure to speak for liberation and the pressure to conform to the status quo. We need more moral leadership in our politicians, as Karin just said. But we also need moral leadership in our cultural institutions and in our culture at large. There is no easy binary between ‘pressure’ which is bad, and ‘freedom’ which is good. Freedom is a relative term: freedom from what? And what for?
Personally, I don’t want to be ‘free’ from our mission to connect the past to the present. If I am not doing that well enough, please pressure me! On the other hand, I would love it if our legal and financial context would make us more free to pursue our new agenda to highlight and fight practices of oppression and extraction. There is too much pressure that limits the execution of this mission.
In conclusion, I hope that through sharing our dilemma’s and how we have dealt with them, I have been able to bring more complexity and clarity, that helps us to move beyond the simple binary of artistic freedom versus social pressure.”
The next keynote speaker was Bregtje van der Haak, journalist, documentary filmmaker and current director of EYE Filmmuseum:
“From my side many thanks as well, both for the opportunity to speak here, and for the chance to listen. To be honest, I feel a bit put on the spot right now, by the weight of the words and actions that have been shared before me… I feel some pressure, or indeed, pressure from different directions. I feel pressure to share what we are currently going through at EYE Filmmuseum. And I feel pressure to shut up about it. Let’s go with the honesty, as we do. This is not the speech I had prepared.
What I had prepared was a statement to stress that the health of our democracy stands or falls with more funding for our audio-visual heritage, which happens to be one of the main tasks of the EYE Filmmuseum. What kind of director would I be if I would not take this opportunity in front of Members of Parliament to bend this conversation on freedom under pressure towards the financial sustainability of the institution I work for? And I will not apologize for this. Because there is a structural precarity in our sector. Several of the speakers from the audience today have highlighted this from their own specific perspectives. In our sector, and probably not only in our sector, we always feel the pressure to deliver more than our resources would allow us to do – which always comes at the expense of the artistic and moral integrity and our care for the people we work with and for. We extract ourselves and each other. Obviously, I recognize that the precarity of EYE is very different than it is for most independent artists and art workers. Yet what I have learned about the institutions I used to look up to from the outside: behind the scenes there is almost always less glamour and more duct tape. This constant financial pressure is one of the key players in the story I am about to share. The story which I now realize you all are waiting for to hear from me… It is the story of the young girl Hind Rajab who was murdered by the Israeli military, and the Zionist security company CyberArk, and how they both ended up on or in the EYE Filmmuseum.
In May this year we projected on the façade of our iconic building a photo of 5-year old Hind Rajab[6], who was killed in Gaza after 335 bullets were fired at her by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), or more accurately named occupation forces. Alongside the photo, the projection featured Amsterdam’s city logo, and the text “Peace Now!” We can agree that although this slogan has been associated with Israel’s war on Gaza, it sketches a simplified solution to over 70 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine. But for us, it felt that at least we were doing something. Some might dismiss this act as performative, but as we know from Robert De Niro’s interpretation of method acting: sometimes you work from outside to inside, from the costume to the character. That happened to us much faster than we were prepared for.
The image of Hind Rajab on our facade would soon be confronted with the idea to rent out our space to the company CyberArk, for the World Tour they are making to promote their business. This is a cybersecurity company which was founded by former intelligence officers at the aforementioned IDF, and still has strong ties to the military machine responsible for the oppression of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza.[7] Who would want to host that? I mean: how do we put our staff in the position to host that? It must have been an unsafe Code of Conduct which has led to the infiltration of CyberArk into our programming. Although we intensively program films that tackle issues of human rights transgression, however, with increasing pressure on our funding, how do we find a balance between our artistic vision and our financial continuity? Sure, it has been said that if you can’t ride two horses at the same time, you shouldn’t be in the circus, but to straddle those opposing forces is going to hurt at some very particular and sensitive point. Counter-pressured by vigilant activists and voices from within the EYE Filmmuseum, we eventually cancelled the rental to CyberArk. We approach such pressures as an invitation and a productive force where a rupture could occur. It is a pressure to direct this institution with an unwavering ‘moral leadership’ as Karin Amatmoekrim proposed before my talk.
We have found guidance in the cinematic heritage of Jean-Luc Godard, who famously stated that one should confront vague ideas with clear images. Although in this case, the projection of Hind Rajab was in hindsight a rather vague image, and the rental to CyberArk was clearly a bad idea. In his film “Ici et ailleurs”, Jean-Luc Godard’s approach to peace emphasizes the need to continually question and resist simplistic or commodified versions of harmony. ‘Peace Now.’ Instead, one should rather recognise and confront structurally embedded inequalities towards reaching a horizon of justice. Such labour requires lots of strategic and risk-taking endeavour, which needs to be aligned with the entire board of supervisors at our institution.
While we have been very intentful in platforming Palestinian, pro-Palestinian and even anti-Zionist Israeli filmmakers, we now feel the necessary pressure to instill our ethical positions into our institutional Code of Conduct. This is still a work-in-progress though, which is why I was hesitant to bring it up. However, looking around me, I see so much talent and experience in the room, that I would love to have a generative session amongst peers, to supplement the three known codes on cultural governance, diversity and inclusion, and fair practice with a fourth code: an Anti-apartheid code for Freedom and Justice, which would guide us as cultural institutions in working towards a just, safe and fair practice in a just, safe and fair society. Thank you. This is quite a relief. I am looking forward to talk to you.”
We assume that each of us, when confronted with a challenging idea, situation or proposal, find within themselves a variety of potentially conflicting responses. In a world that is not open to ambiguity and complexity, we often allow only one of those to come out. In this text, we have tried to imagine what other ideas and images might live within some of the public speakers chosen to speak out for and represent the cultural sector at the Paradisodebat 2025, not to replace but rather to coexist with the thoughts and feelings as they were expressed within that reality. In this way, we propose a cultural sector that uses the freedom of speech to speak for freedom, and to prefigure a fair practice so all of us can live in a fair society. As co-directors of Platform Beeldende Kunst, we would gladly support the continuation of that conversation.
You can refer to the recorded session, the actual speeches as given by the speakers, and other responses to the event on the website of Kunsten ‘92 via this link.