Students occupying the Goldsmiths Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) have said they were not told the gallery would be closing until October and had been attempting to negotiate with management before the closure was publicly announced.
The activist group, Goldsmiths for Palestine, has been occupying the gallery for two weeks due to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. They are calling for it to cut ties with Zak and Candida Gertler, who, they say, are personal friends of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and supporters of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.
Among the demands posted on Instagram are that Gertler’s honorary fellowship from Goldsmiths be revoked and that Goldsmiths CCA remove the Gertler name from one of its galleries. They also cite the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, co-founded by Candida Gertler, which they describe as “complicit in Israeli apartheid and genocide.”
Goldsmiths CCA, located on the campus of Goldsmiths University in London, posted on Instagram on Tuesday that it would be shutting its doors to the public until the Autumn. The statement said: “It is with regret that we announce that Goldsmiths CCA is closing to the public from today until October. We are closing because we have been occupied by a student group, which prevents us from being able to operate properly as a public art gallery.
“We’re doing this because while the occupation continues, we are unable to fulfil the terms required by our insurers for keeping artworks safe and unable to maintain health and safety standards for visitors and staff.”
The gallery said that an exhibition by the octogenarian German artist Galli would be postponed until early next year and its residents programme, which hosts school, student and community groups, is also being paused.
Despite the disruption, Goldsmiths for Palestine said it had received messages of support from two artists exhibiting work in the gallery, Matt Connors and Mark Corfield-Moore, who posted on Instagram: “My exhibition We Speak Chicken @goldsmithscca has had to close earlier than scheduled. The building is currently being occupied by @goldsmithsforpalestine and some things are rightfully more important right now.”
The student occupiers of the CCA said that since some concessions had been made last month following an earlier occupation of the university, senior management had missed the last two meetings with the group and it has little faith they will follow through with promises to address the university’s “financial institutional complicity” with the situation in Gaza.
The group tells The Art Newspaper: “We reiterate that our action is a direct result of senior management’s failures and any decisions made by CCA to close were entirely their decisions. The closure until October was neither a suggested nor intended part of our campaign. We were not told that this would be a possibility or outcome of our actions before it was publicly announced, and we had been attempting to negotiate with the CCA in good faith to navigate the de-installations/installations of exhibitions and with the knowledge of impacts on precarious workers at the CCA, namely the front of house staff who are mostly students like us.”