Brett Bailey responds to ‘Exhibition B’ forced closing
South African artist Brett Bailey's performance art exhibition Exhibit B has had its run at London's Barbican cut short after activists who felt that the project celebrated "complicit racism" gathered 20 000 signatures on a petition to shut down the show.
Picture: AFP
According to a report in The Guardian, many of the activists had not even been to the Barbican to see the show.
Bailey offered the below statement on his Facebook page on Friday:
I’m feeling sad this morning. Exhibit B should not have been closed down. I do not approve of bullying and censorship.
I stand against a few loud-mouthed people wielding so much power in the mistaken belief that they are speaking for a silent majority – or saving the unenlightened.
This is dangerous for the arts and for society.
But, looking at the video of the protesters: the vast majority of them are good, engaged people, committed to what they believe is right.
They look like the people I work and play with. They feel passionately, the way we do.
Many of us on the Exhibit B team could have been out there if we had believed all the crap we read in the media and in the hype of the few extremists that fanned the flames.
I so wish those few moments in which the security barriers outside the venue were breached at 6.30pm on Tuesday had not occurred.
This whole thing is much bigger than Exhibit B, bigger than The Barbican.
I can well understand that the show had to close, unfortunately. Had somebody – on either side of the doors of The Vaults – been injured, with tempers this frayed, and with 22 000 people on the pulse, who knows what could have happened.
I shudder to think that an art work made in love against the hate of racism could spark a violent riot.
I hate that this whole episode is polarizing people even more.
I hate that it is probably feeding grist into the mills of those who are racist and who are seeing some sort of confirmation of their divisive outlooks.
Let’s be cool, and humble about it all, and feel the weight of what it says about the times we are living in.
Bailey’s website states that Exhibit B is scheduled to move to the Museum Of Modern Art in Moscow from 10 to 14 October. There is no confirmation as yet regarding whether or not those dates have been put in jeopardy by the London closing.
