Artist Santiago Sierra to Stage Days-Long Reading of Names of Palestinians Killed by Israel

Provocateur performance artist Santiago Sierra‘s latest project is a work called Israeli State Crimes in Palestine Since 14 May 1948, a piece that will involve the recitation of the names of “Palestinians killed in historic Palestine by the Israeli state, its forces and settlers since the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948,” to quote the piece’s announcement.

Staged beginning on September 22 and organized by the London-based nonprofit A/POLITICAL, the piece will be spread across the British capital’s Bacon Factory art space as well as museums in Rua Red in Dublin and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia, with screenings of the performance set to appear at additional venues. Though viewers will be allowed to see the work performed in person, where performers will read from behind glass walls, the piece will also be live-streamed online on a dedicated website.

Per a release, the performance is mounted “in partnership with a research institution based in Palestine, who have requested to remain anonymous.”

That release states that the names “have been compiled from established sources including the Gaza Ministry of Health lists via Iraq Body Count, B’Tselem, the Palestinian Information Centre via WAFA: The Palestinian News and Information Agency, The Shireen Observatory, and The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, alongside ongoing research drawing on historical monographs and other scholarly publications, academic journals—including the Journal of Palestine Studies—UN records, legal files, published registers, archival material and other published sources.”

However, the release also notes that “the ongoing occupation, displacement, destruction of archives and restrictions on access to records mean there will inevitably be gaps in what can be recovered.” Describing Israel’s war as “an ongoing genocide in Palestine,” A/POLITICAL said it would release a “detailed methodology” for the names at the start of the performance, which will continue uninterrupted until the list of names is exhausted.

The piece reprises a format used in 2017 by Sierra to confront the Syrian Civil War, which had begun in 2011 and continued until December 2024. That piece was called The Names of those Killed in the Syrian Conflict between 15th of March 2011 and 31st of December 2016.

Sierra has also previously addressed Israeli military action with such works as Arrangement of Twelve Prefabricated Parapet, a piece staged at Israel’s Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004. The titular parapets were the kind of used by the Israeli Defense Force; Sierra installed them so that they looked like Minimalist art. In 2018, at Tel Aviv’s 1:1 Centre for Art and Politics, he showed 697 Crimes, a performance that involved readers listing off the names of the 697 people killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the end of the 2014 Gaza War. He called that piece “a markedly anti-­militarist work.”

The Madrid-based artist, who represented Spain at the 2003 Venice Biennale, has regularly generated controversy with his work. In 2006, a sculpture of a gas chamber planned to be exhibited at a former synagogue in Germany generated backlash from Jewish groups; the work never made it on view. In 2018, pixelated portraits of people Sierra termed “Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain” slated for exhibition at the Arco Madrid art fair never made it on view; Sierra labeled the incident a form of censorship. In 2021, an Australian arts festival spiked plans to exhibit a Union Flag dipped in blood donated by Indigenous people.

In a less controversial though no less polarizing vein, Sierra also notably designed a runway for a 2022 Balenciaga show created from 275 cubic meters of mud from a French peat bog. Kanye West was among the models who walked down it.

Israeli State Crimes in Palestine Since 14 May 1948 was commissioned for a show organized by A/POLITICAL at Brutus, an art space in Rotterdam.