The German city of Aachen nixes an award to a Lebanon-born artist after discovering that he supports boycotting Israel.
Walid Raad will not get the Aachen Art Prize due to his political views, the mayor says. The prestigious prize comes with an award of approximately $10,900.
“According to research, we have to assume that the designated prizewinner is a supporter of the BDS movement and has been involved in various measures for the cultural boycott of Israel,” Mayor Marcel Philipp says in a statement, according to ARTnews.
The statement says the contemporary media artist was asked about his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement against Israel and that his reply was “evasive.”
A view of the German city of Aachen. (José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro/Wikimedia Commons/via JTA)
Raad currently lives in New York, where he teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art.
In May, Germany passed a resolution calling the BDS movement anti-Semitic, becoming the first major European parliament to do so.
In 2014, Raad signed a letter calling on artists to withdraw from an exhibition because it was being shown at Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology. More than 100 artists and intellectuals signed the letter organized by the BDS Arts Coalition.
— JTA
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