Artists and activists from Bangladesh, Iran, Palestine and Britain met in London to discuss how art can resist censorship, rising fascism and genocide.
Palestine has become a testing ground for a new kind of fascism, and the oppression Palestinians face is a microcosm of what people across the world are up against, the Palestinian writer and organiser Sarona Bedwan told an audience of artists and activists in east London last night.
Bedwan chaired Cultural Resistance: From Bangladesh to Palestine, an evening of talks and short films held at Proposition in Bethnal Green. The speakers were the Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam, the London-based curator Rahila Haque and the Iranian artist-filmmaker Maryam Tafakory. Each spoke about the role art has played in resistance in their own countries.
The event was co-hosted by Artists for Palestine UK, a network of arts workers launched in 2015 to end cultural and institutional complicity in Israel’s crimes against Palestinians, and Book Works, a London publisher of artists’ books. It was organised in association with Drik Picture Library, the Dhaka-based agency Alam founded in 1989, and supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture programme.
Palestine as a laboratory
Bedwan is co-director of Makan, a Palestinian-led organisation that uses political education to support the Palestinian liberation movement. She opened the evening by describing Palestine as a frontier. The methods Israel tests on Palestinians, she said, are the methods of a new kind of fascism, one that uses Palestine to experiment before turning those tools on others.
That makes Palestine a microcosm of the oppression faced by people across the world, Bedwan said, and it is why the struggles of artists in Dhaka, Tehran and London cannot be separated from what happens in Gaza and the Israeli occupied West Bank.
From Dhaka to the flotilla
Shahidul Alam, the photographer and activist who founded Drik and the Chobi Mela photography festival, described how Sheikh Hasina’s government had captured Bangladesh’s police, judiciary and bureaucracy before it was toppled by the student-led uprising of July 2024. The greatest danger under such rule, he said, comes when people start to ask “what is the point of resisting”. At that point repression becomes normal and people become “part of the machinery”.
He recalled Abu Sayed, a student at Begum Rokeya University in Rangpur who stood before police with his arms spread wide and was shot dead on 16 July 2024. Sayed became the symbol of the uprising, Alam said, and after his death parents sent their children into the streets.
The uprising forced Hasina from power and brought an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus, followed by elections this year that made Tarique Rahman prime minister. But Alam warned that revolutions do not always deliver what they promise. “The change of leadership is less important, in my mind, than a change of political culture,” he said. “That is where we continue to fight.”
Alam sailed with the Freedom Flotilla in 2025 and was seized by Israeli forces at sea. He said he joined because world leaders had “abdicated” and allowed genocide to happen, leaving individuals to put their bodies on the line. While he was at sea, he said, both Yunus and Rahman, then the opposition leader in exile in London, issued strong statements, even as Bangladesh, whose economy depends on garment exports, was negotiating to reduce US tariffs.
After his release, Alam and others bought a vessel that sailed for Gaza under the Bangladeshi flag, with the backing of the Bangladeshi public and government despite the risk of angering Washington. Drik’s calendar for 2027, he announced, will be dedicated to solidarity with Palestine.
“Which Iran?”
Maryam Tafakory, an Iranian-born artist-filmmaker whose work has been screened at the Barbican and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, said her first response to questions about Iran is to ask: which Iran? Iranians face a battle of narratives, she said, and anyone who speaks honestly is accused of downplaying repression by the Islamic Republic.
She described an independent art book fair held last month in Tehran, now in its fourth year and run by two women. This year it took place at the Iranian Artists Forum, a major cultural centre. Its artists had responded to the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising of 2022, to the genocide in Gaza and to the wars Israel and the US have waged on Iran.
The word “resistance” itself has become a battleground in Iran, Tafakory said. The Islamic Republic has long claimed it, presenting itself as the leader of resistance to Israel and the West. As a result, for many Iranian artists the word has come to mean only one thing: resisting their own government. That leaves them without a language to speak about resisting colonial brutality, whether in Palestine or in the form of foreign intervention in Iran itself.
Walking a tightrope, some artists are trying to build a new language of resistance that belongs neither to the state nor to those who have abandoned the idea because the state claims it. These artists want to stay independent of a government they have opposed for years, at a time when that government is the only organised force defending the country against foreign attack. They also want to oppose it without becoming pawns of foreign powers whose intervention would destroy their homes and lives. Some, she added, find the obsession with moral purity absurd when their country is threatened with nuclear attack.
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Censorship in British arts
Rahila Haque, a curator and member of Artists for Palestine UK, said the network was founded on the principles of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), part of the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It asks artists and institutions to refuse ties with Israeli state-funded organisations complicit in apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Much of the network’s recent work, she said, is with arts organisations that consider themselves progressive but still operate under outdated policies. It is helping them write ethical policies grounded in international law, which boards can adopt to protect themselves against censorship and against a possible future Reform UK government.
Haque pointed to two cases. In November 2023, the Arnolfini arts centre in Bristol cancelled events curated by the Bristol Palestine Film Festival, prompting more than 1,400 artists to boycott the venue. It apologised in May 2024 and the boycott was called off. More recently, the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham moved to cancel a screening organised by West Midlands Palestine Solidarity Campaign after complaints that its publicity used the word “genocide”, before backing down when campaigners threatened a public campaign.
Institutions often hide behind Charity Commission guidance, she said, wrongly claiming it requires them to stay neutral. Cultural spaces have become a flashpoint because public opinion has turned against Israel, she said, and those trying to win it back are failing. She noted that Book Works is one of the few UK organisations to have adopted PACBI.
Palestine at the centre
The evening ended where Bedwan began. Palestine has become the centre of struggles from Dhaka to Tehran to London because what is done to Palestinians is a warning of what can be done to anyone. That is why it unites movements across the world.
During the discussion with the audience, this writer pointed out that Palestine’s place at the centre of these struggles cuts both ways. It brings people together, but it also makes Palestine a bigger target for Israeli loyalists. In France, for instance, protests over local issues have been blamed on calls to “globalise the intifada”, casting solidarity with Palestine as a danger to public order and the Palestinian cause as a threat to the West. Activists need to be alert to these smears and ready to challenge them.
Such tactics are unlikely to work. As has been said, “Wind extinguishes a candle and energises fire.” The Palestinian cause is the greatest moral question of our time, and the fire the genocide in Gaza has lit in people’s hearts only grows stronger with every attempt to put it out.
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