This will not end well? Art, activism, and institutional control in times of Genocide

This article examines two artistic interventions staged in Berlin-based state‑funded cultural institutions in 2024: Nan Goldin’s opening speech for her retrospective This Will Not End Well at the Neue Nationalgalerie and Tania Bruguera’s participatory performance Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Both works became flashpoints in the ongoing repression of Palestine solidarity in Germany. This context is documented by the activist platform ‘Archive of Silence’ as a structural pattern of bans, cancellations, and persecutions which disproportionately targets Palestinian, Jewish, Black, and Brown cultural workers. Drawing on queer and trans performance scholarship on visibility’s double edge, Hannah Arendt on ‘appearance’, and Michel Foucault on surveillance, solidarity is approached from the outside as necessarily clumsy and inadequate, positioning discomfort as a method rather than a problem to be resolved, proposing that strike, boycott, and withdrawal may constitute the most generative forms of appearance currently available.