No Neutral Space

A Collective Refusal of Ahoy’s Militarized Venue

 




  • Open Letter to Mondriaan Fund
Published September 21, 2025
(Dutch version of  letter is underway!)


       If Prospects, a centrepiece of Art Rotterdam, is a fair dedicated to young, emerging and diverse artists, then what does it mean to hold this celebrative cultural occasion in a venue that hosts the Netherlands Defence and Security Exhibition (NEDS), an arms fair that is integral to the global weapons trade?

This is not an abstract question. Instead it is a timely question that has increased in urgency in the past two years, where we have witnessed the Israeli state use advanced military technology to commit a live-streamed genocide in Gaza1 with financial and military support from Western countries2. This ethnic cleansing campaign, marked by repeated war crimes and crimes against humanity, relies on weapons and systems from companies like Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin3, firms that have exhibited at NEDS in Ahoy until this year4. These same companies are also complicit in causing militarised brutality to the people of the Global Majority across the world5. While Israeli companies may be excluded this year from NEDS, Ahoy’s structural complicity remains6. It will continue to be a marketplace for the militarised economy that enables the killing of civilians in endless exploitative wars aided and abetted by our governments.

To display our art in such a space is to be implicated in its machinery. The cultural events at Ahoy are a form of artwashing7: they provide a mask of legitimacy to a venue that profits from and normalises the arms trade. We are witnessing the increased militarisation of our society, where public infrastructure has become a stage for war profiteers, while our social, cultural and health services are insistently being eroded. We are witnessing cultural institutions like Mondriaan Fund partake in artwashing without a hitch of critique and within the same cultural spaces that claim to celebrate freedom, creativity and criticality, we see genocide diminished to a matter of “personal opinion.” This is not a neutral act. It is a political act that masks the Western military responsibility for the insurmountable killing of people of the Global Majority and the irreversible destruction of all life on the Earth.


The Role of the Mondriaan Fund

Unlike private funding bodies, the Mondriaan Fund, as a public institution funded by taxpayers8, is a source of support with little to no strings attached, and therefore a safer option for many artists. Yet by hosting Prospects at Ahoy, the Fund forces emerging artists into an impossible and unethical bind: legitimise a venue that enables war and genocide, or sacrifice the visibility and opportunity the fund itself is meant to provide.

In its new 2025–2028 direction the Mondriaan Fund claims to go “beyond the centre, beyond the norm,” where it will be “facilitating and strengthening the dialogue between the public, institute and creator9.”  We insist that our refusal to normalise the entanglement of the art market and war industry is an active practice of the Fund’s new direction of going beyond the norm.

Reflecting on the Fund’s stated commitment to “champion a diverse and resilient visual arts and cultural heritage sector10,” we ask: what does it say about our cultural present if the art market is so tightly entangled to the war industry that artists’ “only choice” is to partake in its profits? Is this the legacy the Mondriaan Fund wishes to create for emerging artists, one that begins with complicity?



Our Stance,
Our Demands





As artists within the Dutch cultural landscape, we refuse this false choice. We refuse to have our art used for artwashing genocide. We refuse to partake in a culture where public funding bodies willfully accept the normalization of militarization, occupation, and settler colonial brutality.

Therefore, we demand the Mondriaan Fund and the organisers of PROSPECTS take the following actions:

  1. Public Accountability: 

    Publicly acknowledge the political implications of using a venue tied to the arms trade. There is no neutrality; silence is complicity.

  2. Immediate Withdrawal and Ethical Re-alignment:
      - Publicly condemn Ahoy Rotterdam’s role in hosting NEDS.

      - Commit to withdrawing Prospects from Ahoy unless it permanently severs all ties with the arms industry.

      - Use your leverage to relocate the Art Rotterdam to a venue that does not profit from war

    • An Institutional Stance Against Militarisation:

        - Guarantee that no public funds administered by the Mondriaan Fund will ever again support venues tied to the arms trade. 

        - Issue a transparent statement recognising your ethical responsibility to protect artists from being instrumentalised for artwashing.

     


    No more excuses.
    No more complicity.




    The West’s failure to truly reconcile with its brutal practice of colonial plunder for the sake of capitalist gain is part and parcel of the rise of fascism in the West11. This is not new: we see the same connection between the military and fascist movements, across the West today as well as in Europe’s past12. By normalising increased militarisation, Western institutions, despite their claims of innocence and willful ignorance, are actively sustaining a culture of fascism.

    As artists and cultural workers who consciously practice going beyond the norm of military profit, and beyond the center of Western imperialism, we understand that the struggle against fascism and the struggle for liberation of all people is a collective struggle. A wave of resistance and refusal is sweeping through cultural institutions13 as artists, cultural workers and educators are rejecting the brutality that is enabled through hardheaded innocence and an imposition of false neutrality. The ongoing live-streamed Israeli genocide of Palestinians has torn away the façade of Western democracies, revealing the deep economic and political complicity of these states in the Zionist machinery of annihilation.

    The choice is clear: stand with artists and the integrity of public culture and art, or stand with the profiteers of war.

    The Mondriaan Fund as an institution that serves the public, has a duty to lead, not to follow. You must act now: sever ties with militarized spaces, take an unambiguous stand against militarisation, and fulfil your responsibility to foster a cultural landscape that unites and guarantees a beyond geared towards a liveable future.

    This letter is also an invitation to the cultural field in general. We call on all artists, cultural workers, and institutions to add their names and voices to this demand. Together, we can break the cycle of individuation and isolation and build a united front against the artwashing of war.


    People Against Militarization in Arts & Culture


    To sign the petition  click here

    Join the live list of signatures from people around the Netherlands and Europe in different areas of arts, culture, patronage, music, film, dance and so on. All who are against the militarization within arts & culture, who refuse complicity, false choices by big art institutions and cannot/will not stand on the side of genocide.


     If you would like to be updated about future actions or have further questions fill in the contact form here or find the email below.


    Together, we refuse complicity. 
    We refuse neutrality.          
                                                                   



    Footnotes  


    [1] As introduced in the preface of Amnesty International’s “The State of the World’s Human Rights” report, published in April 2025.
    [2]  As shown by SOMO’s analysis of EU trade and investment relations with Israel (“Economic Sanctions Now: The EU Is Israel’s Largest Investor”)
    [3] Discussed in the report “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide” by Special Rapporteur on the situation  of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese’s to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.
    [4] As shown in the many mentions of Elbit Systems in archives from the Dutch Defence Press.
    [5] Think, for instance, about both companies’ roles monitoring US borders, or Lockheed Martin’s supply of weapons used directly on Yemeni citizens.
    [6]  In the article by Necva Tastan Sevinc, “Netherlands Bans Israeli Firms From Arms Fair Amid Gaza War,” the reasons of this retrieval are justified by fears of social unrest, and are not based on ethical grounds, nor on the Dutch Government’s new condemnation of the state of Israel.
    [7] Here a short and descriptive take on Artwashing by writer Joanna Walsh.
    [8] “Who We Are & What We Do - Mondriaan Fund,” Mondriaan Fund, April 7, 2025, https://www.mondriaanfonds.nl/en/about-the-fund/who-we-are-what-we-do/.
    [9] Ibid.
    [10] Ibid.
    [11] See these overviews of 21st Century trends by the European Economic and Social Committee, Verso Books or Britannica.
    [12]  See for example the recruitment of soldiers into fascist movements in the US.
    [13] Thinking, for example, about initiatives such as “Artists against Apartheid,” boycott pledges by figures of several cultural industries, or cultural workers directly addressing their institutions.  
















    Contact

    collectiverefusal@proton.me


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