Artist Hamishi Farah said on Wednesday that a painting of Joe Chialo, Berlin’s controversial culture senator, never made it on view in Berlin because it was “deemed inappropriate” by the art festival that planned to show Farah’s art.
The untitled painting, which depicts Chialo wearing a royal blue coat and looking out at the viewer, was intended to appear at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of the Transmediale festival, which surveys “cultural transformation from a post-digital perspective,” according to its description. A description of Farah’s painting, which was commissioned for Transmediale by curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheng, said the work would contend with “the history of Western portraiture and its depictions of the ruling classes and their ideologies,” but it did not state that it would portray Chialo.
Chialo’s policies have spurred protests within Berlin, particularly after he attempted to institute a funding clause that required all recipients to commit themselves against antisemitism. He defined antisemitism using the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s criteria, which includes denial of Israel’s right to existence as a form of prejudice.
His attempt to enact that clause generated a movement known as Strike Germany, through which artists have declined to work with German institutions that will not issue statements in solidarity with Palestine or alter their positions on Israel’s war in Gaza. Although Chialo’s clause was not ultimately adopted, his policies have continued to polarize Berlin’s art scene.
Farah’s portrait did not explicitly represent any of this controversy, something that the artist highlighted in a statement posted to Instagram. “Despite its adherence to the formal restraints of state portraiture, the painting was deemed inappropriate to be exhibited at HKW as part of transmediale 2025,” Farah wrote.
“Maybe it helps to think of the painting not only as a rendering of the Black conservative avatar of repressive state power in Germany, as he gazes from the image he chose to cover his autobiography,” Farah continued, noting the widespread “absolute & unremitting cynicism” surrounding Palestine within German politics.
Earlier this week, Triple Canopy published an edited version of a lecture given by critic Tobi Haslett in Berlin that addressed Farah’s painting. In that essay, Haslett said that Transmediale did not know in advance that it was getting a painting of Chialo from Farah, and that the festival had permitted Farah to present the work at Haslett’s talk, which was officially held as part of Transmediale.
“I suspect that the real reason this painting cannot be exhibited properly is the same reason Farah thought to paint it in the first place, and the reason its true subject had to be concealed from the curators of this festival: that Joe Chialo represents the cutting edge of culture-industry repression in this country, which is not exactly known these days for its openness, permissiveness, good faith, or good taste,” Haslett wrote.
Moreover, Haslett wrote, “The face in this painting was, for a moment, the face of the pro-Israel vanguard within the German state. That’s saying something. And one might infer, based on Farah’s previous work, that it matters more than a little that this smiling, public face is a black face. Its presence in the German state apparatus might be cited as proof of the transcendence, at last, of racism—even as Arabs and antigenocide demonstrators get their skulls smashed in the street.”
A representative for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt told ARTnews that the museum did not play a role in curating Farah’s work, which was organized by Transmediale alone. A Transmediale spokesperson did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.
