The Spanish conceptual artist Santiago Sierra launches his latest performance piece today in London—a non-stop recital listing the names of Palestinians killed over the past 78 years.
In the durational performance, Arabic speakers will continuously read the names of Palestinians killed ”by the Israeli state, its forces and settlers since the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948”, according to a statement from A/POLITICAL, the London-based arts organisation behind the initiative.
The event starts at 6pm UK time on 22 September and continues 24 hours a day until complete, says a spokesperson for A/POLITICAL. “We’ll be open 6pm until midnight [on the start date at their headquarters in Kennington in southeast London] then 10am to 6pm daily with global livestream 24/7,” she adds.
According to an A/POLITICAL statement, the list of names to be read has been compiled from various organisations, including the Gaza Ministry of Health via Iraq Body Count, B'Tselem, and The Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Centre, among others, as well as historical archives and other published sources. Where victims have not been identified, the readers will name them as majhul, or ‘unknown’.
According to a statement, the project is organised in partnership with “a research institution based in Palestine, who have requested to remain anonymous”. A network of cultural institutions worldwide will also stream the work, including Club Saw in Ottawa, Rua Red in Dublin and Dar Jacir in Bethlehem. The performance coincides with a show of the artist’s work at the Brutus Art Space in Rotterdam (Death & Money, until 20 December).
In an interview posted by A/POLITICAL, Sierra says: “I think that as an artist you have to pay attention to the time you live in… the truth is that I have been addressing this ever since I understood this situation of a constant trickle, if not a torrent of Palestinian deaths... I think it is meaningful to bring it all together and analyse it along the lines of what we did with the Syrian conflict project.” In 2017, Sierra staged a major performance during which the names of people who had died in the Syrian civil war were read aloud at cultural venues in Tel Aviv, Vienna, London and Buenos Aires.
These performances also pay tribute to One Million Years (1999) by the late Japanese artist On Kawara, which has been described as “a memorial to everyone who has ever lived or will ever live”. The work consists of a list of dates stretching one million years into the past and one million years into the future, compiled in books.
Since Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis and in which more than 250 people were taken hostage, nearly 73,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed in Gaza, according to data published by the World Heath Organization in cordination with the Palestinian Ministry of Health.