A German court convicted Berlin-based Lebanese curator and writer Edwin Nasr of “approval of crimes” and ordered a fine of €1,000 (~$1,058) over Instagram story posts Nasr published last year pertaining to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israeli ravers at the Supernova dance festival. During their sentencing last Monday, November 11, Nasr, who uses they/them pronouns, stated that they were not aware of the full extent of the attacks until later on and apologized to those hurt by the content of the posts.
Nasr posted three consecutive Instagram stories on October 8, 2023, as reporting around Hamas’s attack began reaching international news outlets. The first story post featured a historical illustration of Black soldiers hanging two White soldiers from nooses attached to palm trees, which Nasr captioned: “I’ve no fanon quotes nor lucid analyses in me to share in the hopes of convincing the complacent and perplexed among us that anti-colonial struggle inherently entails bloodshed … To hell with whoever at this point isn’t able to recognize or indulge in the beauty of revolutionary violence, even (if not especially) as it comes to produce scenes of ‘intolerable’ brutality.”
The second story post included three images of Israeli ravers fleeing the Supernova dance festival with the words “POETIC JUSTICE” overlaid in bold red text. The third featured two photographs — one of a young Israeli girl signing a missile destined for Lebanon during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, which Nasr captioned with”Remember this icon of settler innocence?”; and a female Israeli raver running away from the dance festival with the statement “This is her now 💔 🙏🏻.”
In a statement during their sentencing, as reported by German media outlet Die Welt, Nasr and their attorney Benjamin Düsberg relayed that the curator did not know a massacre had unfolded at the Supernova festival at the time they posted the stories. Nasr said they had gone out to a nightclub after uploading the posts and immediately removed them after learning the severity of the attack.
“With the posts, I was reacting to Israeli partygoers who were dancing on the wall and thereby demonstrating their indifference to the plight of the Palestinian people,” Nasr said in court, stating that they neither condone nor justify the killing of civilians.
According to Die Welt, the publication’s own contributor Boris Pofalla accessed Nasr’s Instagram stories and filed a criminal complaint against the curator.
In an email to Hyperallergic, Nasr explained that they had never met Pofalla, but came to know of him “because of the incendiary articles he had penned against ruangrupa [Indonesian collective that curated Documenta 15], and also Bonaventure Ndikung as soon as he was announced director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.”
Though Pofalla had mentioned Nasr’s Instagram stories in conjunction with criticism of October 7 responses from ruangrupa as well as Palestinian artists Emily Jacir and Jumana Manna in a Die Welt feature published on October 11, 2023, Nasr told Hyperallergic that they were only informed by Berlin police of a criminal investigation against them in April.
Pofalla did not immediately respond to Hyperallergic‘s inquiries.
“I’d only been based in Berlin for about a year when this ordeal began, and so it felt particularly surreal to find myself in the middle of such a revanchist and racially motivated media spectacle, just as the ongoing Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza was raging on,” Nasr said, explaining that they’ve been struggling to keep up with rent and healthcare payments and haven’t managed to book a single curatorial gig since the Instagram stories were shared in the media.
Formerly working at the Center for Contemporary Arts in Berlin, Nasr chiefly curated a solo exhibition for Brazilian artist Jota Mombaça as a part of Berlin Art Week programming in 2023.
“I’m thankfully surrounded by loving friends and members of the community who’ve been immensely supportive, and honestly at this point in time it feels grotesque to want to ponder on one’s career when all that we’ve come to know and love is getting exterminated as we speak,” they left off.
Artists and culture workers in Germany continue to navigate the tensions of working with state-run institutions as the government limits speech criticizing Israel. This week, filmmaker Hito Steyerl, South African Jewish artist Candice Breitz, Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman, and Turkish-German artist Raphael Malik withdrew from participating in the upcoming “Art and Activism in Times of Polarization” symposium at the Neue Nationalgalerie after the event was targeted in a social media post by the boycott advocacy group Strike Germany.
