We Can’t Build Care on Complicity: A Personal Reflection on CCA, PACBI, and the Future of the Arts in Scotland

I’ve worked in the arts in Scotland for nearly 20 years – as an artist, a facilitator, a community worker, and a cultural organiser. I have spent my career believing in the transformative power of art and in the promise of our sector to hold space for care, dialogue, and justice. And like many others, I believed that the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) was one of the few places where these values were lived – not perfectly, but with sincerity.

I am also a proud member of Art Workers for Palestine Scotland, and I am writing this because I believe in truth, in accountability, and in the radical potential of our cultural institutions to do better.

We invited CCA to join nearly 200 arts organisations across Scotland in endorsing PACBI – the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. This was not a demand made in anger. It was a hopeful gesture. It came from artists, audiences, staff, and communities who have long loved CCA, who have shared work, conversation, and care within its walls. We asked because we wanted to believe CCA could stand on the right side of history.

Instead, they refused.

CCA’s board cited legal uncertainty and the need for political neutrality. But over 90% of their staff – those who actually keep the institution alive – signed a letter asking CCA to endorse PACBI. Their voices were ignored. Ours were ignored. And in that silence, the opportunity for meaningful dialogue was lost.

More than that, CCA escalated an act of community and solidarity into a moment of violence.

On 17 June, we shared a clear proposal: to host a week-long, intergenerational programme called the Liberated Zone in CCA’s public courtyard. Our events included reading groups, art activities, film screenings, and discussions centred on Palestinian art and liberation. We shared safety plans, a Code of Care, and asked, clearly and respectfully, that police and private security not be called.

Instead, on Tuesday 24 June, the building was pre-emptively locked. Private security was on site. Police were already present before anyone had gathered. When artists and community members showed up, we were shut out. A protest formed outside. One person was violently arrested, leaving her with a fractured fibula, ruptured tendons, and now facing three charges. She is still hospitalised.

This was avoidable.

CCA’s claim that the programme was announced with “only 24 hours’ notice” is false – we have the public statements and emails to prove it. Their invocation of “safeguarding” to justify calling the police is deeply troubling. Policing is not care. It is not safety for the many racialised, working-class, and disabled communities CCA claims to serve.

And while this incident has rightfully drawn public attention, it is part of a wider, structural problem, one that implicates not just CCA, but our entire sector.

We are witnessing an arts landscape increasingly entangled with arms funding and corporate complicity. Last year, Fossil Free Books challenged Baillie Gifford’s investment in fossil fuels, but fewer have addressed their investments in Babcock International, a company that arms the Israeli military. Baillie Gifford remains a major partner of the Edinburgh International Festival, which this year includes only a handful of Palestinian artists – and does not mention Palestine at all in its brochure. Their chair, Keith Skeoch, formerly of Standard Life, once oversaw over £1000 million in arms investment.

Meanwhile, the Edinburgh International Festival is platforming Simon Fanshawe, a co-founder of the LGB Alliance, in a year when anti-trans rhetoric is fuelling real harm. These programming choices are not neutral. They are political – just as silence in the face of genocide is a political choice.

Across Scotland’s flagship cultural institutions, board members and partners are entangled in systems of extractive capital, settler colonialism, and surveillance: The Fringe Society and National Galleries of Scotland are both chaired by Benny Higgins, who manages land for the Duke of Buccleuch – one of the UK’s largest landowners – and last year they actively lobbied against housing reform while the Fringe partners with Airbnb, a company profiting from illegal Israeli settlements. At the National Galleries, board member James McConville is a senior figure at Aviva, which insures UAV Engines, a key supplier of Israeli military drone parts. Meanwhile, National Museums Scotland board member Stephen Gordon-Dando is a former Bain Capital partner, a firm that recently invested over a billion dollars in Israeli surveillance tech. These are not abstract connections. They are material links between our cultural leadership and the systems that enable occupation, environmental collapse, and repression. If arts institutions truly stand for care, justice, and liberation, they must address the values – and the power – held by their boards.

And yet, PACBI is framed as “too political” to support. I find that bizarre. The arts are inherently political. Every curatorial decision, every invitation, and every omission is political. PACBI is not a fringe demand. It is an artist-led call for ethical programming in the face of apartheid, occupation, and genocide. It does not target individuals. It challenges institutional complicity.

Two weeks ago, we reached out to Creative Scotland, our national arts funder, to ask for a statement clarifying whether support for PACBI is permissible within charitable guidelines. We are still awaiting a response. But we know that at least twenty organisations within their multi-year funding portfolio have already endorsed PACBI. We welcome their clarity and stand with them.

We don’t ask for perfection. We ask for accountability. For courage. For leadership that listens and institutions that live up to their promises.

We ask for more because we love these spaces. Because we have worked in them. Because we want to continue to build within them – not under authoritarianism, but in the spirit of openness, collective care, and solidarity.

We are not outsiders. We are the artists you programme. We are the community members you cite in funding applications. We are the workers who hold your buildings together. We are your peers, and we are asking you to stand for something more.

Because care is not a mission statement. It’s a practice.

And it starts here – with truth, with Palestine, and with us.

– A proud member of Art Workers for Palestine Scotland, Rosie Aspinall Priest