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.
Photo credit: Gaza Genocide Emergency Committee
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
Thank you for speaking out. Like the Labour Party, the arts in Scotland have been captured, and neutered.
Is it really ‘increasingly entangled’ or actually more like ‘increasingly exposed’?
New artistic revelations often clash with old reputations.
For example, in Dark Laboratory: on Columbus, the Caribbean and the origins of the climate crisis (2025), Tao Leigh Goffe writes about a famous bird artist, p188:
“Audubon’s violent legacy as a slaver, grave robber, and profiteer of the dead has not been enough for the society named for him to make a crucial change.”
I’m not sure what your point about LGB Alliance is.
And no mention that Fanshawe was a founder of Stonewall. The LGB Alliance is irrelevant to Gaza and this protest, obviously.
I have to admit I found this article and dispute totally manufactured and has for now, forced the closure of the CCA. I cannot understand what Art Workers for Palestine Scotland think they have achieved for Palestine or fellow artists or what CCA has done that is wrong except not to accede to Rosie Priest’s desires.
I find the language disingenuous. The article says CCA were ‘invited’ to join Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, ‘not a demand made in anger. It was a hopeful gesture’. For a start an invitation can never be a demand of any sort and is not the same as ‘asking’ the verb used just after. The CCA apparently ‘refused’ and everything that followed was a result.
The spin is clear – if you invite someone, they do not ‘refuse’, they decline and have every right to do so. If there is no anger in that invitation why act so angrily when the invitation is declined, an anger that included a protest designed to up the ante and make CCA look like villains when in effect, they were entrapped?
The whole approach is very much like that of some trans-activists – hunt around for / manufacture those people and institutions on the ‘wrong side of history’ (a subjective phrase that has no place in serious discourse) then seek to vilify, even destroy them when they do not do what is demanded. And if we thought this kind of cancellation culture activism was dying out, here is a place it is very alive and well – the CCA is currently closed. Does Rosie think this a ‘result’?
@Niemand, I have sympathy with your views, although there is perhaps one objective usage of ‘wrong side of history’ in the sense of falsification of professed beliefs, such as the exposure of ideological pseudoscience, partisan myths and indeed the kind of reputations I briefly touched upon.
Is Israel conducting a genocide in Gaza or not? This is something that could be established beyond reasonable doubt, given an appropriate definition, which is a criterion in law. It is not generally possible to falsify religious beliefs such as “God wants Israel to conduct a genocide in Gaza”, though it is pertinent to ask why someone would hold such a view. Is this British government complicit? That degree could be effectively established one way or another. Then you get to a stage where (whichever) genocide deniers, like (anthropogenic) climate change deniers, are confronted with the weight of evidence and their reactions measured. Is damaging military hardware to prevent war crimes terrorism? This can be objectively argued against too.
I haven’t followed the trans debate as closely as the genocide in Gaza or anthropogenic climate change, but I am aware that some gender academics have made some disprovable claims such as the ‘people generally professed belief that there was only one sex before the Enlightenment invented two sexes’ theory, and it surely in the public interest that these claims are investigated and where false, exposed. My concern is that deplatforming has unethically targeted those attempts, and some activists have in bad faith misrepresented factual, analytical, scientific, philosophical and interpretive positions as ‘hate speech’.
I have nothing against the boycott movement, but again I am critical of presenting artists as in any way morally superior advocates to the rest of society, when the opposite is provably true: many artists are paid, professional liars, who among other things are propagandists for genocidal and colonial states, reputation buffers for patrons, and shills for consumer capitalism. And some are worse. Not all artists, of course, but this kind of ‘artists of the people, only better’ narrative is exactly the kind of cultish fiction that gives artistic licence a badder name.
@Niemand, a concrete example might be Jerusalem-centred flat-Earth maps that were typically drawn by Christian artists in the Crusading aftermath.
“The small amount of authentic geographic information retained by Christendom – which lost hold of the Holy Land during the initial spread of Islam, before reconquering it and losing it again during the Crusades – was edited and manipulated in order to serve the heavenly image of the land.”
https://exhibition.nli.org.il/en/exhibition-items-en/bunting-clover-leaf-map
Now, some ardent Zionists might have claimed that later round-globe maps were anti-Semitic in nature, because they denied the centrality of their holy city, and thus insulted their religion/god/culture/chosen people status. I have seen no evidence that any did, but as a thought experiment it seems useful.
Particularly because it also highlights the role of artists in this kind of skulduggery. There’s a ton of interesting discussion about how much artistic licence and how much ideological baggage went into cartography through the ages, from flat-earth to projection systems (including, you guessed it, a ton of racist stuff).
Without the ability to definitively discredit bogus models, we would still be having to treat flat-earth theories as unfalsified, and might never make progress towards planetary consensuses. And maybe have to contend with flat-earth activists claiming round-earthers were promoting hate speech while trying to deplatform them to deny the public access to their evidence. We don’t have to silence flat-earthers, but why would we hire them for our geography departments?
Falsification of professed beliefs is indeed an issue and you give some good examples but the phrase ‘wrong side of history’ seems to be used mostly to say I do not agree with your view / actions / lack of action and the future will prove me right, with the added implication that you will never live it down. It is a kind of emotional and societal-consequences blackmail.
In this case the accusation is not that the CCA will be on the wrong side of history for defending / supporting Israel but for simply not bowing to the demands of one group to join another organisation that endorses PACBI: ‘We asked because we wanted to believe CCA could stand on the right side of history’. I assume many of the protesting artists are beneficiaries of the funding the CCA gets via donations and will join the wrong side of history queue, or give the now tainted funding back.
The CCA have no links with anything to do with Israel (as far as is known) yet the article shifts quickly to saying ‘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’. Implicates the CCA for what exactly? Complicity for what and in what way? What arms funding? Or is it simply that the CCA did not do what Art Workers for Palestine Scotland demanded? And how do you know the entanglement with arms funding is ‘increasing’ – what is the evidence? The juxtapositions are grossly misleading and the whole thing seems manufactured, unfair and pointless.
@Niemand, indeed, the phrase ‘wrong side of history’ is often used as a fallacious appeal to authority (perhaps argument to the future).
I am not arguing against the value of arts in exploring ideas, though it often isn’t a dialogue, but when even arts-loving Bella calls Glastonbury “a profoundly defanged and corporate music festival” some balance and realism is due when confronted with art-puff in matters of great public concern.
I hadn’t even heard of the Centre for Contemporary Arts, but I read their blog piece and the summary of Scottish charity political campaigning:
https://www.oscr.org.uk/managing-a-charity/managing-charity-trustees/charities-and-campaigning-on-political-issues-guidance/what-about-joint-campaigning-with-another-organisation/
and the crux seems to be if the campaign with another non-electoral-party organisation was “advancing your charity’s purposes”. To ascertain that, sifting through the CCA’s self-described raison d’être:
“thought-provoking”, “collaborative, civic-led”, “active engagement”, “working with contemporary artists to unravel the web of legacies left by the colonial project”, “international”, “risk-taking and experimentation”, “focusing on issues like sustainability and equality”, “refugee communities”… it is hard to see what legal objection the CCA could have to PACBI, but then perhaps their other concerns about safeguarding (or liability) were valid.
Considering the CCA’s focused themes, the IDF’s mass-maiming of Palestinians, destruction of their agriculture and traumatising/disempowering surviving youngsters would seem highly relevant. But as you say, I don’t see any evidence the CCA is entangled in Zionist plots or the international arms trade. Their site says “We’ve temporarily removed individual names from this page to protect staff during a period of transition and public pressure.” and the venue has currently shut down. So there appears to be real-world consequences to the pressure put on them, either externally or internally.
I think your point about accepting tainted funding goes somewhat to the heart of this. How many artists returned their income when they discovered it originated from the CIA or British equivalents?