Tracing the money.
In April 2026, the 28th edition of the art fair Art Paris will take place at the Grand Palais in Paris. Hosting around 165 French and international galleries from some twenty countries, one of the programme highlights is the well-endowed BNP Paribas Banque Privée Art Prize. Offering €40,000 to a mid-career artist “to support an artist’s career and showcase how the artist’s gallery works to promote them and develop a wider awareness of their work” it is presented as a no-strings-attached cash injection. Yet there is nonetheless a high price to pay for this prize. BNP Paribas is the number one European financier of genocide and colonisation in Palestine.
Since 2021 the Don’t Buy into Occupation (DBIO) Coalition – a network of 25 Palestinian and European civil society organisations – has published annual reports that expose the financial relationships between European financial institutions and businesses involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as genocide in Gaza. DBIO have identified 104 companies involved in the export and sale of arms, munitions, and other military equipment to Israel, the extraction and use of illegally acquired Palestinian natural resources that, and the supply of equipment and materials facilitating the construction or expansion of settlements, the wall, and associated infrastructure of the regime of military occupation and apartheid. They have subsequently identified 1,115 European financial institutions (including banks, asset managers, insurance companies, pension funds, and the European Investment Bank) that have financial relationships with these businesses. Of these European financial institutions propping up genocide and colonisation, the bank BNP Paribas is the number 1 creditor, providing 20,810 direct loans and underwriting 20,670 more.
BNP Paribas finance almost every aspect of genocide: the tech giants that enable Israel’s advanced AI targeting and weapons systems: Google (4,933.76 million USD), Amazon (3,415.91 million USD), Microsoft (5,889.28 million USD), IBM (300.00 million USD), and Palantir (489.75 million USD). The weapons manufacturers themselves: Lockheed Martin (107.10 million USD prime contractor to Israel for the F-35 fighter jet), Boeing (225.27 million USD manufacturer for many of the guided weapons used by the Israeli military), BAE systems (167.34 million USD, a leading supplier for the F-35), Leonardo (6.77 million USD, part of the F-35 coalition) and Elbit systems (0.18 Million USD producer of the Iron Beam, a laser-based missile defense system designed to counter rockets, drones, and cruise missiles).
The bank continue to deny responsibility, in a July 2025 statement calling the boycott “unlawful”. They claim BNP Paribas “does not provide any disputable financing” yet its entire disavowal of responsibility lies in the artificial separation of things: “the report says BNP Paribas supports companies active in these territories, which is not permissible. The financing we provide these companies supports projects deployed in Europe as well as elsewhere in the world.” Yet as the DBIO report notes, even if “identified businesses also operate outside the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” meaning not all “of these capital flows are directed solely to activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, investment in a company generally supports that company in its entirety. As a result, investors are directly linked to all of a company’s activities, and therefore to the adverse impacts arising from them.”
The partnership with BNP Paribas Banque Privée (a subsidiary of BNP Paribas), established in 2024, six months into a genocide that has killed over 70,000 in Gaza, extends the complicity in violence to the art fair too.
A call for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was made over two decades ago, in 2004. Part of the broader Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement, its principles assert that if institutions would refuse collaboration with the financiers of genocide, they would firstly prevent them from whitewashing their investments in the name of art and culture, and secondly, they would put pressure on them to divest from Israel, its military, and its settlements.
As we wrote last year, in the lead up to Art Paris 2025 ——
‘BDS in the art world makes one thing exceedingly clear: it undermines art’s “claims of autonomy and emancipatory effects,” as Vijay Masharani wrote in 2020, in his article No words: on the status of BDS within contemporary art. And it thus “leaves it only with refusal: either refuse to be a perpetrator or refuse the request made by Palestinian civil society. At this juncture,” he adds, “the latter option should already be unthinkable.” Five years later, and 18 months into the genocide during which Israel has killed over 60,000 Palestinians across Gaza and the West bank, Masharani’s juncture is a far off land, and things have only gotten worse.’
Art Paris, and the other cultural enterprises and institutions that continue to accept money from the financiers of genocide in exchange for the art washing of their image, have chosen to refuse the request made by Palestinian civil society, they have chosen which side they are on.
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