BNP Paribas — Art Washing the Funding of Genocide
What do we do with an international art market that already deals in whitewashing, money laundering, and tax fraud when they announce partnerships with financial institutions that invest in arms manufacturing and apartheid? The whole system is rotten, the money circulating in its market is bad, “art industries trigger trickle-up effects which are then flushed sideways into tax havens,” wrote Hito Steyerl in 2016. “Art’s economies divert investments from sustainable job creation, education, and research and externalize social cost and risk. They bleach neighborhoods, underpay, overrate, and peddle excruciating baloney”. It is ever more the case.
Yet there are banks — like BNP Paribas, the number 1. European investor in companies actively involved in illegal settlements in Palestine, and the number 1. European creditor to companies that sell weapons to the Israeli military — who still claim that their investment in culture is part of their “fight against all forms of discrimination”. And so while art itself does not maim, nor kill, its emancipatory or political content becomes a vacant referent made possible on the back of Palestinian lives, when individual artists or cultural institutions accept partnerships and funding from the same financial institutions that fund bombs and drones.
A call for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was made over two decades ago, in 2004, by groups including the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees; Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions; Palestinian NGO Network, West Bank; Teachers’ Federation; Palestinian Writers’ Federation; Palestinian League of Artists; Palestinian Journalists’ Federation; General Union of Palestinian Women; Palestinian Lawyers’ Association; and tens of other Palestinian federations, associations, and civil society organizations. 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.
In this sense, 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.
Yet, when the more nationally-focused of Paris’ art fairs, Art Paris, announced a premium partnership with BNP Paribas earlier this year, it didn’t make news. It didn’t cause a ripple as the genocide intensifies. For BNP Paribas also funds reputable French institutions including the Centre National de Danse; Chaillot Theatre National de la Danse; Villa Médicis. On the opening day of Art Paris, on 3 April 2025, the Israeli army killed 112 Palestinians; three schools and a number of shelters were targeted. On the second day of Art Paris Israeli air strikes killed 38 Palestinians across the north and south of Gaza, the embargo on humanitarian aid reached one month. On the third day of Art Paris, 30 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes. On the closing day of Art Paris 44 Palestinians were killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza.
Meanwhile, at Art Paris, under the gilded coupoles of the Grand Palais, the director of BNP Paribas’ private banking branch congratulated the recipient of their €40,000 prize for his depiction of “the banality of the every day, integrating the symbols of a world that is changing”. To cite Masharani again, who makes the appeal: “we must disallow arms dealers and autocrats from cynically exploiting the perceived transcendent virtue of contemporaneity’s propositional mode.” For “art’s harm is made to seem distant, both in space and time.” But art is not distant, nor is the every day banal under genocide. It is, as Rasem Nabhan in Gaza describes, “dead bodies, body parts, injured people and a lot of blood,” the separation of infants from their families. It is water shortages, and discovering that your husband’s dismembered body has stayed in an ambulance for three days because it was unable to reach the hospital, as Asmaa al-Masri describes.
Art in a fair is a defanged commodity, yet the boycott is a specific project, one with urgency, one that seeks to stem the flow of money into a genocide. To put enough pressure on players like BNP Paribas could result in divestment. We might not be able to count on their commitment to ethics, but instead to accumulation, and should their reputational damage become such that profit is dented, gilded sponsorship of ballistic missiles, submachine guns, and AI driven drones, might just come to an end.