Ahmet Öğüt asks Amsterdam museum to remove his work
Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt has called on Amsterdam‘s Stedelijk Museum to remove his installation, Bakunin’s Barricade. This position comes amid a row about the work’s accompanying acquisition contract, which maintains that it is not just a work of art in the visual sense.
The sculpture is a barricade, comprised of materials, detritus, fencing and the wreck of a car. It’s very similar to the authentic assemblage of materials you see on the street during a fraught protest or riot. The Stedelijk’s website mentions anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin’s suggestion that as Prussian troops prepared to crush the 1849 socialist uprising in Dresden, they used valuable paintings from the National Museum at the front of their barricades, as the soldiers surely wouldn’t want to destroy the art.
Bakunin’s Barricade was acquired and first displayed by the Stedelijk in 2020. A contemporary rendering of Bakunin’s famous proposal, it now incorporates works by the likes of Nan Goldin and Käte Kollwitz. Interestingly, Bakunin’s Barricade has been shown in other venues, and when it has, an accompanying statement said it can be requested that it be used in protests.
“A loan contact, prepared in collaboration with a lawyer, stipulates that the barricade may be requested and deployed during extreme economic, social, political, transformative moments and social movements,” Öğüt notes on his website.
However, things took a turn on November 5th, when Öğüt claimed that in June, the Stedelijk “refused” to loan Bakunin’s Barricade to a group of Amsterdam activists called the Not Surprised Collective, as they protected students from police brutality when protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in the Middle East.
Instead, the Amsterdam institution proposed installing the artwork outside the nearby Gerrit Rietveld Academy, an art school and museum. Significantly, they suggested that they use a reproduction of the piece and not the selection of original artworks of economic and cultural value, going against the central motivation of Öğüt’s work.
A statement from the Not Surprised Collective asserted: “The museum invoked a remarkable clause in the contract stating that reproductions could also be used. Moreover, the museum proposed to use the reproductions without disclosing this, which would practically constitute forgery.”
However, the Stedelijk defended its choice, maintaining it has a duty to preserve works for the future, but the activists called the position “performative”.
Öğüt has now weighed in on the matter, claiming that the museum is trying to evade the terms of the original acquisition agreement. He said it requires that the Stedelijk publicly announce that it has declined to loan artwork to its collection. The museum also asserts that it has only proposed minor adjustments to the original contract, maintaining that artworks are purchased with public funds, hence its commitment to protecting them.
“This stance is completely against the core idea behind the Bakunin’s Barricade, to the point that as an artist, I have no option but to publicly demand the removal of my work from the collection display,” the artist writes in his “demand” to take the work down on his website. “Though the Museum legally owns the work, I expect it to respect both the integrity of the artwork and my role as its author.”
As it stands, Bakunin’s Barricade remains on display at the museum.
