From the
river
to the
sea

Artworks depicting rivers and seas, sourced from the Rijksmuseum's database.

This website is inspired by the April fool’s day article titled “Berlin Museum Removes All Artwork Depicting Rivers or Seas” posted on Hyperallergic, which is not particularly more absurd than the silencing of voices in the cultural sectors of the Global North that condemn Israel’s ongoing settler colonialism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against Palestinians. While disillusioning about the superficiality of the “decolonization gimmicks”, the situation necessitates critical modes of attending to the technical capacities of the infrastructures of culture, namely institutions. Using the API provided by Rijksmuseum, the website presents public domain artworks from the museum’s database that depicts rivers and seas, constructing the slogan for the Palestinian liberation “From the river to the sea”, unjustly accused of being antisemitic. By appropriating the resources of an institution with an inherent colonial history, the website presents the often censored slogan without breaking the content policy of the API. This highlights the idea of an institution as a technical object with open capacity, susceptible to “queer uses.”

Also, check the Forbidden Color Translator and 1.8 Million Displaced Here.