French Artists Denounce Centre Pompidou and Hanwha Partnership in Open Letter
By Theo Belci
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More than 100 prominent French artists have signed an open letter that calls for the termination of a partnership between Centre Pompidou and the South Korean business conglomerate Hanwha Group, per multiple reports.
Following a four year partnership agreement initially signed in 2023, the Centre Pompidou and Hanwha planned to open the new “Centre Pompidou Hanwha” museum to the public in Seoul later this week. The venue has already been inaugurated and served a prominent stage for international art and commerce: last week, Chanel staged a Métiers d’Art show at the museum.
The nature of the protests against the partnership stems from Hanwha Group’s ties to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). The Art Newspaper recently reported that in 2021, Hanwha Systems (an affiliate of Hanwha Group) signed partnership deals with the Israeli firms Elbit Systems and Elta Systems, which are defense-focused subsidiaries of Israel Aerospace Industries, the Israeli government’s state owned military and civilian aerospace manufacturer.
“We, members of the art world, denounce the partnership between the Centre Pompidou and the South Korean group Hanwha, implicated in the arms industry linked to the Palestinian genocide,” the English translation of the open letter reads. “We criticize the imminent opening of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha in Seoul, perceived as an ‘art-washing’ operation masking profits derived from armed conflicts, and more broadly denounce the commodification of culture and the international expansion of museums through alliances with multinational corporations.”
A longer op-ed from the protesting collective was published in Libération, and claimed that the opening of the Centre Pompidou Hanwha was “the result of a previous agreement made in 2023 (which marks the first agreement between Pompidou and this notorious arms dealer whose stock market had increased by 800% after October 7 of that same year).”
Signatories of the new petition include Ali Cherri, the winner of the 2022 Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion for a promising young artist; artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar, the winner of the 2021 Marcel Duchamp Prize; Soyoon Ryu, a professor and art historian at the University of Chicago; Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a Palestinian Jewish photography theorist; and the performance artist Kubra Khademi.
This article was originally published by Artforum.