An artwork at the Kunstverein Hamburg was damaged when a visitor used their foot to erase the word “Palestine,” which had been etched onto a layer of clay covering the gallery floor. The act of vandalism, which took place in November, is currently being investigated by local authorities as a hate crime, the museum confirmed last week.

The site-specific installation red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth [kick dirt] (2024) by London-based artist Phoebe Collings-James is part of the group exhibition “In and Out of Place. Land after Information 1992–2024” at the Kunstverein Hamburg, which opened September 7, 2024 and closes this Sunday.

Collings-James’s work invites visitors to walk across a floor covered in dried clay, on which the artist has made drawings and written brief pieces of text. In one section, she inscribed the place names Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, and Congo, all countries that have experienced devastating conflicts in 2024. In November, only the word “Palestine” was erased from this list. The work has since been restored to its original state.

Phoebe Collings-James, red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth (kick dirt) (2024) after it was vandalized by a visitor to the Kunstverein Hamburg.

The visitor participation element of the installation inevitably alters the work over the time, but the targeted erasure of the word “Palestine” has been understood as an attempt by an unknown perpetrator to “deliberately deface” the artwork, according to a statement that the museum posted on Instagram on Friday. It added that it was “deeply saddened” by the incident, which it “unequivocally condemns.”

The museum declined to disclose any further details about the crime, citing the ongoing investigation.

“The vandalism was a devastating reminder of the force of support there is for the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people,” said Collings-James in a statement via email. “My artwork invited people to move across it, to consider land and its politics, the violent act of erasure taps into the psyche of all that has sought to destroy and dispossess us.”

The hate crime investigation takes place as tensions over censorship and how to respond to Israel’s war in Gaza have only intensified in Germany’s fractured cultural sphere. At the beginning of November, Germany’s federal parliament passed a resolution intended to “ensure that no organizations or projects that spread antisemitism, question Israel’s right to exist, call for a boycott of Israel or actively support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement receive financial support.” Critics voiced their concern that the resolution posed a threat to freedom of expression, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International.

Phoebe Collings-James, red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth (kick dirt) (2024) in its original state.

In late November, around the same time that the incident of vandalism occurred at the Kunstverein Hamburg, Nan Goldin delivered a controversial but widely publicized speech at the opening of her exhibition at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. As well as condemning Israel’s war in Gaza, she decried what she called Germany’s complicity abroad and censorship at home.

“In declaring all criticism against Israel as antisemitic,” Goldin said, “it makes it harder to define and stop violent hatred against Jews. Meanwhile, Islamophobia is being ignored.”

Speaking to FAD magazine last fall, before the act of vandalism in Hamburg, Collings-James had said that the inclusion of Palestine, Haiti, Sudan, and Congo in red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth [kick dirt] (2024) was an opportunity to “lay a rose for them, draw an olive tree.”

In her statement, she said incidents like these provide an opportunity for museums to take “a stand against ongoing genocide and apartheid. And to not make conversations around decolonizing—a hot topic in museums—academic fodder, decolonizing means ending genocide and white supremacist violence now. Colonization is not historical, we are in a continuum.”