Activists Cover Picasso’sMotherhoodwith Photo of Palestinian Mother and Child

Just days after two young climate change activists weresentenced to prisonfor bringing awareness to their cause by tossing soup over Vincent van Gogh’s 1888Sunflowersat London’s National Gallery, another young pair of protesters on October 9 entered the same museum and pasted an image of a Palestinian mother and child over Pablo Picasso’s 1901Motherhood (La Maternité). Taken by Palestinian journalist Ali Jadallah during the Israeli siege of Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital this past March, the image showed a woman weeping as she held her bloodied child. The demonstrators, affiliated withYouth Demand, an offshoot of a student division of climate action groupJust Stop Oil, were arrested after one poured a red liquid on the floor, eliciting gasps. The museum has since reported that the painting, which was behind glass, was unharmed, the photo having been peeled off it shortly after its application. The frame and floors were also undamaged.

The activists were identified as National Health Services worker Jai Halai, 23, andpoliticsand international relations student Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 21. Avideoposted to Youth Demand’s Instagram shows Rosenfeld, sitting on the floor before the masterpiece, wearing a shirt reading STOP ARMING ISRAEL, speaking against Israel’s sustained retaliatory attack on Gaza and calling for a Free Palestine. Rosenfeld in a separatevideo statementsaid they took part in the action “because as a Jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza.”

“I’m taking action with Youth Demand because at this point it’s been over one year of seeing my colleagues in the healthcare field decimated,” Halai said in a recorded testimony transcribed in Hyperallergic. “Decimated by bombs, by bullets and by having to operate, with no medical equipment, on starved children.”

The pair’s action comes shortly after British defense secretary John Healey rejected French president Emmanuel Macron’s call for an arms embargo to Israel. Youth Demand is calling for a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for an end to all new UK oil and gas licenses.