The Question of Funding
© The Question of Funding
The Question of Funding is a collective of artistic practitioners and activists who aim to rethink the economy of cultural practices and the way cultural institutions mediate and influence art production. In particular, they seek to raise pertinent questions about the ‘donor economy’ in which artists and artistic scenes are at the dependency of international funding. Beginning from Palestine as the ground for their research and practice, where following the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, cultural organisations experienced a shift, having to register as NGOs in order to receive international funding, thus surviving through subservience. Their practice aims to develop alliances with those who wish collectively to create alternative frameworks for developing a new and sustainable infrastructure for cultural production. The collective has been building an economic model named Dayra — Arabic for ‘circle’ or ‘circulation’ — that forms circles of trust within a community who also harnesses the vast resources at their disposal in Palestine and elsewhere, the exploitation of which is usually stifled by the difficult political and economic realities they face. In the absence of money, they turn to human, material, natural and intellectual resources as communal wealth. Building on debt as a communal asset, Dayra becomes an interdependent economy of different parts of the community. Dayra was first introduced by The Question of Funding in the context of documenta fifteen, Kassel, in 2022, and has continued to develop. A growing series of information videos and posters provide context and information on Dayra.
Dayra, 2025
3 videos, 02:30 min.
Courtesy the artists
Towards Militant Art, 2025
Poster
Courtesy the artists