ArcLight and Academy Museum lighted up with Gaza protest projections
An activist art collective called Indecline projected a series of graphic videos onto several symbolic local buildings, including the ArcLight Cinema off Sunset Boulevard, on Monday night, calling attention to the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Titled “For Your Consideration: Ceasefire,” the guerrilla protest also lighted up the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Wilshire Boulevard and the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study on Vine Street. Images of injured Palestinian children and grieving parents drew the attention of drivers and passersby for hours, amplifying the collective’s call for an immediate cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Founded in 2021 by an anonymous group of photographers, graffiti writers, filmmakers and artists, Indecline is known for its politically charged public art. In 2015, the group claimed to have created the largest graffiti piece in the world — a half-mile-wide message reading, “This Land Was Our Land” — on a disused landing strip in California’s Mojave Desert. In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, the group unveiled life-size naked statues of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other cities.
Monday’s protest comes just two days after the opening of the group’s first retrospective exhibition at downtown L.A.’s Superchief Gallery, which chronicles nearly two decades of its guerrilla art actions.
As with other recent demonstrations related to the war in Gaza at events like the Oscars and Emmys, the locations selected for Indecline’s protests were intended to highlight Hollywood’s cultural influence. The decision to target the Academy Museum follows a recent controversy surrounding an exhibition about the film industry’s Jewish founders, further emphasizing the thorny questions swirling around cultural institutions over their responsibility to confront social justice issues. The Pickford Center, named after film legend Mary Pickford, houses the academy’s preservation and technical efforts, while the ArcLight, although closed since the pandemic, remains a beloved piece of L.A.’s film landscape.
In a statement, Indecline called out the moral responsibility it believes lies with those in power: “Even when the world refuses to look at injustice; history has the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Don’t be the bad guys in the history books of tomorrow. Be the resistance today.”
The collective plans to continue its protest Tuesday evening, with projections set for other high-profile buildings across Los Angeles.
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