After Brighton’s Jubilee Library's cancellation of an exhibition of the New Union Flag, artist Dr Gil Mualem-Doron warns against a climate of cultural caution.

In early October, I proposed a collaboration between my project, the New Union Flag, and Stand Up To Racism, in response to the far-right Raise the Colours campaign – an operation plastering Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses across England. One of our planned events was an exhibition at Jubilee Library in Brighton, featuring the New Union Flag alongside two other reimagined flags.

Then the library cancelled the exhibition.

In a phone call followed by a letter, staff explained that the exhibition might ‘put visitors and their belongings at risk.’ They added that, unlike a gallery or museum, library visitors might encounter the work unexpectedly and take offence. No compromise was offered, not even to show one or two flags.

The irony was hard to ignore. Just two years ago, Brighton & Hove City Council commissioned New Union Flag works for a public art series that appeared on bus stops across the city for eight months. Now, the same city that once embraced the project had turned away. ‘Toto,’ I thought, ‘I have a feeling we’re not in Brighton anymore.’

Adding insult to injury, a grant application I submitted to a fund for political art was recently rejected because, as the committee put it, ‘Brighton is a very liberal place – you’ll probably find all the support you need.’ Well, perhaps not.

This is the first time the New Union Flag has been censored since I began the project in 2014. Its debut was at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, just three days after the Brexit referendum. The timing was charged: the flag, which reimagines the Union Jack through fabrics sourced from across the world, symbolises a multicultural, inclusive Britain. My partner half-jokingly suggested I wear a bulletproof vest to the opening – it wasn’t long after the murder of Jo Cox. Yet the Turner Contemporary team stood firm. The show must go on, they said.

A flag for the Britain we live in

The New Union Flag replaces the familiar red, white and blue with textiles that represent Britain’s diverse communities. Through workshops with over 10,000 participants across the UK, it has become a living artwork – a patchwork of shared identity, cultural exchange, and belonging. It doesn’t erase the British story. It expands it, weaving in the colours and shapes that have been painted over time and again. What it challenges is the myth of a homogenous Britain – a myth that not only distorts history but also diminishes the nation’s richness.

Since its debut, the flag has appeared at Tate Modern, Southbank Centre, Liverpool Museum, Brighton Museum, the People’s History Museum in Manchester, and Amnesty International, among many others. It has been used in school workshops and hung in civic buildings. In all those years, there has never been an incident, nor a complaint.

So, what is Brighton’s library afraid of?

When neutrality becomes complicity

When I spoke with the library’s head, she assured me the decision ‘was not personal.’ But for me, it couldn’t be more personal.

My mother survived the Holocaust because ordinary Bulgarians refused to stay silent when the Jews of Bulgaria were marked for deportation. They stood up. They said no. I learned from her that silence – not hatred – is often the greatest danger.

At the 1963 March on Washington, standing beside Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Joachim Prinz said: ‘I was the rabbi of the Jewish community in Berlin under the Hitler regime. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful problem is silence.’

Silence takes many forms. Sometimes it’s indifference, sometimes it’s fear of controversy, or the desire to ‘stay neutral.’ But in times of moral crisis, neutrality isn’t neutrality – it’s complicity.

If, in Brighton of all places, a public library feels unable to host a work that celebrates diversity and inclusion, we should be concerned. It signals a retreat into caution and conformity; the very forces art is meant to challenge.

The creeping culture of caution

The danger isn’t that Jubilee Library cancelled an exhibition. It’s that this kind of quiet self-censorship is spreading, often dressed up as ‘risk management.’ Institutions that once prided themselves on open debate and creative freedom are increasingly paralysed by fear of complaint – or by fear itself.

Art has always unsettled as much as it inspires. However, when public institutions prioritise discomfort over injustice, the cultural space that sustains democracy begins to shrink.

I am reminded of Rhinoceros, Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 play, in which an entire town’s inhabitants gradually transform into rhinoceroses – a metaphor for conformity and moral numbness. In modern Hebrew, inspired by the play, there’s even a verb for it: lehitkarnef, ‘to become a rhino.’ To lose one’s moral sensitivity. In English, perhaps we could say: to become ‘rhinocerosized.’

When the people of a supposedly open and liberal city flinch from showing a flag that celebrates the very diversity they claim to cherish, I wonder how many of us are quietly growing horns.