Apartheid Apartments: Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives

viewable 24 hours a day until the 2nd of July

A controversial new estate agent has opened in South Yorkshire that appears to be offering properties for sale and rent in the West Bank and Gaza. 

video capture courtesy Jon Robson

On a Doncaster street already dominated by estate agent branches, Apartheid Apartments doesn’t immediately stand out as anything unusual. But on taking a closer look, potential customers will find half the shop dominated by barbed wire and CCTV cameras, with listings advertising a “striking, fully obliterated property” for Palestinians, or a “rare opportunity to participate in a crime against humanity” in an illegal settlement for Israeli citizens. 

But the “estate agent” is in fact an art installation by artist Darren Cullen, (42, from Leeds) who goes under the name Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives. He says the exhibition is an attempt to draw attention to what he calls “Israel’s long-term policy of ethnic cleansing,” which has had material and diplomatic support from successive UK governments, “Israel’s genocide in Gaza is beyond horrifying,” he says, “but its important to place it in the context of an ongoing attempt by Israel to wipe Palestinians off the map. I put all these horrific crimes into the mundane form of an estate agent to try and show the banality of evil at work, how things as dull as planning permission and property rights are all part of an attempt to systematically eradicate an entire people.” 

Cullen has previously worked with Banksy when another of his shop-based installations, Pocket Money Loans, was featured at Dismaland in 2015. But while Pocket Money Loans took aim at pay day loans and child-targeted advertising, this new work aims to show the injustice of Israel’s continued occupation and annexation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza. 

At the rear of the shop, on the Palestinian side, the wall has been dramatically broken through by a JCB digger arm, a reference to the arbitrary demolitions that Israeli military authorities regularly carry out against Palestinian homes in the West Bank. Architectural models show some of the property options for buyers, with a newly built Israeli apartment complex built on a foundation of human skulls, and a Palestinian tent pitched in a bomb crater, with yet another bomb just about to fall on it. 

On the Israeli side a replica assault rifle is advertised as “free with every new home”, based on the AR-15 rifles that Israeli government ministers handed out to illegal settlers, and a Trustpilot sticker on the wall rates the business as zero stars and “genocidal” according to the UN. On the outside of the shop, a break in the barbed wire is replaced with anti-bird spikes above the Israeli side, which has violently impaled a white dove of peace.