Art as Activism: The Evolving Responsibility of Creatives in Crisis

A five-metre-tall installation loomed over the Venice Biennale in 2022, its undulating form evoking both rising seas and the fragility of human intervention. We Are the Flood, by artist collective Superflux, used salvaged timber and projected data on climate displacement to confront viewers with the realities of ecological collapse. Its presence was as overwhelming as its statistics: 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050, according to the UN. The work was not just a warning—it was also a challenge to reckon with complicity.

Art’s role as a conduit for social commentary is not new. Francisco Goya's The Disasters of War (1810–1820) and Käthe Kollwitz's The Weavers (1897) foregrounded the suffering of their times. But what distinguishes today’s landscape is the immediacy of digital dissemination and the intersectionality of the crises being addressed. Artists are now tasked with responding to an increasingly interwoven tapestry of issues: climate injustice, systemic racism, the refugee crisis, and the pervasive afterlives of colonialism. “The world is asking new things of us,” says Clara Peeters, curator at Tate Modern. “Artists cannot afford to work in isolation from these broader pressures.”

At the 2023 Sharjah Biennial, Otobong Nkanga’s Underneath the Shade We Lay Grounded transformed over 1,000 square meters of gallery space into a meditation on extractivism and belonging. Visitors were invited to kneel or sit within woven installations while audio murmurs listed sites of environmental destruction. Nkanga’s piece anchored itself in the personal, asking viewers to consider their consumption patterns. By centring the materiality of the earth, she bridges the gap between abstract systems and individual responsibility.

The relationship between art and activism is, however, fraught. Critics argue that the institutional frameworks funding major works are themselves complicit in the systems they critique. In 2019, protests erupted at the Whitney Museum over its board vice chair, Warren B. Kanders, whose company Safariland manufactured tear gas used on migrants at the US-Mexico border. Nan Goldin’s protests against Sackler-funded museums spotlighted the tension between patronage and public morality—a tension unresolved in many cultural institutions. Artists like Goldin are forcing a reckoning: Can art for change exist within the very systems that demand change?

“Increasingly, artists are also technologists, working deeply with the tools that define our times,” notes Ananya Sen, a researcher at the Serpentine Galleries' Creative AI Lab. Consider Refik Anadol’s 2023 installation, Data Monuments, a series of AI-generated projections built on datasets of urban inequality. Trained on municipal corruption records and anonymised eviction filings, Anadol's algorithm renders cityscapes that glitch and dissolve, evoking the precarity of urban life. Yet, as with any work engaging AI, Anadol's piece invites scrutiny: Is technological commentary authentic if it replicates the same power structures it critiques?

The medium itself has become part of the critique. In 2021, Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu merged digital and physical layers in The Seeding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her cyborgian figures, part-human and part-earth, used Augmented Reality (AR) to overlay digital ruins onto the physical exhibition, reminding viewers of the accelerating loss wrought by extractive capitalism. Mutu's work exemplifies what Sen calls a new "layered" responsibility: engaging with the materials, audiences, and infrastructures that both enable and limit art’s impact.

But can art truly instigate change? There is little consensus. While art historians like T.J. Demos argue for its potential to catalyse collective action, others, such as critic Aruna Raman, caution against overstating its efficacy. “Art is not policy,” Raman says. “Its best function is to provoke, to inspire critical thought. Change requires structures larger and slower than art alone.” Still, Raman acknowledges the importance of art in articulating the intangible—grief, hope, solidarity—in ways inaccessible to other modes of discourse.

Consider Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch (2014–2019), which brought twelve massive glacial ice blocks to urban centres including London and Paris. Designed as both spectacle and warning, the melting ice was a visceral reminder of climate urgency. Yet detractors questioned the carbon footprint of transporting the installation. Eliasson, in response, pointed to the paradoxes of visibility: "How do we ask people to act without showing them what is at stake?" This tension—between the impact of the message and the means of delivering it—remains unresolved, a hallmark of art's evolving role.

Perhaps the most direct intersection of art and action lies in grassroots practices. Brazilian collective Opavivará! transforms public spaces into arenas for community engagement, using participatory design to model alternatives to neoliberal urban planning. Their 2022 project Solar Kitchen built solar-powered street kitchens in Rio de Janeiro, redistributing resources while also creating moments of dialogue. Such practices bypass the institutional apparatus entirely, embedding art within lived experience.

“We are entering an era where art must do more than represent; it must embody,” argues curator Lucy Lippard. If the works of Goya and Kollwitz held a mirror to social suffering, contemporary artists are attempting to both reflect and intervene. The stakes are high, and the outcomes are uneven. Yet art’s persistence in crises—its ability to channel the language of urgency into forms that demand attention—remains its most enduring contribution.

As Peeters suggests, “The question is not whether art can change the world. It’s whether it can remind us who we need to be to survive it.”