Framing Change: Contemporary Art as a Lens on Social Issues

The gallery’s main wall features Billie Zangewa’s tapestry, The Journey Home (2022). Made from silk offcuts, it shows the artist carrying her son through an imagined cityscape. Its modest size invites intimacy. For Zangewa, ‘home’ embodies her practice of ‘daily feminism,’ asserting that domestic routines can be acts of resistance.

Zangewa’s themes of care and identity resonate across contemporary art, with artists addressing social issues directly. This thread connects venues from London’s Tate Modern to Lisbon’s Galeria da Graça. Artists are stitching and printing works that demand engagement rather than propose solutions.

Climate anxiety finds a visual counterpart in Olafur Eliasson’s ongoing series Glacial Landscape Archive. Since 2019, Eliasson has catalogued photographs of disappearing glaciers. Each image emphasizes its materiality, printed on archival pigment paper. These prints accompany blocks of melting glacial ice, displayed at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. Eliasson aims to detail the passage of time—a quiet loss that reflects collapsing ecosystems.

Similarly, South African artist Tabita Rezaire merges technology and ancestral practices to address systemic inequality. Her video installation Deep Down Tidal (2017), premiered at the Centre Pompidou, layers underwater cable imagery with narratives of colonial violence. Projected in a darkened room, the video’s blues and silvers envelop viewers, drawing them into its narrative.

At the Museo del Barrio in New York, the 2023 exhibition Something to Declare examined diasporic perspectives on migration. Among its highlights was Guadalupe Maravilla’s Disease Thrower #12 (2020), an assemblage designed for sound healing ceremonies. Maravilla, a Salvadoran refugee, uses his art to navigate trauma. On the exhibition’s final day, he performed a sound healing session, inviting community participation as a shared experience.

Curators are increasingly prioritizing these dialogues. María Elena Ortiz, who curated Between the Earth and the Sky: The Spiritual Foundations of Climate Resilience at Pérez Art Museum Miami, emphasizes her role in “facilitating spaces where audiences can confront discomfort.” In a March 2023 panel, Ortiz noted that conversations must transition from abstract critique to tangible engagement. The exhibition featured artists like Tavares Strachan, whose neon installations juxtapose scientific diagrams with Caribbean cultural references, highlighting interconnected vulnerabilities.

However, framing these practices solely as activism is reductive. Art historian Claire Bishop cautions against reducing art’s critical potential to a checklist of “issues addressed.” In Artforum (July/August 2023), Bishop argues that the challenge lies in maintaining aesthetic complexity while broadening accessibility. Artists like Zangewa and Rezaire invoke layered storytelling that resists easy conclusions.

Commercial interests also influence what is displayed and where. At Art Basel 2023, galleries showcased works addressing environmental degradation, yet the fair itself faced criticism for its carbon footprint. Some artists, like the Senegalese collective RAW Material Company, bypass institutional validation, operating in Dakar as a “centre for art, knowledge and society.” Their programs engage directly with local needs.

What are the stakes of such practices? An exhibition at Carpintarias de São Lázaro in Lisbon this September, titled After the Flood, posed this question directly. It showcased works by European and African artists responding to rising sea levels. The curators avoided didactic framing, allowing unresolved tensions to emerge. A suspended sculpture by Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, made from reclaimed fishing nets, swayed gently, prompting viewers to consider whether art can fully address the crises it represents.

Contemporary art’s role in addressing social issues is not new, but its urgency feels heightened. As institutions confront their ethical and environmental responsibilities, the works they display must balance critique and complicity. Through Zangewa’s intimate self-portraits, Eliasson’s vanishing glaciers, and Maravilla’s healing rituals, these practices amplify the complexities of our shared reality. They invite us to listen more closely, rather than promise solutions.