Why Art That Sticks Its Nose Into Politics Still Has a Place

Forsaken - 300 x 200 cm Fred Fabre 2025

There's a fashionable idea that art spaces should be a pleasant refuge, a bit of calm where you can forget the outside world. Fair enough; everyone enjoys a breather. But insisting that art should never touch political questions is a bit like refusing to open the curtains because you don't like the view. It doesn't change anything; it just lets things fester off-stage.

Right now, across Europe, the UK and further afield, voices once comfortably relegated to the margins are finding louder platforms. Anti-immigration protests in towns and cities around Britain have at times been co-opted by organised far-right groups, riding on local anxieties and turning them into broader nationalist agitation. Home Office figures for the year to March 2025 show referrals for extreme right-wing radicalisation overtaking those for Islamist extremism for the first time, the highest proportion on record, even as the security services still rate Islamist terrorism the more severe threat.

This isn't confined to these shores. Across Europe, parties built on exclusionary, nationalist platforms are gaining ground at the polls; in Germany, the AfD has been polling ahead of the governing CDU through most of 2026. And in other countries, leaders and movements openly draw on symbols and rhetoric that recall much darker chapters of the twentieth century.

Most political questions don't vanish when ignored. They settle into the wallpaper. Artists who choose to poke at them aren't running a public seminar. They're simply refusing the neat separation between "culture" and "everything else that's going wrong". Sometimes all that's required is to make people notice what they've trained themselves not to see.

It's often said that political art divides people. Good. A room where everyone feels entirely comfortable is usually just a showroom. The minute a piece unsettles someone, even slightly, you know the work has actually registered.

And let's be honest: any space that invites the public in is already political, even if it pretends not to be. What you choose to show, what you avoid showing, who feels welcome, who doesn't, these things signal a worldview whether you announce it or not. Declaring "neutrality" simply disguises the fact that a position has already been taken.

The point of art that deals with power, identity, violence or the stories we tell ourselves isn't to deliver tidy solutions. It's to hold things up long enough that you can't glide past them. It interrupts the weekly rhythm of shrugging and moving on.

Spaces that avoid difficult subjects end up feeling oddly weightless, as if they're floating above the world rather than part of it. Spaces that take the risk of facing these questions become places where people can actually think, rather than be reassured.

Political art isn't necessary because it has answers. It's necessary because it stops us sleepwalking. It forces a bit of clarity, even if it's uncomfortable. And in times like ours, when some of the old certainties are fraying and old prejudices are finding new audiences, pretending not to see what's happening is a luxury we probably can't afford.

Ref: Home Office, Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme, England and Wales, April 2024 to March 2025