Rise of the auto-narrative

Rising inequality and geopolitical tensions are, once again, igniting new practices as artists respond to these experiences

- Avantika Bhuyan

Across the world, it is a time of charged geopolitics, marked by widespread crackdowns on civil liberties and freedom of expression. Can the art world be unaffected by all the conflict? One can sense the impact of polarisation in the exclusions at certain events.

For instance, at the ongoing Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Tom Vattakuzhy’s exhibition was closed temporarily last year after religious groups protested against Supper at a Nunnery, an interpretation of The Last Supper, outraged by the artist’s treatment of a Biblical theme. For the 2026 Venice Biennale, South Africa’s minister of sport, arts and culture blocking artist Gabrielle Goliath’s entry Elegy, which depicts gender-based violence and references Gaza.

Throughout history, cultural practitioners have responded to moments of conflict in their own unique way, giving rise to significant art movements and major turns in artistic practice.

TURMOIL AND HEALING

In his 2024 article The Impact of War on Art, published on the website of the online Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art, artist Gavin Coates lists Dadaism and Surrealism as two movements forged in a response to turmoil and conflict. The former developed during World War I, with artists like Marcel Duchamp and Hannah Höch “using absurdity and chaos to reject conventional aesthetics, mirroring the senselessness they saw in the war,” he writes. “Similarly, Surrealism arose post World War I... with artists like Salvador Dalí and André Breton channeling their trauma into dreamlike, unsettling works that critiqued the social and political conditions of their time.” Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) is still considered one of the most powerful political statements by an artist in response to the bombing of a town in Basque.