Troubling care

I’m stepping into a conversation that’s been circling for a while now: what political art can still do, at a moment when systems are visibly breaking and museums are trying to respond. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but at some point political art started to feel… small. Not wrong. Not insincere. Just strangely light, considering the weight of the world.

I keep thinking back to how much faith there used to be in art’s ability to matter politically. Not just to reflect, but to instigate. Cause trouble. Shift something. I don’t know if that belief was naive, but I miss it. Or perhaps I miss the feeling of it, that art could still carry consequence beyond the room it was shown in. Now often when I walk through exhibitions I recognise the language immediately. I’m told what I’m supposed to feel. I know what side I’m meant to be on. The artworks described as political aren’t bad and often they’re careful, sensitive, well researched, but they rarely stay with me. They land and then they dissolve.

Institutions often respond to crises by adopting a poetic, languid language of care and community that soothes rather than challenges. Care, in this sense, becomes a mode of governance by naming harm while keeping responsibility diffuse. This rhetoric allows everyone to agree that something terrible is happening without asking who caused it or who should be held accountable. Perhaps this is why art feels less capable and useful now. It favors congeniality over confrontation or aestheticisation over consequence.

I’m aware that this carefulness is not accidental, speaking from a Nordic context. It is closely tied to the liberal political economy of consensus. Which is to say, cultural institutions are shaped by a self-image of fairness, transparency and moral progress, where conflict is expected to remain reasonable and disagreement must appear constructive. Art is encouraged to be engaged, even critical, but only within the boundaries of what can be recognised as civil, balanced and socially responsible. The result is a form of politics that feels meaningful while remaining structurally cautious, attentive to injury, yet reluctant to follow its causes through funding systems, state interests or institutional governance.

I think therefore, museums and exhibition spaces become sites where visibility is carefully negotiated. Certain histories and bodies are welcomed insofar as they can be framed as contributing to dialogue of diversity and inclusion, rather than disruption. Difference is invited to appear, but often as a managed encounter, producing recognition without demanding implication. What circulates under the banner of care seems to quietly displace questions of power, especially when institutions remain materially entangled with the economic and geopolitical arrangements they claim to critique.

The world feels unbearably loud. Genocides in Palestine and Sudan are livestreamed in real time. Police brutality is replayed on endless loops. Detention centres hold children prisoners. Extraction in Congo powers the very devices we use to denounce extraction. Museums sometimes issue statements. Artists sometimes share posts. Workers burn out. Our roles within  systems of production feel harder and harder to disavow, even when we are increasingly visible in civil acts of witnessing and response. Everything feels structurally broken, and art, at least the kind that moves easily through institutions, feels incapable of meeting this scale.

This problem feels atmospheric. Like a thinning of oxygen. It’s like the conditions that once gave political art its friction have quietly disappeared, leaving behind the gestures instead of force. This atmosphere feels inseparable from the institutional conditions that reward consensus, manage disagreement and turn political urgency into something safely ambient.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m imagining this. If I’ve just become cynical, tired, or harder to move. But I remember a time when encountering a work knocked something loose in me and others around me, not because it said the right thing, but because it made things unstable. Now so much work feels pre-agreed upon. Politics as a shared understanding, rather than a radical space. Everything is so careful. Which makes sense. No one wants to lose funding. No one wants to become difficult. Institutions survive through balance, diplomacy, avoidance. Over time, that creates a culture where disagreement becomes impolite and real tension feels inappropriate. So politics (and I am talking about the kind of politics that instigates radical material change) becomes something we gesture toward, not something we step into.

I want to admit, quietly and honestly, that none of this is easy and that pretending otherwise might be part of the problem. I keep asking myself how to bring that difficulty closer to the centre of my own practice. Not as a failure to be solved, but as something to be named. To say: this is hard, this is unclear or this is risky. Maybe that kind of honesty could open space for different conversations, not just with artists, but with institutions, audiences and peers. Conversations that don’t rush toward solutions but stay with the discomfort a little longer. The problems in the world right now will not be solved softly.

I also keep circling back to this idea of care. Institutions are increasingly expected to provide care, accessibility, community engagement, and I agree with all of that. Care is political, of course, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s becoming a buzzword, something written into forms and funding applications rather than something that actually grows out of the work. When institutions mandate care, it often feels procedural, like the framework comes before the art itself, rather than emerging from it. In these instances art is often asked to serve a pre-defined social function, rather than being allowed to generate meaning that then ripples outward. I don’t think care should be abandoned, quite the opposite. But it has to emerge from the art itself, from sustained relationships and shared risk, rather than being imposed as a requirement. Radical care isn’t always comfortable and political disagreement doesn’t always feel welcoming or safe, especially for those already carrying precarity and vulnerability. If museums are meant to be spaces for community, what happens when the conversation truly divides people? Who feels held and who feels exposed?

I have a lot of faith in art. Interacting with it shapes my everyday life and I make many of my life choices around it. That’s partly why I want to have these conversations at all. I move through the world with the same urgency when it comes to injustice: I fly to Italy to see the Biennale. I fly to Egypt to support people crossing the Rafah border. And yet those two actions feel incredibly far apart, almost like unrelated lives rather than parts of the same one. I can’t quite reconcile that distance and I keep wondering why these commitments that are both grounded in care feel so difficult to hold together.

I don’t have answers. Mostly I have doubts and a sense of grief for something that feels like it’s slipping away or already gone. I do not uphold the fantasy that art can fix the world, but I believe  that it could at least interrupt it. Maybe the task now isn’t to make louder political art, or more urgent art, or more virtuous art. Maybe it’s to resist the pressure to resolve everything too neatly. To let uncertainty be visible. To allow art to be challenging to mediate. I think it’s finding ways to let art be awkward, unresolved and risky even when that doesn’t look good, doesn’t feel safe and doesn’t fit easily into a funding box. If political art feels less capable now, it may be because the conditions that host it are increasingly invested in resolution, legibility and balance which precisely the things that drain it of force. Perhaps the task is to curate relationships between artworks, audiences, artists, activists, thinkers and institutions and intentionally make tension and uncertainty visible. Perhaps spaces could be used to invite discomfort, open-ended questions and unresolved encounters, rather than tidy conclusions and make room for risk, complexity and reflection? Maybe that’s where all this has to start. Not with answers, but with the courage to say, out loud, that this is hard and to keep working at it anyway. 

This was supposed to be a short journal entry. But I would love to chat about exhibitions that have disrupted your assumptions, offered a new approach or helped you see something differently. Message me! Also, did anyone see Utopia. The Right to Hope at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg? I didn’t see it but I’m curious!

Helena Solveigar Aðalsteinsbur