Contemporary art today increasingly exists under the pressure of political interpretation. Biennials, museums, and the wider art market often expect works not only to possess aesthetic or formal significance, but also to articulate positions on identity, conflict, ideology, and power. Yet for advisers, collectors, and scholars working across the fields of Modern and Contemporary art, the question remains whether art can still preserve a degree of autonomy from the political frameworks through which it is now almost automatically read. Against the backdrop of the current season in Venice, Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at Palazzo Manfrin offers a compelling opportunity to reconsider whether art must always function primarily as a political statement, or whether it can still remain a space for ambiguity, perception, and open-ended experience.
Text by Angie Afifi
Once contemporary art tried to convince the viewer that it could exist outside of politics. Artists spoke about form, colour, space, material, perception. Abstract art of the twentieth century, for example, was largely built on this idea: art should move beyond ideologies and national conflicts. A simple square, a monochrome, or a minimalist sculpture were not necessarily required to express a political position, or to express anything at all. And perhaps it is precisely for this reason that it is especially interesting today to look at such ambiguous figures as British sculptor Anish Kapoor (b.1954)
Kapoor is an artist who began as a maker of almost metaphysical objects, and over time has become one of the most politically vocal figures in contemporary art, even though he most often does so indirectly.
It is clear to me that art does not always and inevitably have to be political. Art owes nothing to anyone. The idea that art cannot be autonomous from politics and ideology today sounds almost like an axiom, although to me it seems overly reductive. Art does exist within society, within time, and within systems of power. However, aesthetic inquiry and formal experimentation have not always been created as political statements. At times, artists have sought to explore the language of art itself, experimenting with perception, material, and form, rather than expressing a political position. For this reason, I believe it is important to preserve at least a partial possibility of autonomy in art. Naturally, this remains an open and in many ways unresolved debate.
This is why artists such as Anish Kapoor are so important for contemporary discussions about art today.
His early works existed in a very different register. He created objects that seemed closer to ruptures in space than to political manifestos. His reflective surfaces, black voids, and deep cavities operate almost on a physical level, like an encounter between the viewer and something unknown and difficult to articulate. In other words, Kapoor is concerned with moments when space ceases to feel stable, when the viewer can no longer fully trust their own perception.
In this sense, his work has always been more about the limits of human experience than about politics. About a void that is at once frightening and seductive. About something that cannot be fully seen, measured, or put into words.
Against the backdrop of the current Venice Biennale, Kapoor has once again become one of the key figures of the Venetian season. Alongside the Biennale, a major exhibition has opened at Palazzo Manfrin, running until August 2026. Rather than a traditional retrospective, the exhibition focuses on one of Kapoor’s central ideas, the so called non object. This concept runs through his entire practice: in Kapoor’s work the object seems to exist and disappear at the same time.
For this reason, his works are often perceived almost as portals, voids, or architectural glitches in reality. And here lies an intriguing paradox. While the Venice Biennale itself increasingly becomes a site of political conflicts and debates around national pavilions, Kapoor’s exhibition seems to return the viewer to a more fundamental question: human perception, the nature of space, and the limits of reality.
Yet it is precisely here that it becomes clear how difficult it is for contemporary art to maintain distance from political context. Even an artist who has worked for decades with almost abstract and metaphysical categories inevitably becomes involved in conversations about violence, power, social tension, and collective anxiety.
In recent years, Kapoor has increasingly spoken about nationalism, censorship, hatred, and the crisis of humanist values. What matters here is not so much the content of individual statements, but the degree to which such a position is now naturally received within the artistic field.
Twenty years ago, an artist of his scale was primarily perceived as a maker of works. Today, the artist increasingly becomes a public figure, a moral commentator, almost a political subject. What is expected from them is not only art, but also a position.
But what is more interesting is the following: the contemporary art system today especially values art that can be read through trauma, conflict, political resistance, or personal experiences of pressure. This is undoubtedly an important and necessary shift. Yet it raises the question of whether the system itself has become too dependent on a particular type of statement. Is there still space for art that does not seek to speak directly about politics, trauma, or social struggle, but exists as a more open and free form of expression.
It sometimes feels as though neutrality is no longer considered a legitimate position.
Art exhibitions increasingly resemble an extension of the news feed: the same conflicts, the same ideological confrontations, only translated into the language of art.
Perhaps this is why many viewers experience a strange fatigue with contemporary art. Not because it has become too complex, but because it increasingly fails to leave space for experience outside the political frame. Works are more and more often expected to deliver the correct statement rather than a new visual experience.
In this sense, Kapoor appears as a somewhat contradictory figure. On the one hand, he actively participates in political debates. On the other, his work remains, by its very nature, an experience of indeterminacy. His works cannot be reduced to a simple slogan. They do not offer the viewer a ready made answer, but rather force one to feel one’s own instability in the face of something infinite and ungraspable.
When it is said today that all art is political, the distinction between artistic inquiry and activism is often erased. Between a work that seeks to intervene in political reality and a work that explores form, space, or human perception.
If one follows the logic of absolute politicisation, then even the Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) becomes merely a political instrument rather than an attempt to create a new visual language. Yet Malevich himself sought to move beyond the utilitarian function of art rather than subordinate it to ideology.
And here a difficult question arises.
Should the artist truly be political? Or does society simply no longer allow them to remain outside politics?
The very idea of artistic autonomy is increasingly being questioned today. Many contemporary theorists, such as Roland Barthes or Michel Foucault, argue that art cannot be fully separated from society, ideology, and political context. Even the choice of form, subject matter, or the refusal of explicit statement is often interpreted as a position in itself.
There is a certain logic to this. Art does not exist in a vacuum and inevitably bears the imprint of time, its environment, and systems of value. However, the habit of reading a work primarily as a political statement can sometimes significantly narrow the way it is perceived. In such a framework, form begins to function merely as a container for ideological content, even though a substantial part of twentieth century art was in fact built around the exploration of form itself, perception, and the viewer’s experience.
This is where one of the differences of the present moment becomes visible: contemporary art is not becoming more political by necessity, but rather because of the way it is being read. After wars, social conflicts, and constant informational pressure, the viewer almost automatically searches for political meaning in a work, even where the artist may have intended something quite different, an exploration of form, perception, or space.
In this context, Kapoor’s works become a telling example. His black voids and reflective surfaces are often interpreted as metaphors of anxiety, catastrophe, or collective fear, even though they originally exist within a logic of abstract, almost physical experience of space. This shift from experience to interpretation makes his work particularly sensitive to the way visual images are read today.
For this reason, one increasingly gets the impression that a work is valued not for what it asserts, but for the space of interpretation it leaves open for the viewer.
