How geopolitical tensions and inequality are fuelling auto-narrative art

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 blocked 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, mirror ing 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.

At home, the trauma and displacement of Partition left a deep impact on the practice of Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Haren Das and Ganesh Haloi. “(Haren) Das, who came from the Dinajpur district in modern-day Bangladesh, continued to depict the rural idylls he was to become well-known for making. These idealised landscapes of rural (East) Bengal, played an important part in the wounded psyches of those who were being forcibly displaced. It allowed them to carry an idea of home with them and offered a psychic salve…” writes Ankan Kazi in the essay, Finding a Refuge: Indian Modern Art and Migration, on the DAG website. The communal violence following the 1992 riots led to the rise of the artist as witness in practices of Vivan Sundaram, Navjot Altaf and Atul Dodiya.

MATTERS OF IDENTITY

Artists are no longer impacted by one instance of conflict but by the increase in daily acts of violence, both subtle and obvious. Continued and systemic inequality is a cause of inner turmoil. Once again, we are seeing similar shifts in artmaking and curation. Curator Girish Shahane says that the “era of the transcultural superstar curator” is fading. “Questions are being asked increasingly about who can represent whom because of the emphasis on identity,” he says.

According to Shaunak Mahbubani, a curator who lives and works in Germany and India, cultural workers are realising the pressing need to create their own pockets of solidarity, independent of the frameworks established by Western institutions. “This is sometimes through rhizomatic activations such as the Gaza Biennale, which is taking place across 15 cities such as Berlin, New York and Sarajevo, and creating a platform for important counter-narratives. Or the powerful polyphonous dialogue at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, reimagining the roads to being human,” they say.

In the Global South, a big development in artmaking is the rise of the auto-narrative in both theme and materiality. Artists are speaking more strongly from their personal, ancestral and direct communal experiences, thus asserting the right to tell their stories in their own terms. Both artists and curators are avoiding the narrow labels of “queer”, “political” and “anticaste” art to look at complex intersections through a personal lens.

Artists like Sajan Mani, Rajyashri Goody, Parag Tandel, Rah Naqvi, Vikrant Bhise and Saviya Lopes are key voices in this movement. Mahbubani is exploring the development of the auto-narrative in their ongoing show, Autopoiesis: A Song for Resuscitation, at Arthshila Goa. The exhibition, on till 1 March, seeks to under stand the lineage, breadth and nuances of this shift through works by six artists from peninsular South Asia, “who engage with expanded forms of poetic utterances to revive wounded archives”.

There is a new series of abstract mixed media paintings by Mumbai-based artist Jahangir Jani, partially created by burning everyday materials as a way to purge the memories of past queer lovers. “Fire as an element of transformation is also reflected in a video by Priyageetha Dia. Spurred by beats of the Tamil Dalit funeral practice, Oppari, Dia’s CGI plantation erupts in flame to protest years of atrocities against indentured labourers,” explains Mahbubani.

Hailing from a family of rubber tappers, Sajan Mani imagines an unresolved knowledge system, using the labour of his body to enliven the radical anti-caste poetry of Poyankali Appachan in a 15ft scroll hanging from the heart of the space. Vasai-based Saviya Lopes challenges hard national boundaries by transmuting a large archive of photos and documents from her grandfather’s migration on to muslin cloth. “Emerging from these tender resonances across lived experiences, we see that grief, resistance, healing and ancestral invocation are deeply intertwined,” Mahbubani adds.

Shahane too looks at the ecological crisis from a humanist perspective at Teeming Earth, an ongoing show at Anant Art Gallery’s new space in New Delhi. It brings together 27 contemporary artists, including Abhishek Narayan Verma, Alexander Gorlizki, Atul Bhalla, Arti Vijay Kadam, Atul Dodiya, Dhara Mehrotra, Digbijayee Khatua, Ravi Agarwal, Tito Stanley and Sudhir Patwardhan. The show might seem like a comment on the Anthropocene but it goes beyond by offering an intimate understanding of how human progress has both nurtured and endangered the world. Imprint of lived experiences is visible in materials and motifs in which personal stories are foregrounded.

“I have worked with artists like Awadesh Tamrakar, who hails from a family of copper craftspersons, in the show, A Bold Step Sideways (2024). His last name alludes to his community’s identity. He has incorporated that in his work, wherein he uses materials used in the making of copper utensils to talk about belonging and displacement,” says Shahane. Another example is of Mumbai-born Al-Qawi Nanawati, who makes her own paper by using material from the clothes of her late mother. This is a means of catharsis.

Having said that, the ‘auto-narrative’ is not rooted in individualism. By centering their lived experiences, artists are making space for collective healing. They use their work as an example, just one of the ways to help articulate the pain stored within.