Join Thomas Hirschhorn and Kendell Geers as they ask: What happens when art enters the political arena?
Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has spent three decades constructing vast, fragile worlds from the materials most societies discard. Cardboard, foil, packing tape and magazines become monuments to attention, responsibility and shared civic space. His installations are sprawling, unruly and defiantly non-luxurious, and they confront viewers with the debris of consumption and the complexity of democratic life. For Hirschhorn, art matters because it generates presence: it forces us to look, to think, and to stay with contradictions that politics often rushes to avoid.
In this edition of Art Matters, Kendell Geers invites Hirschhorn to examine a tension that feels increasingly urgent: What can art do that politics cannot?
This conversation brings together two artists who believe that art should unsettle rather than soothe. Together they will explore the responsibility artists owe to the public and how imagination itself can become a form of resistance.
speaker
Thomas Hirschhorn is a Swiss artist who represented his country at the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is renowned for constructing dystopian environments from humble, discarded materials like plastic sheeting, cardboard, aluminium foil, packing tape and magazines. For Hirschhorn, this way of working is both an aesthetic stance and a political gesture. By overwhelming viewers with oversized imagery and immersive landscapes of debris, he urges us to reconsider our everyday patterns of consumption. Throughout his career, he has insisted that Art Matters because of its ability to generate presence, attention, and shared responsibility. His community-based monuments and socially engaged projects affirm that art is not a luxury but a civic practice: a space where complexity is embraced, disagreement can unfold, and collective reflection becomes possible beyond the constraints of politics or the market.
moderator
Kendell Geers is a contemporary artist. His work confronts universal themes of love, resilience, and hope, driven by his belief that the act of making art is what defines humanity itself. In times of social crisis and political extremism, his work challenges audiences to consider how art can build bridges and restore a sense of shared humanity.
Extending this vision, Geers hosts the Art Matters tables at TheMerode. Bringing together performance, philosophical inquiry, and community engagement, Art Matters embodies his conviction that art is not a passive pursuit but an active force for change. At its heart lies the idea that art changes the world, one perception at a time.
