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 explore the responsibility artists owe to the public and how imagination itself can become a form of resistance.