When galleries become protest sites – a new exhibition explores the art of disruption

'It’s tricky, and the fact that it’s tricky is what drew me to it,' Alex Margo Arden tells me. The artist started making work inspired by protest actions in 2022, when Just Stop Oil activists made headlines by throwing soup at Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery. ‘Safety Curtain’, her solo exhibition at London’s Auto Italia, looks at various moments when arts institutions have become protest sites.

It contains a number of paintings of recognisable artworks disrupted by activist groups, frozen in time moments after the event — red paint smeared across a Monet landscape; the Mona Lisa violated with pastry residue. Arden notes that, in most cases, the artworks themselves are safer than they seem. Their protective glazes bear the brunt of the damage, and inspired the exhibition’s title.

The trickiness has to do with the extreme public reactions to such events. Though the artworks tend to remain unscathed, the protests inflict what Arden calls 'symbolic damage.' It’s a symbolism that ruffles many feathers; groups like Just Stop Oil are subject to a near-constant stream of vitriol online. Sympathy for their environmental cause seems to be in short supply.

Arden takes a more nuanced point of view. She’s all for the conservation of important artworks, but understands that, in the long term, this involves heeding the warnings of climate activists. 'The stakes of the cause are obviously huge,' she says, 'in the future, culture might not even exist — or be drastically changed by the deadly effects of climate crisis.'

Generally, we have low tolerance for ambiguity. It’s difficult to hold two opposing-seeming views at once. It’s hard to understand an act of symbolic damage as an act of care, but perhaps we should try to. It’s — to use Arden’s word — tricky, and that’s why she thinks we should engage with it: 'these exhibitions become a way of generating conversations and expanding thought, both for me and for the people who see the work.'

Cancelled Performance (2024–25) is an installation on the gallery’s facade. Arden has covered it with posters for a performance of Les Misérables with an appendage that reads ‘CANCELLED’, a reference to an action where protesters stormed the stage mid-performance. Eventually, the show went on — just as the masterpieces were cleaned and returned to display.

But Arden notes the importance of remembering these events, canonising them as part of cultural history. 'If we want to have art in the future, we’re going to have to think of how we’ll protect it.' Paradoxically, disruptions like these will be a key part of that conversation.

Safety Curtain is at Auto Italia in London from 17 January 2025