Historically, artistic risk has been framed as a mode of provocation or aesthetic transgression, often the remit of the courageous, typically male individual. But as Tai Shani and Sophia Al-Maria discuss, against the backdrop of the genocide in Gaza, risk has been transposed from the artwork to the artist. In an art world increasingly characterised by institutional retreat and political repression, they discuss the illusion of neutrality and how the consequences of risk today attach less to artistic form than to speech.

What is artistic risk today?

SOPHIA AL-MARIA  I can only speak to my own experience and practice, but let me try. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the bureaucratic systems of commission in the art world. It’s futures-based and speculative, structured around a constant loop of proposals and invitations. We’re expected  to respond to curatorial briefs that are often faddish or reactive to current events. There’s an assumption that an artist’s perspective will somehow generate an answer that is useful, legible or timely. I’m not convinced that’s true. The only thing I know is that I really don’t know. I’ve been making from an ungrounded place of existential crisis, financial insecurity and a growing alienation from my own creativity for years, so risk for me feels like a necessary part of my growth process. Over the past few years I’ve felt I needed to make a sacrifice or simply expose myself to the likelihood of failing publicly by trying things that have not been my vocation. So, for example, performing a daily comedy show at Frieze Art Fair felt like a huge risk in the context of maintaining a respectable career. I’m not a performance artist. I’m not a comedian. I’m not very funny. But I knew that whatever I did, my goal was not to gain the respect of that particular iteration of the many “art worlds” that exist. So I had nothing to lose really but respect for myself. Funny story about Frieze: I proposed using the prize money to learn a practical skill. I wanted to get certified in bricklaying so I could start amassing a skillset to build a house someday. They told me that in spite of the fact I would be fully certified and health and safety vetted by opening day, I wouldn’t be allowed to build a retaining wall inside Frieze because obstructing the booth entrance which is essentially a thoroughfare would disrupt the flow of traffic to Abu Dhabi Art and other booths behind it. I actually appreciated that honesty. That’s why we ended up using a trompe-l’œil theatrical backdrop instead and it was genuinely funny.

TAI SHANI That’s what’s interesting about this moment – it shows that risk changes; it’s mercurial. If you think back to before or even during the pandemic, the art ecosystem imagined itself as the de facto platform of risk-taking, the only site for the metabolisation of politics from the street into the institution. Risk was so entertained that it felt like you could do pretty much anything. Over the last few years, particularly since the genocide began in Palestine, it feels like the scope for risk-taking has diminished. The entire post-war arts blueprint was leftist, or even Marxist, but now it feels risky speaking about the genocide, being explicitly pro-trans, or even just being very left-wing. Saying, “I’m an anarcho-communist” now feels like there’s a frisson to it, whereas it used to be the default position.

Tai Shani is an artist whose work spans sculpture, film, performance, and writing; they won the Turner Prize in 2019 as part of a collective. Their recent major installation The Spell or The Dream – a monumental sculpture and accompanying 24/7 radio broadcast exploring collective dreaming and alternative futures – was shown at Somerset House in London in 2025.

Sophia Al-Maria is an artist, writer, and filmmaker who works across film, installation, and text. In 2025 she participated in the participatory installation The Pits at Somerset House Studios and was awarded the Frieze London Artist Award, which resulted in her live performance commission Wall-Based Work (a Trompe LOL) at Frieze London. Both Tai and Sophia are Somerset House Studios artists.

Sophia Al-Maria, Frieze London Artist Award 2025 by Frieze and Forma, Frieze London 2025. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze and Forma.

SAM  When do you consider identity politics to have started?

TS Around 2012 or 2013. My introduction was through a very basic and quite banal form of feminism that today one might consider “girlboss” feminism. I grew up in a very progressive household in terms of sexuality and gender: my mum was bisexual, my parents weren’t married and were polyamorous. But politically, I was still starting at ground zero, even though I had this very liberal up-bringing. My ideas around gender were, “I don’t think of myself as a woman, and I don’t care about gender because I’m not bound by that. I do what I like.” I wasn’t aware that ultimately most aspects of one’s subject position are beyond one’s control and choice. How the world sees you determines the level of friction with which one traverses the politics of society. There has also been this huge social fissure, where one part of society dogmatically believes in a natural order that is being undone, and the other side believes that we have invented this reality, it is all made up, and we can therefore make it up differently. Those two perspectives are colliding, or combusting, I think.

SAM  What you just said – about how one’s subject position shapes one’s politics based on socialisation – really put into words to something I’ve felt but never been able to articulate. Thank you! It makes me think, in particular, about the bifurcated nature of my own so-called political education. I’ve written before, in a very personal mode, about my experience of perpetually moving back and forth between two cultures that are manufactured as oppositional in the 21st century. On my Arab side: the veiled, bearded, visibly other Muslim with a tribal last name that was actively persecuted and imprisoned by the US government after 9/11.  On the American side: a very Christian, right-leaning, white family of diasporic Finnish and Norwegian descent. My political education was forged through arguments around the dinner table. I’ve also had to reckon, over time, with the ways my own positions have shifted, moments where I’ve recognised that what I once believed came not from clarity, but from trauma, bitterness or a lack of education. One memory stands out in particular. I was arguing at a dinner about the death penalty. At the time, I was carrying a great deal of rage from experiences of sexual harassment and assault and I argued vehemently to a group of lawyers that rapists should just be executed. Someone I was with then, whom I loved very much and who was studying law, later told me that hearing my argument was the moment they fell out of love with me. The consequence of that moment forced me into a more humble reckoning with why I thought the way I did. If I were to mark two moments in the awakening of what I’d call my heart’s political position, that would be a big one. The other was the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah which I saw on television in Doha. I had never seen anything like that while living in the United States. It felt like a small apocalypse – a veil lifting on a story I had been told my entire life. I haven’t lived in the US since.

TS I lived in Israel around that time. I was within a liberal circle, working as a fashion photographer and then an artist. I had deep friendships and relationships with people who I respected, people who care about animals, who care about conflicts, who care about other atrocities happening in the world, who care about the oppression of all groups except Palestinians. Part of that is down to this absolute propagandisation that happens in Israel. There’s no facet of public life that isn’t an exercise in brainwashing. When I lived there, there was conflict between the liberal, secular community and the ultra- religious right. Settlers were considered freakish and marginal, to be ignored, and now they’re in power as an overwhelming, violent, centrally-funded movement. At the time, I was confused by the killing of Muhammad and could only understand it as a mistake, because from inside the machine itself, it seemed impossible that such cruelty and barbarity could have been done on purpose. That’s the story Israel tells itself about any kind of atrocity that pierces through the ambient level of violence, like the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh. It’s framed as an aberration, not as the design doing what it’s supposed to do.

SAM The ambience, though, is everywhere. It is what everyone with a television living in the Arabic-speaking and wider Muslim world is constantly experiencing.

On 30 September 2000, 12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah was killed at the Netzarim Junction in the Gaza Strip, during the Second Intifada. Muhammad and his father, Jamal, were filmed by Talal Abu Rahma for France 2, as they were caught in crossfire between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen. Initially the IDF accepted responsibility for the killing, but later retracted, and claimed that not only did the IDF not kill Muhammad, he never existed.

Shireen Abu Akleh was a prominent Palestinian-American journalist who worked as a reporter for 25 years for Al Jazeera. She was killed by Israeli forces in 2002 while at work, covering a raid in the West Bank.

TS  I think it has become really difficult post-genocide to not think about the spaces we work in as being more hostile than neutral. I don’t know how to orient myself anymore, because I don’t understand what their red lines are. I understood that we worked in a competitive, paradoxical industry, in proximity to insane power and wealth, but I believed that we were a community, ultimately. The collapse of institutions, the UN becoming a pariah for the establishment, and the ICC and the ICJ being of no consequence make me wonder: do our institutions also fall into that collapse or can they be salvaged? At the same time, the exponential growth of tech wealth and power has terrifying ramifications for the world. Elon Musk is in a position of responsibility for people’s lives, even though no one elected him. These people don’t care about culture, because they don’t need to: culture doesn’t matter in the way that it once did.

SAM I’ve been listening to The Silk Roads (2015) by Peter Frankopan. One historical moment where a similar concentration of wealth and power happened was with the Nabobs, British men who migrated to India in the 1790s to make their fortunes with the East India Company and the Dutch East India Company. When they returned to England, they were suddenly rich and influential, so became policymakers. What differed was that to enter society, they would take classes to learn how to dance, play music and appreciate art, because there was still a pretence of the powerful being interested or entertained by beautiful things.

TS I wonder if this class of tech billionaires and oligarchs is the first class of extreme wealth that has not invested in art at all. If creativity and creative acts now become inaccessible to people who need to work godless hours to pay for rent and basic necessities, that is spiritually devastating.

SAM When I zoom out of my own political worldview, I can see what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. The world is ending, the environment is collapsing, and only a few can survive – and they’re the ones building an ark for themselves. But at what cost in the grand cosmic scheme? It makes one feel almost religious.

TS It does. A place that has started feeling interesting to me is art that exists outside of physical spaces. I think a lot of people will never experience “content” – whether it’s a film, a TV series, an artwork, a reel – that they haven’t chosen to see, even algorithmically. For me, a lot of my artistic awakenings happened by being a night owl and watching weird TV at night, seeing strange films that I didn’t choose to see.

SAM I still experience that, though. I remember the first time that I saw Naked Attraction (2016–2024) on TV in a hotel room – unfortunately, with my dad.

TS Right, but people generally don’t watch TV now, they stream. Public art can be this weird event now, where there are perhaps interesting ways to think about what it can do beyond just the visual representation. I tried to do that with The Spell or The Dream (2025): there was a radio station that was much more discursive than the sculpture itself that people would happen upon.

Tai Shani’s work The 7 Darknesses: A Very Gothic Reading, was a staged minimalist reading of “Be, be the seven darknesses…”, a re-imagining of the folk story Bluebeard. Shani’s version was a feminist text written in detail from the perspective of a cube of flesh.

SAM The thing I got most excited about in the last 24 hours was walking by a huge piece of graffiti. Someone had spray-painted “victory to the hunger strikers” underneath this bridge. It made me think about how so many people who aren’t even aware of the hunger strikes will encounter this message. That public space is still there, as long as we keep leaving our houses, which is not happening in the US, where people are being kettled into their own private homes.

TS Again, it raises the question – what does the imagery of genocide do to visual art?

SAM When I first started writing scripts, I was commissioned to write one about Théodore Géricault’s painting, The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819). The Medusa was a warship that was on its way to reclaim Senegal after the French Revolution. Due to the stupidity of the aristocrat captain, who didn’t listen to his crew telling him not to steer close to the shallow Arguin sandbank, they beached the ship way out at sea. The rich passengers took all the boats to the land, and survived. The rest of the people, who came from all over the world, ended up on this makeshift raft and were forced to eat each other. When the story made its way back to France, Géricault’s horror at the 1% abandoning the people inspired him to make the painting. I consider it a piece of proto-photojournalism. It was so big that it made people physically sick when they saw it. Similarly, I was working in a movie theatre when The Blair Witch Project came out, and I remember having to clean up puke because people weren’t used to seeing images of violence – over time, we have become acclimatised to the pain of others. Of course, an erotics of violence ends up happening, on some level, when you’ve been so desensitised, which then makes more extremity possible.

TS  I used to love watching horror films, but I feel that exposure to real horror has rendered them completely obsolete. The lyrics of black metal music were about how extreme you could make them: could you make someone puke? I’ve written pieces like that before, which are about pain and are very graphic, like the performance The 7 Darknesses: A Very Gothic Reading (2013). People really struggled with its level of gory detail. But I have no compulsion to make work like that anymore. I was interested in it as a form of feminist methodology. Now I’ve seen things that I didn’t think I’d ever see even in my wildest nightmares, I don’t think that language has an interesting function anymore.

SAM Psychological horror still freaks me out and I struggle the most with those kinds of films. You’ve got to maintain a solid emotional core. It might be where religion comes back in.

TS I’m thinking of converting to Buddhism, officially.

SAM I think about that sometimes, too. .