The broken, the worn, the wounded and the discarded form the terrain through which committed art moves at the beginning of this century, a space where aesthetics becomes evidence and resistance rather than decoration; in this context, works like Gramsci Bar—installed at the Hirshhorn—stand out not only for their precarious architecture but for their capacity to generate a social field where the excluded gather, transforming marginal materials into communal discourse and activating memory through presence, not spectacle; nearby, the torn, re-colored and bullet-ridden flag by Hank Willis Thomas subverts the national symbol, replacing its patriotic authority with a painful map of racial trauma, where red becomes raw flesh, green a fractured hope, and stars barely survive against the punctured sky, an object no longer waving but enduring; yet perhaps the most striking material gesture is found in Ibrahim Mahama’s immense textile interventions, where worn-out jute sacks—once used for transporting commodities across African markets—are sewn together into monumental skins that cover buildings like scars, embodying labor, movement and erasure, turning surface into archive and architecture into protest; here, form is not illustration but confrontation, and the political does not reside in the slogan but in the structure itself, in how these artworks make visible the invisible mechanics of exclusion and survival, building a language of damage that refuses repair, opting instead for exposure, accumulation, presence—as if the only way forward was to make the wound public, and to insist on its visibility.
