Land, Memory, and the Power of Art
In Depth
How can communities use art to imagine a better tomorrow that protects and celebrates nature—and the people that live within it? The 2023 Soros Arts Fellows will pursue projects that reckon with the role of socially engaged art in a time of crisis.
![Two figures stand on a bridge dressed in hand-made Indigenous regalia.](https://opensocietyfoundations.imgix.net/uploads/159b6b06-17fa-4b0f-9528-715a3f62f17d/20231102-cannupa-hanska-luger-futureancestraltechnologies-welive-still1-3000.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&fit=min&fm=jpg&h=215&q=80&rect=0%2C313%2C3000%2C1688&w=380 "This still from Cannupa Hanska Luger's "Future Ancestral Technologies - We Live" (2021) illustrates the artist’s blending of Indigenous futurism, place, storytelling and documentation of living practice as two figures pledge accountability to the land and waters through their physical presence. Like many projects from this year’s art fellows, the work incorporates knowledge and practice from native communities that live in harmony with nature to imagine how the whole world can improve our relationship with the Earth. Photo credit: © Cannupa Hanska Luger")
Introduction
Tatiana Mouarbes, team manager working on Culture and Art at Open Society, reflects on this year’s Soros Arts Fellows.
At a time when the world faces a number of competing crises, art matters more than ever. Where open society is under threat, artists can bring new perspective and creativity to open up space for hope. For communities whose voices and power have been repressed, art offers pathways to speak out, envision, and bring about a more just and inclusive future.
“When injustice occurs—great or small, historic or contemporary—art gives people the power to demand redress. It allows communities to dream of a better world, and in fact to begin building it. In sum, art is a fundamental component of inclusive and diverse democracies that serve all their people.”
— Tatiana Mouarbes
The Soros Arts Fellowship is the largest award for socially engaged art in the world. The Fellowship provides innovative mid-career artists the freedom to develop work on their own terms, which celebrates their cultures and promotes justice for their communities. The project is steeped in the belief that art is an essential tool to achieve equity and social change by allowing for the reconfiguring and redistribution of power in society.
The fourth cohort of the Fellowship, awarded in 2023, is focused on art, land and public memory. The artists are based in diverse communities that face common and interconnected struggles: overcoming colonialist and white supremacist attacks, the destruction of natural environments, extractive capitalism, and the attempted erasure of ancient and Indigenous knowledge and culture. But art provides opportunity for justice and healing through all such adversity.
This year’s Soros Arts Fellows, in collaboration with their wider communities, are seizing these opportunities, and developing innovative and inspiring concepts through their projects. They are leading impact-driven art projects that propose bold solutions to address the climate crisis, reclaim and uplift Indigenous knowledge, and imagine and build sustainable futures. We are proud to support their work—and to see what it can bring to the wider world.