In contemporary times, more artists than ever are seeking to spark a change and spread messages that inspire, inform, challenge and mobilise, even if it means finding new ways to practice and new places to exhibit. The most provocative art throws away the rule book.

Audiences also are being asked to play a different, more collaborative role when it comes to consuming art. It’s more of a conversation between artist and audience; inviting viewers to question their deeply held beliefs, interrogate the institutions that uphold our power structures and acknowledge the tensions in the room.

Here’s our pick of Australian artists who are leading some critical conversations with their art. 

Peter Drew

Peter Drew is a street artist who came to the country’s attention in 2016. He created posters that started conversations about refugees and immigration.

Drew designed and distributed across Australia, 1000 posters of Monga Khan (one of many people who were exempt from the White Australia Policy because they were considered essential to Australian’s economy growth at the time.)

Following this campaign, he came up with another set of posters called Real Australians Seek Welcome which talked about Aboriginal languages and land ownership issues; while his latest series attempts to create meaning through seven different ideas in our increasingly fractured world.

Libby Harward

A descendant of the Ngugi people of Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) in the Quandamooka, multi-disciplinary artist Libby Harward creates artworks that break through the colonial overlay to connect with the cultural landscape, which always was, and always will be here.

Her political practice, in a range of genres, continues this decolonising process. She utilises low and high-tech media with elements of sound, image, installation and performance,  engaging directly with politically charged ideas of national and international significance. Her works on water sovereignty have been installed across the country and she is considered one of the more important art world voices on the subject.

Kay Abude

Kay Abude is an artist based in Melbourne.  Her practice spans diverse media, including sculpture, large-scale installation, photography, performance, video, and silk screen printing.  Her works, often adorned with texts, function as provocations and explore themes of work, labour and money. 

Her famous piece ‘Onshore Production’ was a line of clothing bearing slogans highlighting the offshore manufacturing of classic Australian brands such as Bonds and Holeproof. These were worn by gallery attendants at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne for the exhibition State of the Union in 2018.

Ms Saffaa

A multi-talented street artist, activist, and Ph.D. student, self-exiled Saudi Arabian artist Ms Saffaa’s artwork has empowered and fuelled a social movement opposing Saudi Arabia’s male guardianship laws.

Based in Sydney, Ms Saffaa has used her art in protest for the Saudi Arabia women’s rights movement. Combining street art and paste up posters using graffiti style calligraphy in LGBTQI colours, she uses portraits of women’s rights activists wearing the traditional male head-dress, the shemagh.

Ms Saffaa uses social media to bolster her street art protests, carrying the hashtag #iammyownguardian They are a direct call to action against the retraction of women’s rights.

Samuel Leighton-Dore

Perhaps a less political form of activist, Gold Coast visual artist and writer Samuel Leighton-Dore’s work stands out for its inspirational messages of radical self-acceptance and irrepressible kindness. A queer multi-disciplinary artist who suffered severe bullying as a child, Sam explores themes of toxic masculinity in his work, all tied in with mental health, repressive gender norms and the unifying nature of the naked human form. His work encourages shameless self-expression and the normalisation of outward displays of emotion in men, itself a form of activism.

His innovative piece ‘Cloud Drive’, an interactive ceramic-based artwork reflecting on tensions between the public and the personal, was one of the pieces showcased at the inaugural exhibition at HOTA, Home of the Arts, Australia’s largest regional gallery on the Gold Coast.

Abdul Abdullah

Hailing from Perth and now living in Sydney, Abdul Abdullah works across a variety of media. His pieces focus on the experience of marginalised community groups, reflecting his coming of age in the post-September 11 era as a Muslim Australian.

His award-winning piece A Terrible Burden highlights the way ownership has been inscribed on Australia cartographically and aesthetically, since invasion, and was temporarily removed from a touring exhibition following comments by federal MP George Christensen.

Janet Laurence

Bushfires and floods rage all around us, yet we are told natural disasters are not the time to discuss climate change. For Janet Laurence, the environment became explicitly political in her practice in the late 1990s, when she witnessed the impact of land clearing during a residency. Now, Laurence’s poignantly beautiful works, ranging from print and photo-media to sculpture and installation, unapologetically focus on the devastating impact of climate change.

One of Janet’s major installation pieces, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (2015–16/2019), included footage of coral and marine life filmed during a residency at Lizard Island, a site where the reef is monitored for coral bleaching.

Sam Petersen

The work of Melbourne-based, self-described “disabled, queer, dyslexia, nerdy person” artist, writer and performer Sam Petersen is informed by her disability and sexuality, and particularly focuses on access – physical, professional, social. Petersen has described plasticine as a “great subverter of space, and therefore potentially of people’s minds”, and uses it in installation works, exploring its malleable and opaque properties.

Her confronting 2020 work My Pee Is Political looks at the difficulties faced by people with a disability when it comes to something as simple as going for a wee, and utilises some of the artist’s own urine.

Christine Emily Yaha

Graphic designer and illustrator, Christine Emily Yaha, is the artist behind Pink Bits. Pink Bits largely operates on Instagram (@pink_bits) and celebrates and strives to provide artistic representation of daily realities and diverse bodies for those who are not commonly featured in mainstream media. “I draw the bits and shapes we’ve been told to hide,” says Emily.