Khalid Abdalla, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Radha D’Souza and more shape “Hostile Environments” at Tate Modern—where art meets extractivism, borders, grief, and justice.
At Tate Modern, art isn’t offered as escape—it’s used as a kind of pressure test for power.
“Hostile Environments” brings together writers. artists. activists and researchers whose work circles a single. uncomfortable idea: the built world can be engineered to exclude. exhaust. and control.. The exhibition gathers figures whose careers move across documentary film. poetry. photography. architecture and law. turning aesthetic experience into an inquiry about who gets protected. who gets presumed suspicious. and who is left to pay the cost.. For audiences. the challenge is to look past the polished surface of “public life” and notice how policy. history and material conditions converge.
Khalid Abdalla—actor, writer and filmmaker—arrives with a political and cinematic practice shaped by the urgency of testimony.. His background in work that connects personal memory with collective upheaval signals why this show matters now: contemporary societies increasingly treat culture as a battleground where narratives are contested.. Alongside him. the presence of artists and scholars whose projects link colonial violence. slavery and fossil fuel extraction to today’s climate breakdown expands the frame beyond immediate border politics.. “Hostile environments” becomes less a metaphor than a map of connected systems.
Imani Jacqueline Brown’s research into the “continuum of extractivism” anchors the exhibition in the material origins of hostility.. Extractivism is not only an economic model; it also reorganizes landscapes, bodies and futures.. When the gallery conversation shifts from immigration enforcement to climate catastrophe. it doesn’t dilute the theme—it clarifies the mechanics.. Hostility. in this reading. travels: from colonial genocide and slavery to the industrial logistics of fossil fuels. and then to the atmosphere everyone must breathe.
Radha D’Souza, a professor and social justice activist, adds legal and critical teeth.. Her work repoliticises rights in ways that resist tidy. market-friendly interpretations of “progress.” In the context of the exhibition. that perspective acts like a lens for cultural spectatorship: what does it mean when rights language becomes a public relations shield?. What happens when institutional sympathy is offered without structural change?. The show’s strongest tension is that it refuses to let the viewer settle for moral outrage alone—moral feeling is treated as the beginning of inquiry. not the finish line.
Nadine El-Enany’s focus on race. grief and justice in custodial death cases also reframes hostility as a question of vulnerability and visibility.. Her poetry and legal scholarship point to a brutal pattern: environments can be made hostile not just through physical design. but through systems that delay accountability. narrow recognition. and turn preventable harm into administrative noise.. In a culture climate that often asks victims to “move on. ” the exhibition asks viewers to stay with the record of what was done—and to question why it persists.
Sunnah Khan brings the emotional instrumentation of poetry and performance into the gallery, carrying haunting language that refuses neat closure.. Where legal argument can feel abstract, poetry can make time fold.. Her presence matters because it reminds the audience that hostile environments are experienced internally as well as externally—through memory. guilt. survival. and the long echo of unanswered apology.. In a society where public debates often flatten complexity into slogans, the exhibition’s poetry-centered voice keeps specificity alive.
David Birkin and Max Houghton. both operating through photography. image history and visual justice. help the exhibition land in the domain of looking.. Birkin’s research into aerial violence and resistance suggests that hostility can be literalized through distance—through the view from above. through technological separation. through the idea that violence is somehow cleaner when it’s mediated.. Houghton’s work at the intersection of photography and law extends that impulse: images are not neutral objects; they become evidence. persuasion. and sometimes a battlefield over whose suffering counts.
Visible Justice. the transdisciplinary research hub featured in the exhibition’s orbit. ties these strands together by treating cultural production as a political method.. The underlying proposition is straightforward but rarely admitted so plainly: creative work can deepen public discourse only when it’s willing to ask uncomfortable questions about efficacy and political voice.. For Misryoum readers. that means the exhibition isn’t just “about” hostility—it’s about how art can challenge the narratives that justify hostility.
Why “Hostile Environments” feels urgent now
The phrase “hostile environments” has entered public conversation as policy shorthand. but the exhibition expands it into something wider: a cultural condition where institutions. technologies and histories combine to produce exclusion.. That broader approach also resonates with a global shift in how identity is being negotiated—through borders. climate. policing. and debates over whose stories are considered credible.. In this sense. the exhibition functions like a warning and a toolkit: it trains attention. insists on context. and places accountability in the same frame as imagination.
A gallery that won’t let you look away
If there’s a single editorial takeaway from Misryoum’s perspective, it’s this: the show treats spectatorship as participation.. By pairing film, poetry, legal critique and image politics, “Hostile Environments” refuses the comfort of passive viewing.. Viewers are asked to notice connections—between extractivism and migration. between legal language and lived grief. between aerial spectacle and everyday harm.. The result is not only a cultural experience but a moral one: a demand to keep looking until hostility loses the secrecy that usually protects it.
In the end, Tate Modern hosts more than artworks. It hosts a conversation about how societies are built—and how they can be rebuilt.