‘My art makes a statement’: what to expect at this year’s Art Basel Miami

“For me the work is about asking questions about the complexity of the world that we all share,” the Canadian artist David Hartt told me, while discussing work that he is showing at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. “The way that I inhabit a political position is through an oblique set of questions that I attempt to open up in the same ways a prism does, to break a really complex situation into its component parts so that we can better understand how it’s operating.”

Hartt was sharing his perspective on the notion of “protest art”, which is a theme of sorts at Art Basel this year. Perhaps more than in other years, artists are showing works that speak to politics, causes and longstanding issues around human rights. While much of the art this year is informed by such notions, artists had varying reactions to construing their work as an act of protest, often voicing unease with seeing their art as a political gesture.

The work that Hartt was showing, an elaborate, intriguing tapestry titled

The Histories (after Church), version with xenoformed atmosphere / Rayleigh scattering spectrum shift, is an apt example of how politics and history can be layered into a piece that is ultimately sophisticated and open to interpretation. Examining ideas around slavery, colonialism, terraforming, alien species and the biosphere, The Histories is a work that wears its heady intellectual pedigree quite lightly.

The Histories is partly inspired by the work of Frederic Edwin Church, a major voice in the Hudson River School of landscape painting and also an abolitionist. For Hartt, Church was a way into the complicated discourses around history, politics and economy that he