Students of democracy typically turn to academic books and journal articles written by political theorists for guidance on democracy’s meaning and features. However, Professor Michael Saward at the University of Warwick suggests that art can offer equally important but fundamentally different ways of understanding this crucial political concept.

Exploring Tate Liverpool’s Democracies exhibition, which ran from November 2020 to October 2023, he reveals how curatorial approaches can challenge and expand conventional academic thinking about democracy. The Democracies exhibition brought together approximately thirty artworks from the Tate’s permanent collection, including paintings, installations, photographs, and videos.

Three artworks particularly illustrate the exhibition’s approach. Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies, from which the exhibition likely took its title, consists of films showing political gatherings including a loyalist parade in Northern Ireland, the funeral of Austrian far-right politician Jorg Haider, and Palestinian protests against Israeli occupation. These films capture moments of collective action where strong political feelings and commitments are enacted, drawing viewers into visceral and sometimes threatening moments that make specific places politically charged. Interestingly, Zmijewski chose the title Democracies because he felt that these images highlight a lack of democracy in some of these countries.

Lubaina Himid’s The Carrot Piece, created in 1985, presents two life-size wooden figures: a clownish white man barely balancing on a unicycle while dangling a carrot from a fishing rod, who represents the West, and a Black woman in African dress carrying a basket of food and a harvesting tool, who represents the non-West. The woman appears caught in a moment of choice – whether to take the paltry carrot or carry on with the substantial resources she already possesses. The artwork explores themes of independence and dependence, empowerment and disempowerment, suggesting for example that the male figure actually depends on the woman’s response to maintain his precarious balance, and that empowerment that can flow from maintenance of a dignified independence on the part of the woman.

Richard Hamilton’s artwork The State from 1993 shows a camouflaged, helmeted soldier with an alert and anxious expression scanning a street scene in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The soldier appears both threatening and vulnerable, isolated yet imposing a claustrophobic presence. Unlike classical images of sovereign authority, such as the famous frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan showing a giant crowned figure encompassing all people, Hamilton’s diminished state figure, the soldier, represents the fragility and vulnerability of political power.

Professor Saward’s research focuses specifically on methodologies – the approaches used to investigate and understand democracy – rather than on the content or substance of democratic theories themselves. He interprets both the artworks and the curatorial framing that brought them together, examining how the exhibition generated knowledge about democracy through what scholars call “enactive research.” Here, the exhibition is used as a tool for investigating and understanding social and political issues rather than simply displaying the results of research conducted elsewhere.

He identifies four key elements of the exhibition methodology. First, it creates an open space for reflection, inviting viewers to consider what democracy means to them and to different people in different contexts. The exhibition emphasizes that democracy is experienced as a “work in progress” rather than a fixed ideal. Second, it uses selective prompting, drawing attention to specific types of experiences such as consequential encounters between individuals and groups, and visceral struggles for rights and recognition. Third, it employs various modes of juxtaposition – placing works from different countries, time periods, and cultural contexts side by side to prompt viewers to think about what moving from one work to another might reveal. Fourth, it incorporates sociological and historical reference, highlighting different groups’ actual experiences in specific circumstances.

This curatorial methodology contrasts sharply with traditional academic democratic theory. Academic work typically focuses on abstract principles like equality and liberty, institutional structures and rules, and cross-contextual models that aim to apply across multiple countries and cultures. Democratic theorists generally adopt an external position – standing outside any specific situation in order to develop general theories. They work with stylized examples adapted to serve theoretical arguments rather than explored in their real-world complexity. The goal is often to build complete models of democracy that capture its essential features without paying close attention to national or other differences.

The exhibition’s methodology, by contrast, emphasizes specificity, embodiment, and situated experiences. Across the artworks, themes emerge around bodies in movement, encounters between people in particular spaces, emotion, social and political change over time, who is visible socially and who is not, the insecurity of authority, and complex textures of empowerment and disempowerment. These themes are underpinned by depictions of protest, resistance, violence, threat, and inequality.

Professor Saward identifies eight key points of contrast between the two methodologies in how they see ‘democracy’. First, its ontology, or its fundamental nature or reality. Democratic theory confidently asserts that democracy exists, whereas the exhibition presents democracy as a potential thing that depends on specific actions, struggles, or events. Second, its context. While democratic theory increasingly acknowledges that democracy differs across geographical and cultural settings, it still tends toward abstraction. The exhibition emphasizes the importance of differing contexts of individual experiences, relationships and challenges with lasting consequences for dignity and autonomy. Third, its meaning. Democratic theory typically defines democracy in precise, dictionary-style terms (such as ‘rule by the people’). The exhibition resists a neat definition, instead asking what events, actions, or encounters produce or fail to produce, and what participants themselves make of these outcomes. Fourth, visceral politics and performative values. The exhibition emphasizes ongoing struggles for equality by individuals in precarious circumstances which democratic theory often overlooks. Fifth, its representativeness. While democratic theory presumes equal representation through electoral systems, the exhibition suggests that representation depends on specific locations and identities, with different perceptions of its depth and accuracy.

Sixth, democracy’s temporalities. Democratic theory treats core elements of democracy as enduring or even permanent. The exhibition presents democracy as partial, multi-perspectival, and contingent. Seventh, democracy’s embodiment. The exhibition shows democracy as fundamentally embodied in real peoples’ physical and emotional experiences, whereas democratic theory downgrades these features. Finally, materiality. While the exhibition highlights material objects and settings – buildings, food, guns, streets, and more – democratic theory work highlights more abstract ideas and principles.

This research demonstrates that art exhibitions can function as sites of knowledge generation about political concepts – in this case, democracy – offering methodological insights that challenge and potentially enrich academic approaches. By comparing these radically different methodologies side by side, Professor Saward reveals how both can contribute to deeper understanding of democracy’s meaning, challenges, and possibilities.