Daniel Trilling is the author of ‘Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe’ (Picador) and ‘Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain’s Far Right’

‘Ideas about nation, territory and identity are thrown into disarray’

At the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz, the spectre of nationalism and anxiety about borders haunted this year’s programme

23 Oct 2023

How to cut a statue down to size

Robert Bevan’s call to require a lot less from our public monuments has much to recommend it

3 Jan 2023
Installation view of ‘Open Storage Africa. Appropriating objects and imagining Africa’ in the Humboldt Forum, Berlin.

Has the Humboldt Forum got it horribly wrong?

The rebuilt Prussian palace is finally open, but the debate about how – and whether – it should house collections from Asia and Africa rumbles on

21 Jan 2022
The Tower of London: a storeroom with a sense of history.

Tourist for a day – the Tower of London is quite the tour de force

The Crown Jewels are what the castle is most famous for, but over the centuries it has housed everything from prisoners to military hardware

27 Aug 2021
Detail of plaque (c. 16th–17th century), Benin City.

Returns policy – The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks, reviewed

Is it enough for Western museums to say how they came by their colonial-era artefacts – or should they just give them back?

6 Jul 2021

Salvage value: the rescue missions of Michael Rakowitz

The Iraqi-American artist talks to Apollo about making an anti-war memorial in Margate – and about ‘problem-solving and trouble-making’ with his art

23 May 2021
Protesters throwing the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour on 7 June 2020.

The art of creative destruction

Hew Locke imagined redecorating the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston more than a decade ago. If only Bristol City Council had let him

10 Jun 2020
The Somerset levels at dusk (1998), Don McCullin. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth; © Don McCullin

‘I’ve earned my reputation out of other people’s downfall’ – an interview with Don McCullin

The legendary photographer talks about his images of war abroad and poverty at home – and what now draws him to landscapes

22 Feb 2020
The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), Michael Rakowitz’s sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London.

Making up for the past – the artists filling in the blanks in our collective memory

How artists such Michael Rakowitz, Kader Attia and Hew Locke are picking up where official narratives leave off

20 Jul 2019
Still from BRIDGIT (2016), Charlotte Prodger, courtesy the artist, Koppe Astner, Glasgow and Hollybush Gardens

How political is political art?

Many artists take themes such as migration, climate change, and human rights as their subjects, but what are they actually doing with them?

8 Dec 2018
Sculpture at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, photo: © Robert Harding/Alamy Stock Photos

What national museums tell us about national identities

Museums of national history put the stories countries like to tell about themselves into physical form

26 Feb 2018