Art and Resilience at the World Economic Forum

The occasion of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting in Davos this week is a chance to reflect on the very particular relationship between art and global policymaking in 2025. Back in 2021, the WEF chose for its central theme “The Great Reset.” In the eponymous book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset,” co-authored by the Forum’s founder Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, the pair framed the global pandemic as an opportunity to develop more sustainable and resilient systems. The themes of subsequent conferences: “Working Together, Restoring Trust” (2022), “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” (2023), and “Rebuilding Trust,” which hint at overriding economic concerns, weren’t so hopeful. Instead, their stress on collaboration and trust gave the sense of a fractured and cynical global economic environment. 

The title of the 2025 edition: “Collaboration for the Intelligent Age” follows the thrust of a recent article by the Forum’s Head of Arts & Culture, Joseph Fowler. The WEF has incorporated an arts and culture program for more than 30 years to enrich and diversify its thinking around core issues discussed at the conference, including sustainability and social progress. In 2023, a number of creatives were invited to speak about their practices under the banner of “Cultural Leaders as Catalysts of Change.” Artist and architect Maya Lin discussed public art and the environment, using her talk to inform listeners about the destruction of natural habitats and consequent extinction of species, while proposing impactful solutions to the very people who have the power to act. In turn, artists were invited to exchange ideas with executives from the likes of IBM and McKinsey & Company. 

The intermingling of arts and culture with discussions at the Forum is seen as one way of fostering the kinds of resilience that “The Great Reset” was calling for during the pandemic. Resilience on these terms is really tensile strength applied to socio-economics: the ability to be flexible in order to resist stress. While Schwab was reacting principally to the COVID crisis, other stresses he pointed to were social inequality and climate emergency. Faced with such threats, what he argued should be resilient is growth, an interesting position to defend given that growth for growth’s sake is often regarded as a leading cause of social inequity and environmental degradation. ‍

The role of artists in this context is to appeal to the human side of homo economicus in order to craft policies that better serve present needs. 

Of course, resilience is also essential for contemporary artists, activists, and artist-activists if they are to navigate an economy that so often undervalues their material and immaterial labor. Three of the artists shown at the WEF in 2024 and 2025: Benjamin Von Wong, the Yawanawá people, and Gary Tyler, question what resilience means for contemporary creators while testing the resilience of the global economic system. 

Benjamin Von Wong is a Canadian artist and activist whose impact can be measured in the virality of his campaigns. Von Wong creates large-scale installations and striking photography using plastic waste to communicate simple messages. One of his campaigns, “Mermaids Hate Plastic,” (2016) is a series of highly saturated photos of models dressed as mermaids swimming in an ocean of plastic bottles. The ocean is an installation comprising 10,000 bottles — the estimated number of bottles consumed by the average American over the course of their lifetime. The photos and installation are meant to convey visually the massive scale of plastic waste. While the marine theme is a reminder of the amount of plastic that ends up in oceans, with one caption stressing that by 2050 there will be more plastics than fish in the sea, replacing the ocean with plastic bottles, or water containers, also creates an ironic commentary on our degraded relationship to nature. Since 2020, synthetic mass has outweighed all living biomass on the planet. 

Von Wong’s practice sits between communications and art, using the methods of the former and legitimacy of the latter to propagate his message.

Occupying space and drawing attention is his modus operandi, while his website uses corporate language such as “campaign,” “amplify,” and “impact” to frame his work, flashing logos of news outlets where he’s been featured, clearly targeting business as an audience. The result is that Von Wong’s career has evolved largely outside of the mainstream art world. His works are featured by Forbes and ABC and created in collaboration with NGOs and large corporate entities including Starbucks and the United Nations. One of his projects, #Strawpocalypse, which included a large-scale installation of waves made of straws titled The Parting of the Plastic Sea (2019), received a Guinness World Record for the largest supported art installation made from plastic drinking straws. 

In fact, Von Wong identifies more as an activist than an artist, and writing him into the confines of the white cube would only limit the reach he already obtains through viral success. Instead of revolving in the hamster wheel of the art world, his approach brings him closer to global actors with wide audiences and large economic and environmental impacts. A case in point was Davos in 2024, where Von Wong exhibited photographs, films, and installations to draw attention to ocean plastics, electronic waste, and fashion pollution. 

Leaders from polluting industries that came to speak at Davos were thus confronted with work whose scale and subjects acted as memento mori to keep environmental concerns on their minds. 

By using art as a tool for activism, Von Wong treads an admirable but complicated path. Naming something as art bestows on it both symbolic and auratic power — the former opening up space for conversation and polyvalent meaning with the latter conferring respectability. These are the same qualities exploited by soup-throwing and statue-toppling activists, who continue to wield art as a political medium. ‍

Of course, polyvalence also leaves space for wires to be crossed or deliberately misused. By working so closely with the institutions his works criticize, Von Wong runs the risk of creating a dissonance between his practice and his preaching. While he may be aiming his message at them, large corporations have a habit of using art to wash their reputations, that is, sticking their name to an artwork and using its message as their own instead of changing their practices. By accident, design, or some combination of both, Von Wong’s work softens the WEF brand even while the artist implores both speakers and attendees to generate meaningful change from the inside. 

In 2024, the Los Angeles-based media artist Refik Anadol in collaboration with the Yawanawá people presented a room-sized, AI-powered installation called Living Archive: Nature which incorporated visuals from a series of drawings by artists and sisters Nawashahu and Mukashahu Yawanawá. The work is constantly evolving based on live weather data from Aldeia Sagrada, the ancestral home of the Yawanawá people.

Datafying the world reduces it to the level of a spreadsheet. Anadol plays with this fact by turning the spreadsheet into a proverbial canvas — propelling data’s visualization into a colorful flux of digital pigments while transforming it into an aesthetic experience. By partnering with the Yawanawá people as both artists and subjects of Living Archive: Nature, Anadol wants to highlight the agency of the individuals behind the data. In a previous version of the same work, the tokenization of each iteration ensured that a percentage of the purchase price was immediately transferred to the Yawanawá community. 

In one sense, the partnership is an act of resilience by the community in the way it leverages the western techno-social regime as well as the profile of an internationally known artist to garner attention and raise funds.

In the context of the WEF, the work also provides a chance to discuss blockchain, decentralized finance, and the ways Web3 might be used to rewire existing financial systems. By distributing funds automatically in a secure, efficient, and transparent way without need for a trusted third party, the work exemplifies Web3 in action, highlighting the potential of smart contracts to enforce donations and automate equity. Many other NFT projects, such as World of Women, follow the same logic, while Arcual, the art market blockchain, launched Access by Art Basel in 2023 to integrate charitable donations into art purchases at the international art fair.

Blockchain is a fantastic tool to integrate charitable donations seamlessly into financial transactions. However, whatever promise of radical politics it might have once offered has now given way to a transparent reconfiguration of western economic circuitry. After all, as Luke Hespanhol has argued, “the core tenets of the blockchain: decentralization, community self-governance, verifiable ownership, accountability, transparency. These are the core values of Western liberal democracies, which makes sense, since that is where the technology originated.” 

One artist participating at the 2025 World Economic Forum whose life has been defined by resilience in the face of injustice is Gary Tyler. A Black quilt artist working in California, Tyler honed his craft at the Louisiana State Penitentiary where he was imprisoned for 41 years for a crime that, many witnesses agree, he did not commit. In 1974, when he was only 16 years old, Tyler was sentenced to death for the murder of a white 13-year-old boy. The case built against him was composed of fabricated evidence and faked testimonies. In 1977, the Supreme Court of Louisiana commuted Tyler’s death sentence to life imprisonment after the US Supreme Court had declared the state’s death penalty law unconstitutional. However, despite the recanting of testimonies against him along with support from Amnesty International and coverage from The New York Times, he wasn’t released from prison until 2016. 

While incarcerated, Tyler drew inspiration for his scenes of life in prison from the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Since being released, he has continued to quilt, exhibiting new works at Library Street Collective in Detroit in 2023 and at Frieze LA in 2024. Both the quilts and their subjects tell an entangled story of racial and economic injustice, highlighting how the intangible value of art can be translated into effective action. Indignity, 2017 (2024) depicts the Louisiana prison’s annual rodeo with a black prisoner falling off a bull as a white onlooker takes a photo. The scene captures the spectacle promoted by the prison that incentivizes inmates to compete in a dangerous sport in exchange for a cash prize.

Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as “Angola,” is a type of correctional facility known as a “prison farm” where prisoners provide agricultural labor for between $0.02 and $0.40 per hour. The prison is located on the site of what was once the Angola plantation, named after the country where many of its enslaved laborers originated. It was turned into a prison in 1880 when the plantation was sold to a for-profit prison management company, which remained in charge until the land was bought back by the State of Louisiana in 1901. It is notable that the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1865 and still in place with the same language today, abolished slavery under the following terms: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” 

The case of Angola prison is just one example of the plantation-to-penitentiary pipeline that uses this loophole in the 13th Amendment to continue operating as a site of forced labor. 

Figures from 2022 show that 74% of the prisoners incarcerated at Angola were Black. Among them, Gary Tyler, Glenn Ford, Henry James, and Darrill Henry are just some of the Black men wrongfully imprisoned. Tyler’s quilting practice is often framed as a form of resilience, revealing the power of art to sustain him through four decades in prison. Yet his life also reveals the resilience of the oppressive system that wrongfully incarcerated him, which maintains dynamics that predate the abolition of slavery to continue to abuse and exploit Black people. In 2019 the WEF published an article condemning the rising trend of imprisonment globally. This new display of Tyler’s work is a chance to renew conversations around prison reform while spurring genuine action and policy change.  

Presented at the WEF, art can be used to foreground human stories that expose the flaws in our current system to those supposedly in charge of fixing it. Perhaps, through the push and pull of art and economics that takes place at the conference, we’ll be able to build more fair and sustainable systems within the existing paradigm. Or maybe it’s time for policymakers to stop delegating ethical responsibility to artists and start facing complex human issues head on.