The British artist Jeremy Deller has built a career on staging events that sit somewhere between history lesson and public spectacle: a brass band performing acid-house anthems, a reenactment of the Battle of Orgreave, a procession that turns a city street into a surrealist “self-portrait.”¹ His work rarely declares itself to be political, yet it returns, again and again, to the emotional life of politics—nationalism, memory and the strange choreography of crowds.

If there is a consistent idea running through his practice, it is a modest one: Art won’t change the world, but it can, at least for a moment, shift the mood and recalibrate how people move through space—together, apart, in friction, in alignment. 

Emily Nathan: You’ve said you’re not a political artist, yet your work often brushes up against politics. How do you decide what to engage with?

Jeremy Deller: I’m not a politician, so I just swim around in it like everyone else. When it comes to my work, it really depends on the project. Sometimes I can make work about something that’s been bothering or intriguing me for years. Other times it’s a commission; institutions really love anniversaries. In those cases, you try to steer opportunities toward what genuinely interests you, so it’s practical in that sense. Making work is a negotiation. You try to go where your interests are, but you also go where people invite you to go.