‘This is fascist America’: Anish Kapoor may sue after border agents pose by his sculpture – The Guardian
14 November 2025
The artist Anish Kapoor is considering taking legal action after border patrol agents posed for a photo in front of his Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago, saying the scene represented “fascist America”.
The Indian-born artist said he was sent the image by a friend who lives in the US city on Tuesday morning in a conversation about his show at the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, which will open next year.
Kapoor recently opened a show focusing on his early works at the Jewish Museum in New York (his mother was an Iraqi Jew). The Southbank show, which will take up the entirety of the Hayward Gallery and feature around 40 works, is a different beast.
Opening on 16 June 2026 and running until 18 October, visitors will be confronted by Kapoor’s usual mix of large-scale, colossal works that use vibrant pigment and Vantablack, the most intense black paint in existence. At the Hayward, he will unveil two new pieces: the first is an inflated PVC membrane.
“As you enter the show, there is a very big object occupying the whole of that first gallery,” he said. “It, if you like, bulges and fills that whole space, pushing the viewer right to the side.”
The second is described by the Southbank Centre as “a dark mountainous threshold” that looms down “amid a sprawling red landscape” contained within the upper gallery.
He said: “What it does, I hope, is to evoke in the viewer a sense of ‘what is this?’; ‘Is it art?’; ‘Why am I here with this?’ I think these are very important questions, because what they do is unleash emotion.”
The exhibition will also feature Kapoor’s 2022 work, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, a huge swirl of black and red that descends from the ceiling. There are a few works from the 1990s and 2010s but much of the show comes from his output over the last five years.
“I don’t think the Hayward is a place for retrospectives,” he said. “It’s a place that invites daring proposals and I’m jumping in with both feet.”
Curated by the Hayward’s outgoing artistic director Ralph Rugoff, the exhibition is a full-circle moment for Kapoor, who had his first major survey in a public gallery at the Southbank Centre in 1998.
Read the full article via The Guardian here.
Image: Anish Kapoor, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, 2022. Mixed media, 13.8 x 6.8 x 3.9cm. Photograph: Attilio Maranzano © Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS, 2025
