What is protest, if not the trembling murmur of a society’s conscience? Across centuries and continents, protest has not only challenged power but also painted, composed, sculpted, whispered, and screamed through every creative means available. Protest is the silent thunder in the human soul -- it is art in defiance, an aesthetic rupture in the fabric of obedience.
Take Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. For most, it is the enigmatic smile of Renaissance genius. But for those who track the cultural pulse of protest, it has become something else entirely -- a target of dissent, a canvas of rage.
In 2024, two climate and food justice activists hurled soup at the glass protecting Mona Lisa in the Louvre. Their demand? That healthy food be made a human right and farmers treated fairly.
A year prior, it was cake. Before that, attempts with acid. The very fact that this painting -- arguably the world’s most iconic piece of art -- is so frequently chosen as the backdrop of protest is not coincidental. It is a symbol. And symbols are where protest breathes.
This was not vandalism. It was, in its twisted yet poignant way, performance art. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once noted, “Symbolic violence is the gentle, invisible form of violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity.” The protestors, in targeting Mona Lisa, were not desecrating art -- they were weaponizing beauty against the violence of systemic negligence. Their gesture was neither random nor barbaric. It was a strategic interruption, a forced reckoning.
Consider the farmer who buried his entire body in the ground, leaving only his head above the surface -- his land granted by the state, his rights denied by bureaucracy. His body became a sculpture of injustice, his silence louder than megaphones. This act was reminiscent of Marina Abramović’s performance art or Ai Weiwei’s installations: Powerful, painful, impossible to ignore.
Protest, when divorced from violence and guided by imagination, becomes an art form capable of penetrating the numbness of modernity. In this sense, it is not merely about demanding change -- it is about reclaiming the right to feel, to empathize, to be human again.
Martin Luther King Jr knew this well. His model of civil disobedience -- marches, sit-ins, boycotts -- was choreographed with such moral elegance that it stunned the conscience of a nation. “A riot,” he said, “is the language of the unheard.” Yet his own preference was for the poetic language of peaceful resistance. His words, his cadence, his presence -- all embodied a kind of performance that demanded attention not through destruction but through dignity.
The political scientist James C Scott, in his seminal work Domination and the Arts of Resistance, distinguishes between public transcripts -- the language of the powerful -- and hidden transcripts -- the language of dissent whispered among the oppressed. Scott argues that oppressed people often find subversive ways to resist power, not with grand revolutions but with small, symbolic acts. These acts, when made visible, transform into protest art.
Perhaps one of the most profound examples of symbolic protest lies in the death of Socrates. Offered the chance to escape his death sentence, he refused. He drank the hemlock. His trial was a political farce, his death a philosophical protest. It was, as political theorist Sheldon Wolin might put it, a radical performance of truth. In his silent acceptance, Socrates declared war on intellectual tyranny.
Protest has always known how to stage itself. The Boston Tea Party of 1773, often remembered as the birth cry of American independence, was essentially political theatre. Colonists, disguised as Mohawk Indians, dumped 342 chests of tea into the Boston harbour to protest taxation without representation. It was subversive. It was dramatic. It was a scene worthy of Shakespeare. And it worked.
In modern times, protest has become more multimedia, more corporeal, more subtextual. Take, for instance, Colin Kaepernick’s simple act of kneeling during the national anthem -- a gesture so minimal, yet so seismic. He did not shout. He did not incite. He knelt. And the world shook. At that moment, protest left the streets and entered the stadium, the screen, the living room.
Or consider Japan, after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when thousands marched silently with paper lanterns. No chants. No slogans. Just a collective glow -- a soft tsunami of grief and fury. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.” These protestors acted in concert, creating a light so quiet it roared.
From street graffiti in Cairo during the Arab Spring to the haunting die-in protests against police brutality in the United States, the forms of resistance have diversified. Protesters lying down in the shape of corpses on streets are not just making a statement -- they are forcing society to walk around death. It is a forced confrontation, a brutal mirror.
Sociologist Jeffrey C Alexander has discussed “cultural performance” in protest, emphasizing that the effectiveness of movements often hinges not just on what they demand, but how they dramatize their struggle. The ability to create symbols, to script meaning, to draw public emotion -- this is protest as theatre, as ritual, as opera.
Social media has only expanded the stage. Memes have become tools of resistance. Caricatures and satire can bring down empires -- just ask cartoonists in authoritarian regimes. A single tweet, a clever visual, a shared story -- they can shake the foundations of power with no more than a thousand pixels.
Yet protest is not always loud. Sometimes, it is deafeningly quiet. A woman sitting alone in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. A child offering a flower to a soldier’s gun. A black square posted on Instagram. These are not stunts. These are archetypes -- echoes of resistance that ripple across generations.
Still, there is danger in romanticizing protest as performance. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek warns us of the commodification of resistance. When protest becomes spectacle, it risks losing its sting. “Interpassivity,” is the illusion of participation without actual engagement -- liking a protest video but never marching, retweeting outrage but never resisting. In such a world, we must remember that protest art, though symbolic, must be grounded in ethical sincerity.
Mahatma Gandhi, perhaps the greatest artist of non-violent resistance, famously said, “In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” His Salt March was not just a political act -- it was a pilgrimage of protest. He staged history. He wrote theatre with his feet.
Protest is not only about the right to speak -- it is about the right to feel, to express, to disturb, to imagine alternatives. It is where politics meets poetry, where grievance meets grace.
Today, as power becomes more impersonal and systems more automated, the soul of protest lies in its creativity. The more technocratic the regime, the more poetic the resistance must be. It is the humanization of struggle that keeps protest alive.
So let protest continue to astonish us -- not with its fury, but with its finesse. Let it challenge not only authority, but apathy. For in the end, protest is not a rupture in civilization -- it is its heartbeat.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst. Email: [email protected]
