Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, never one to retreat from a politically explosive terrain, has returned with Jungle Gym, a starkly conceived structure at Glastonbury’s Terminal 1 stage—an art-and-music platform now quickly developing a reputation for dissent.
This year’s programme, curated by Oriana Garzón under the title No Human is Illegal, offered no easy respite from current geopolitics. Wallinger’s contribution—composed entirely in cyan, or “Unicef blue”—is a sprawling, fenced-in maze, a haunting counterpoint to the innocent play suggested by its title. At its core lies a jungle gym: visible, unreachable, fenced off by layers of bureaucratic metaphor rendered in galvanised steel.
Wallinger, whose Ecce Homo once stood on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, has turned his attention toward the mounting crisis in Gaza, citing the staggering estimate from Unicef that over 50,000 children have been killed or injured in less than two years of conflict. “Children have no say, no power,” the artist remarked, “yet they bear the brunt.” The choice of cyan references the humanitarian aspirations of international aid, though its uniform application in Jungle Gym reads less as optimism and more as an elegy in monochrome.
The work’s bureaucratic sting is amplified upon entry: visitors must answer a question from the UK’s citizenship test. A wrong answer sends them to the back of the queue—an experience at once theatrical and pointedly didactic. “I was thinking about Kafka, about systems designed to exhaust,” Wallinger said. “But I was also thinking about the UN, Unicef—about hope being suffocated by political inertia.”
Garzón, whose programme this year features artists with lived experience of migration from Pakistan, Brazil, and South Africa, has curated with urgency. “Glastonbury is seen as a pastoral, free space, and that makes it a strategic platform,” she told Artlyst. “But this year, we’ve been forced to reckon with the reality that fascism is not creeping—it’s sprinting.”
Terminal 1’s staging, built from materials salvaged from Heathrow Airport, already conjures the visual language of transience, detention and enforced order. Wallinger’s installation foregrounds the human stakes.
Controversy has not been confined to the visual arts programme. A private letter—signed by over 30 music industry heavyweights—urged organisers to remove Irish rap trio Kneecap from the line-up. One member is currently facing charges for alleged support of Hezbollah. Rather than drop the act, the organisers quietly reassigned them to a different stage. The BBC confirmed its intention to broadcast the group’s performance.
“Kneecap has forced Glastonbury to have meetings it’s never had to have,” Garzón said. “It reveals how divided we are and how urgent it is to hold space for difficult voices.”
Despite attempts to sanitise the political temperature, Terminal 1 has doubled down on its message. This is not art for contemplation; it is confrontation. As Wallinger put it bluntly: “There is an authoritarian drift everywhere you look. If we still believe art has any role left to play, then we must wield it—not meekly, but with precision and resolve.”