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.
“Abducting street vendors, breaking doors, pulling people from cars, using teargas on residential streets,” he said about the agents, who were reportedly celebrating after “military style” immigration enforcement raids. “I mean, this is fascist America and just beyond belief.”
There have been reports that more than 1,000 people have been arrested by the federal agents since the crackdown began in September. When asked if he was considering legal options, Kapoor said: “Of course, I’m going to do everything I can.”
Kapoor took legal action against the National Rifle Association (NRA) after they used an image of Cloud Gate, which was installed in 2006 and is known locally as “the Bean”, in an advert.
He settled out of court with the NRA in 2018. “It’s a bit more complicated with this,” Kapoor said of the more recent incident, “because they’re a full, if you like, national army unit.”
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.
Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai and won the Turner prize in 1991, will be one of the standout elements in the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations.
In September, the Southbank Centre announced that Danny Boyle’s You Are Here will see thousands of participants take over the site in a celebration of the role the institution “has played in supporting youth culture since its inception”.
Anish Kapoor, photographed at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, which hosts a new retrospective of his works from 20 APRIL 2022 – 09 OCTOBER 2022. Venice, Italy. Photograph by David Levene 20/4/22
Celebrations will start in May to mark the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, with leaders of the institution hoping it will “galvanise” the country in the same way the original celebration did in 1951.
Kapoor said: “Seventy-five years is a long time in which a hell of a lot has changed. Of course, the postwar optimism is gone, but perhaps we can galvanise another optimism. A Britain that is made of all kinds of people, from all kinds of places coming together with this strange positive sense of what it means to speak of ourselves as British.”
The anniversary will also include a celebration of Benjamin Zephaniah and the composer Steve Reich, while Goalhanger Podcasts will host events, and the pianist Yuja Wang will present her immersive Playing with Fire performance.