Movements such as #Rhodes Must Fall and #Black Lives Matter have had an important impact on art in the public domain, leading to a far greater critical sensitivity to the histories of people and issues commemorated in historical monuments and statuary than was hitherto often the case. But the “falling” of statues and monuments commemorating individuals and events associated with problematical ideologies and practices has not been the only outcome of this abhorrence. Of importance also has been a critical reworking of monuments and sites. Associated with a postmodernist resistance to singular truths, there were frequent instances of critical interventions to monuments being undertaken in the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, such activities have undoubtedly become especially prevalent in more recent years, when monuments and their meanings have been accorded increased critical attention.

Sometimes statues and sites have been reworked permanently, usually through additions intended to counter or correct the narratives they formerly told. When not given a permanent makeover, statues and sites have served as a prompt for performances, installations, graffiti, digital art, and other kinds of temporary creative interventions to them. Although some monuments are ultimately removed, their removal may be prefaced with various interventions that operate as a form of protest against the objects in question.

While many interventions into monuments are done with permission and endorsement by those in charge of statues and sites, many others are done without any authorization. As with authorized interventions, unofficial engagements at times assume forms such as performances and temporary installations that cause no physical changes to sites and statuary. At others, however, they may involve graffiti or some element of desecration. While there is a propensity to dismiss interventions of this kind as meaningless vandalism, it can be helpful to interpret them as discursive commentaries by their makers and a means to give voice to ideas that might otherwise go unspoken – even if one does not condone such practices. Sometimes undertaken with the intention of calling for the removal of a monument, such interventions may also simply prompt viewers to think about an institution or ideology with which the statue or site in question is associated.

How do these various kinds of interventions operate as critique and commentary? How do they shift the relationship between viewers and monuments? How successful have they been in enabling new understandings of histories? How might the practice of reworking or intervening to monuments contribute to the contemporary heritage landscape? These are among the general questions that potential presenters are invited to ask.