Clusters of cast-iron combat helmets resembling mushrooms stand out against the silhouette of the Sydney Opera House. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s new artwork, Mushrooms, outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, began with the realisation of a troubling irony: In 2022, Germany offered 5,000 helmets to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. For Ai, the gesture exposed the uneasy distance between the language of protection and the reality of war. Stripped of their purpose, the helmets morph into a memorial, a warning and a question: How long can suffering remain distant before indifference becomes a form of complicity?

Dissidence, in Ai’s art, has always been an act of interruption. As a critic of the Chinese government, the 69-year-old has taken on censorship, state power, displacement and historical amnesia through his career. In 2011, he was arrested in Beijing for “economic crimes” and detained for nearly three months without charges. Afterwards, following his departure from China in 2015, Ai has converted global events and the facts of his own persecution — surveillance, detention, exile — to challenges to official narratives and ideas of aesthetics, ethics and morality.

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Perhaps that is where art’s dissident heart lies — in throwing up questions that are impossible to ignore: Who bears the cost of war? Whose history is remembered? Whose suffering becomes invisible? Art gives memory a place in public view, holding it up against the tyranny of forgetting.