How Led By Donkeys turned activism into an art form

It started in a pub in Stoke Newington in 2019. Then, an email was sent to an industrial-scale printers in Belfast. Before they knew it, Led By Donkeys co-founder Ollie found himself hoisting an 18-metre square image of David Cameron’s face up a rickety ladder in the middle of the night somewhere along the A10. It was their first action, and also their first encounter with the ‘tyranny of the idea’ that would come to dominate their lives from that moment on. 

The image depicted a screenshot of the former Prime Minister’s 2015 tweet predicting chaos under then-opposition leader Ed Miliband, and called attention to the fact that, four years later, amid sinking Brexit negotiations, Cameron’s government had delivered exactly that. Since then, Led By Donkeys have installed hundreds of public displays (what they call ‘interventions’), including painting the road outside the Russian Embassy with the colours of the Ukrainian flag and, more recently, unveiling a poster of a lettuce during a speech by former Prime Minister Liz Truss (a demonstration which prompted Truss to storm off-stage and, later on X, dub it a suppression of free speech). It is these actions that are chronicled in Led By Donkeys’ upcoming book Adventures in Art, Action and Accountability (published by Thames & Hudson), and accompanying exhibition at 17 Midland Road in Bristol. But, when asked to describe what Led By Donkeys do, they stop short of calling themselves artists.

“I guess an introduction might sort of go, ‘Well, this is what I do,’ but we all kind of do everything,” laughs co-founder James Sadiri on a call with Dazed. “I don’t think it is as thought through as it perhaps looks,” chimes in fellow co-founder Ben Stewart. “It’s just this instinctive sense of how to take something and make it into a social object that sparks a conversation. We all met at Greenpeace so we spent years learning how effective direct action and creative confrontation can be.” Ostensibly, the group’s goal is to “hold powerful people responsible for what they’ve said and done”, but they certainly approach this mission like artists. 

One intervention at the start of 2024 saw the Donkeys team line up children’s clothes for miles along Bournemouth beach. “We wanted to visually represent what it would look like if all the children who had been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were lined up [in a row], and we realised it would be 6.5 kilometres long,” explains Sadiri. “That’s a creative problem, but also a logistical problem that we have to solve. At first, we had the concept of body bags but, tonally, that didn’t feel quite right. You wouldn’t connect with the individual kids. So, then, we were like, ‘OK, let’s do two rows,’ but two rows just wouldn’t be the same.” 

The group were determined to make this visual representation of genocide as visceral and impactful as possible, and that vision didn’t allow any room for compromise. “We’d already booked 80 people coming on a coach to Brighton. We had the day fixed. We were running around trying to find a beach that was seven kilometres long because it just had to be one row to work,” sighs Sadiri. “So, it ended up being Bournemouth instead,” concludes Stewart.

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The group initially got their name from a World War One phrase (“lions led by donkeys”) but, at one point on the call, Sadiri referred to the group by the abbreviation ‘Donkeys’. It spoke to their stubbornness to execute the vision exactly as intended, and of the ‘tyranny of the idea’ that drove each intervention to completion. “It’s the idea that drives the action, that’s what the tyranny of the idea is,” explains Sadiri. “We’ve been horrified by everything that’s going on – supplying weapons, the diplomatic cover, everything the UK government is doing is outrageous, but we don’t want to just complain about it. We want to find a way to create something that can actually progress people’s thinking or experience of it. When we landed on this idea of kids clothes and the six and a half kilometres, it was going to be incredibly hard to do, but we have to do it. It felt like the idea was forcing us along.”

“We’re always thinking about how people emotionally interact with what we’re creating,” Stewart expands. “James talks about this sometimes as a guerilla journalism project, but it also has to be more than that. You can create a press release that says 10,000 children have died in Gaza [now more than 14,000], and that will be a news article or whatever. We’re essentially doing the same thing, just in a different way.”

It felt time to revisit the question – does Led By Donkeys make art? “I’ll answer that question by saying that I have a tea towel downstairs in my kitchen,” says Sadiri. “All the kids in my class drew their faces when they were ten or 11 and, out of those 100 kids, my face is clearly the absolute worst. My 13-year old rinses me about this every time someone comes round: ‘Look! Daddy can’t draw at all!’ I don’t feel that ‘artist’ is a term I can put on myself, but the creativity is what drives me to do it all.” 

Stewart echoes these sentiments: “The title of the book and the show is Adventures in Art, Action and Accountability but I think we would all feel uncomfortable with those words individually. Taken as a whole, it’s the closest we’ve come to capturing what we’re about.” Despite what they say, however, this disregard for labels and unwavering fixation on ‘the idea’, feels very artistic of them indeed. 

Take a look at the gallery above for a selection of their interventions over the past five years.

Adventures in Art, Action and Accountability opens September 12-15 at 17 Midland Road in Bristol. The accompanying book is published by Thames & Hudson and available to pre-order here now.