Anti-Brexit Campaign, Wolfgang Tillmans, 2016-present

“It’s now the duty of us all to defend the pillars of the free world order that was created over the last seventy years. To hold the centre ground, and not to contribute to the centrifugal energies around us”, wrote the artist and proud European just days after Britain voted to exit the EU. Tillmans’ series of posters and t-shirts proliferated around Britain last year, bolstering the official Remain campaign that he saw as “lame and lacking in passion”. This year, as the Netherlands prepared to vote in their next governing party, the two founders of Amsterdam-based international fashion magazine Fantastic Man adapted and expanded Tillmans’ designs to urge their own country to "protect the EU”. The posters were free to pick up from various major institutions around the Netherlands, and have so far been translated into 11 other European languages. As the duo say, “the campaign is a call to work together, to adapt the posters, to spread them and to talk with people of opposite beliefs”.

Protect and Survive, Peter Kennard, 1981

Commissioned by the Greater London Council (led by the staunchly left-wing Ken Livingstone), Protect and Survive is one in a set of 18 images responding to pamphlets distributed by the Thatcher government to offer guidance in the event of a nuclear attack. The GLC refused to support the government’s civil defence exercises, as did almost 200 other UK local authorities in the early 1980s. In Kennard’s words, the pamphlets were “full of totally ludicrous instructions, like telling people to remove their lace curtains in the event of an attack”. The artist thought of his series of images as “a visual toolbox for activists working within the movement… Removing them from the confines of high art and into popular culture is what the work is about.” Kennard is also one half of the duo responsible for the notorious Photo-Op image of Tony Blair that circulated during the UK’s invasion of Iraq.

Your body is a battleground, Barbara Kruger, 1989

Barbara Kruger recently branded Trump a LOSER on the cover of last November’s New York Magazine, but her involvement in her country’s politics stretches back decades. In 1989, George H.W. Bush had just become president and his government was pushing through a wave of anti-abortion laws that threatened the legality of the entire medical procedure. As thousands of Americans prepared to march on Washington in protest, Barbara Kruger applied her unmistakable style to a now seminal silkscreen. It was issued as a flyer to spread details of the march, and the phrase became a rallying cry for crowds at the National Mall. The artist says, “I never say I do political art. Nor do I do feminist art. I’m a woman who’s a feminist, who makes art”. The image has had its text translated into languages around the world for a variety of causes – in 2013, an interviewer posed the question, “where is Your body is a battleground not an issue?”. Kruger’s response: “I’ve not been to that place yet”.

AIDS awareness, Keith Haring, 1980s

“You could go in the subway for 15 minutes and see better art than you could see all day long in the gallery”. Haring’s vibrant silhouettes populated train stations in chalky sketches years before they found their political calling. The artist recalled, “it just grew into this group of drawings. I was thinking about these images as symbols, as a vocabulary of things”, and soon his figures were mobilised against apartheid, nuclear activity, and the AIDS crisis – particularly entwined with the activist organisation, ACT UP. When the artist was diagnosed with AIDS aged 30, he started the Keith Haring Foundation, to provide funding and imagery to AIDS organisations through exhibitions, publications and the licensing of his images. Haring died two years later in 1990, but his icons remain ubiquitous, and his foundation continues to do as the artist intended of his works: “these things have a different kind of life. They don’t depend on breathing, so they’ll last longer than any of us will.”

We the People, Shepard Fairey, 2017

Back in 2008 as the USA eagerly anticipated Obama’s inauguration, Fairey’s Hope poster “encapsulated the mood of its time” and “breathed new life into a form that had lost its purpose” (so said the Design of the Year panel of their winner). For Trump’s inauguration this year, Fairey commissioned three photographers to capture “the diversity and inclusion” of America through people in their own communities, and then translated the images into his now unmistakable style. With tight security surrounding the march (no large signs or placard poles would be permitted), the artist needed an inconspicuous way to infiltrate the crowds with his posters. He took out full-page adverts in the Washington Post, filled with the three images ready to be torn out for the march, and spread word of the campaign through social media. Though the internet played a crucial part, Fairey adds, “when people get out there and they hold something, it’s different. The kind of bonds you form with other people are more meaningful, when there are actual bodies in close proximity and words being exchanged and molecules colliding.”

People Power: Fighting for Peace, Imperial War Museum, until 28 August 2017.