photos by Kristian Buus

Control Room 2

6m x 18m

oil, acrylic, pigment ink, paper on billboard print

2009

Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin, Germany

We were commissioned to make Control Room 2 for Embedded Art , a group exhibition dealing with issues of surveillance. We got the background image of a control room printed as three 6 metre by 6 metre street posters on blue back billboard paper.

Pasting them butted up together, directly onto the untreated concrete wall we then collaged about 100 images onto the base paper and scraped into the images using industrial grinders, tearing at the paper and adding oil and acrylic paint. Trying to encapsulate the separate works in the show which dealt with surveillance from the domestic to the military, our work uses images of police action (mainly in Germany where it was made for) to Iraq . We show images of state torture adjacent to surveillance photos of western streets. Looking at the work the audience is watching the watched looking back at them, while all the while being filmed and  projected in another part of the exhibition.

The work was destroyed by the Akademie at the end of the show in March 2009. See it being made and in detail here………

we had to paste up a base layer of random billboard sheets before pasting up the real base image, donated by a mate, Fibs helped us - thanks Fibs!

relief when we finished pasting up the base image

the opening at the posh Akademie der Kunste where our dirty, protest work was on show

the public could view the work from above..............

.................and below

photos by Kristian Buus

Playing around with the the concoction, fabrication of value in the global capitalist financial system, we engaged city workers with some simple truth derivatives during their lunchbreak, equating their salaried/bonus income with the cost of lunch for a worker in the producing countries ie Mozambique, Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh.

The Cafe of Equivalent$, a lunch food stall selling food at cost equivocal to food affordability in the producing countries – the research to tailor the pricing for the project is not complete but – soup and bread in Mozambique for a worker earning $2 a day costs 20 cents , 10%daily wage – applied to the average bonus-earning-banker  soup and bread from our stall costs $181.67, £111.20

This intervention is an attempt to create a transparency in an opaque world of money, making material the physical possibilities of using financial resources for need rather than profit.

Clients at the stall are invited to write their aspirations for a different future across the artwork.

Cafe of Equivalent$ was commissioned by LII for C.R.A.S.H. A Post Capitalist A-Z as part of 2 Degrees festival hosted by Arts Admin, June 2009. We setup in Leadenhall Market at the back of the Lloyd’s building in the heart of the City.

photos by Jenny Matthews

The Nakba 60 commissioned a group of artists to create a series of billboards to highlight the destruction of the state of Palestine at the moment Israel was created. It ran the billboards as Israel had their 60th anniversary celebrations in London.

Nakba 60 billboard by kennardphillipps in Kensal Rise

A film showing kennardphillipps installing the exhibition DEMO at City Hall, London in 2004 – also featuring the making of DECORATION and AWARD

Film by Kristian Buus