we’ll be making an installation for this on the 12th NOVEMBER off brick lane……………

Signs of Revolt–Creative Resistance and Social Movements since Seattle



EXHIBITION AND TALKS

Space Hijackers/Ultimate Holding Company/Reel News/kennardphillipps/ Cactus Network/Jonathan Barnbrook/Pedro Inhoue/Noel Douglas/David Gentlemen/Guy Smallman/Jody Boehnart/ Jess Hurd/Notes from Nowehere/Movement of the Imagination/Rebel Clown Army/ Indymedia London/Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination/Creative Resistance Research Network/ Turbulence/War Boutique/Josh On



Opening FRIDAY 13 NOVEMBER 6pm then SATURDAY 14–SUNDAY 22 NOVEMBER 


Opening Times: Weekends 10-10pm, Weekdays 12–9pm

Shop 14


The Old Truman Brewery

 91 Brick Lane 


London


E1 6QL



10 years ago, in November 1999 an alliance of direct action activists, environmentalists and trade unionists shut down the meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, stopping the next trade round of Capitalist Globalisation. In the process they sparked a Movement of Movements right across the globe its slogan became ‘Another World is Possible’.

This November exactly 10 years from that momentous demonstration, and with most of the predictions of the movements rapidly coming true what with the crisis of the economy, a permanent state of war and the collapse of our eco-system wrecking lives across the planet, the rich and powerful meet again in Copenhagen to discuss the next Climate treaty after Kyoto, yet again activists are preparing to challenge the idea that the Market can solve the problems of the world, and take another step toward that possible world after Capitalism.

Signs of Revolt is an exhibition that weaves together the story of the past decades social movements, drawing out the influences and connections between and across the movements against Capitalism, War and Climate Change. Using archive material and documentary photography and video from movement photographers and filmmakers. It reveals the story of how we got from Seattle to Copenhagen.

Interspersed in this narrative are works by artist and designer activists and collectives, produced during, within and for the movements, this is the first time such a collection has been brought together in the UK and it will be a chance to reflect upon and celebrate the new creative impulses that the movements spawned and the possibilties for developing the creative capacity of future movements, these issues will also be discussed in greater depth during a series of talks during the exhibition. (timetable here).

As Capitalism threatens our very existence, Signs of Revolt defiantly maps out possible routes to a future filled with hope…


signsofrevolt.net

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

G20 New Number of the Beast, disused shop, Carnaby Street, London, UK, 2009.

To mark the G20 arrival in London and celebrate the protesters in the City we’ve made a trashed installation down in shopping central

Iraq: a process of resistance documents the visual protest made by artists kennardphillipps against the invasion of Iraq and the transpiring obliteration of civilian life in Iraq 2002 – 2008. The work aims to be accessible by the general public and to involve them in questions relating to activism and art. Designed for the Brighton Photo Biennial 2008, Iraq: a process of resistance was shown at Ink-d gallery.

kennardphillipps began their collaborative work as a means to express their revulsion at the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. They aim to use their skills to express their solidarity with the Iraqi people and to produce work that can be used as a resource by anyone protesting against the war including magazines and newspapers.

From throwing dust, blood and oil onto a flatbed scanner for their first series of prints (Award) they moved on to working on paintings combining oil paint with digital printing and then onto large scale works printed on newspapers which are ripped and pummelled in an attempt to physically portray the war-torn country and a people devasted by relentless attack.

This exhibition is designed to show how photographic images from the media can be recontextualised through the processes of art to rip through the lies of mass destruction peddled by the USA and UK government led by George Bush and Tony Blair. By looking at individual press photographs and recombining them in a new context their work offers an audience an alternative view of the construction of war.

photos by Kristian Buus

we're still smoking the jordanian 'rizlas' johnny got us from the local shop - their the purest smoke, no glue! anyone know how to import them? We haven't put up any pictures of our palestinian friends here for fear that they'd get hassled by the israeli authorities - but we think of you lot a lot!

some of our prints next to Sulheiman Mansour’s sculpture of cracked mud – we met Sulheiman, he’s a beautiful artist, done some radical work, he told us of a teahouse he opened for a day in the threatened and abandoned heart of Hebron where the palestinian citizens are terrorised by the young soldiers of Israel and the now present israeli settlers who have been ’settled’ in the centre of the major palestinian city of Hebron. The palestinians shops and houses are still there but abandoned, under threat from israeli’s, and down there in the heart of the old city Sulheiman and a band of artists opened a teahouse to sit drink tea and discuss anything with regular citizens, israeli troops and israeli settlers. He described it as a successful attempt to start dialogue between whoever came along. Sulheiman is a driving force at the Arts Academy in Ramallah.

We walked down those streets in the heart of Hebron, the palestinian people had to erect cages to cover their streets to protect themselves from missiles being dropped by israelis who occupy the upper floors of the buildings.

checkpoint at exact centre of Hebron to stop palestinians from freely accessing their mosque on the other side

the mosque. This is where the israli occupation of Hebron began, about 10 years ago a group of israeli settlers entered this mosque and shot dead more than 40 palestinian worshippers. From that point on the state of Israel declared it an no go area, state of emergency and encircled it with 4000 israeli troops, after a year Israel lifted the no-go status but left the soldiers in place and began placing israeli settlers in surrounding houses, the state invited the settlers to use the mosque as their place of worship which they do. The Israeli settler population that inhabit the area around the mosque number only 150 people but they have a school. Many choose to sleep outside the city in neighbouring settlements but dutifully bus in every day under military escort in order to occupy the area. 4000 soldiers provide 'security' for this little group of families. The palestinian citizens who had houses and shops in the area have been harassed by the soldiers, which is severe, to a point where most dwellings belonging to them lie deserted. The Palestinian Authority runs an incentive programme that allows free electricity and water and low rent to any palestinian willing to live in these streets, only the very desperately poor take up the offer. Palestinians are allowed to use a small part of the mosque at certain times if they are willing to face the checkpoint that surrounds it.

the mad military aesthetic of the israeli settlement. we would see this one from Bethlehem on our walk home from the Ghetto each night. it's been built in the last 10 years

Made In Palestine

Made in Palestine detail

the charming israeli apartheid wall, great inspiration for kids growing up alongside it

Forms of Resistance was a large show at the Vanne Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, for which we remade soldier#1 as a billboard and showed the STOP protest posters surrounding the footage from Lakenheath airbase.

The exhibition Forms of Resistance shows that ‘art and resistance’ are both timeless and universal. Although politically engaged works often put content first, this exhibition shows that art is an outstanding method of transforming content using form.

The exhibition draws on four historical events: the Paris Commune (1871), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Prague Spring (May ’68) and the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). This division does not pretend to be historically exhaustive but shows how resistance through the centuries has been repeated and revived, and has not been merely limited to social problems of a national nature. Socially conscious artists are often part of a larger movement or organisation, such as the Futurists, Constructivists, Bauhaus, Atelier Populair, Brigadas Ramona Parra or the Angola Committee in the Netherlands. There are also photograph and video collectives, which were particularly prevalent in the 1970s and highlight abuses on every continent. Other people, such as John Heartfield, Adrian Piper, Hans Haacke, Valie Export and Sanja Ivekovic, work alone. Marco Scotini’s Disobedience archive, which contains a collection of manifestations of civil disobedience, provides a social platform for related yet independent forms of protest all over the world.

Artists and graphic designers have emerged as idealists, accusers, underground activists, guerrillas, anarchists or propagandists at key moments throughout history. Forms of Resistance shows how artists through the ages have used their talents to react to society. Through the explicit political and social context of their art, citizens and governments are addressed directly. It is not so much an act of artistic recognition as a political protestation or an open declaration of sympathy.

Blairaq

pigment ink and pva on newspaper

300cm x 600cm

Leonard Street Gallery, London, Uk  2007

detail of bush/iraq portrait

Soldier #1 billboard in Old Street London 2007

Iraq Destroyed

pigment ink on newspaper

350cm x 300cm

Houston Centre of Photography, Texas USA 2007.

The work is a portrait of George Bush printed across 58 copies of the Houston Chronicle torn through to reveal images of the destruction of the Iraqi people and their landscape.

review of the work in the Houston Chronicle

V22 Gallery, Ashwin Street, London, UK

THIS IS A 3D QUICKTIME IMAGE OF THE 4 ROOMS OF THE GALLERY AT ASHWIN STREET

TO VIEW OUR WORK IN ALL 4 SPACES CLICK ON THE PICTURE AND DRAG THE MOUSE TO MOVE AROUND THE SPACE. CLICK WHEN AN ARROW APPEARS AND YOU’LL MOVE THROUGH TO THE NEXT ROOM. ZOOM IN OR OUT FOR BETTER VIEW

Obscenity at V22 Ashwin Street in 2006

Santa's Ghetto, Oxford St, London 2006

in the ghetto’s window on oxford street, london