Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent – the artist and activist is celebrated at Whitechapel Gallery
By James Brewer
Jet-black oil spews from a drilling rig stationed in the North Sea. The catastrophic pollution ominously morphs into a silhouette of Britain and the island of Ireland.
That was the striking design conjured up by radical artist Peter Kennard for a poster advertising a stage performance of Britannia Rig: Life on a Drilling Rig, in August 1985. Its eloquence was typical of his many stark illustrations – heightened by the power of photomontage – that he continues to create after half a century of application.
A characteristic selection is on display at Whitechapel Gallery in the exhibition Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, an earnest and moving tribute to the London-based artist and activist.
The Britannia Rig poster is a prime example of his trenchant messaging. It was to advertise the 7:84 Theatre Company England’s play directed by Gavin Richards and based on an account of life on a drilling rig by writer and actor Peter Searles, who spent six months on an offshore platform. The play was presented by the Greater London Council. People were urged to book tickets because “in 1986, there may be no GLC, so events like this may not take place again.” The warning was timely, as the GLC was about to be abolished under Margaret Thatcher’s drastic local government reforms.
The former prime minister was savagely mocked by the artist: it was inevitable that in 1986, he created a montage called Thatcher Unmasked in which she is seen to ‘remove her mask’ to reveal a grotesque death’s head.
Peter Kennard, emeritus professor of political art at the Royal College of Art, where he once studied, is modest about his talent for crafting audacious and haunting images, but his sardonic wit pictorially scythes through hypocrisy and the tropes of the arms race. Much of his most pointed scorn against governments and their military chiefs adopts the ugly contours of viciously pointed missiles, among these The Gamble in 1986. He takes aim at targets which are of the same genre as those of the younger, pseudonymous street artist Banksy, who once told him: “I take my hat off to you, sir.”
Archive of Dissent was devised specially for Whitechapel Gallery, for which Peter Kennard has nostalgic affection. Set in three galleries that were part of the former Whitechapel Library, the exhibition is an unforgettable cache of social and political history.
In relentlessly countering societal abuses since the 1970s, he seeks to turn “outrage into image.” His practice switched from painting to photomontage to achieve more graphic effect during the anti-Vietnam War campaigns. For the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s–80s his images included a hijacking of John Constable’s opus The Hay Wain for a composition he called Haywain with Cruise Missiles. His endeavours supported the Anti-Apartheid Movement and Stop the [Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria] War Coalition campaigns, up to the present wars in Ukraine and Gaza. He is just as committed to environmental causes.
The works serve not only to expose the relationship between power, capital, war and the destruction of planet Earth but also “to show new possibilities emerging from the cracks and splinters of the old reality.”
It would be wrong to call this pageant of protest a retrospective, for it is ‘bang’ (a word we can choose advisedly) up to date. There are some of his most recent and ambitious installations. Double Exposure (2023) in collaboration with Nigel Brown consists of an array of 36 Financial Times stock market pages and LED flashing images to suggest corporate profit, overlaid with scenes of destruction, oppression and climate breakdown. Boardroom, from the same year, projects onto anonymous faces the logos of big corporates that profit from conflict. These are mounted on wooden boards recovered from streets near the artist’s studio.
An even newer work, The People’s University of the East End (2024) takes its title from the familiar name for the former Whitechapel Library and includes stands of placards from Kennard’s collection. It references what he regards as the original function of the rooms as a democratic local resource, where people living nearby would come to read, inform themselves of world affairs, and in winter, to keep warm. Symbolic of the didactic ethos, some of the messaging is propped on old wooden lecterns.
“My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society,” declares Peter. “Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on…”
His work seeks “to express that anger by ripping through the mask by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask: the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying ‘no’ to corporate and state power. It rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies,” he insists.
The exhibition examines the artist’s process, his tools and his literary output. His photomontages have been used in publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times, and the Scotsman, and reproduced in posters, book covers, placards and digital format, and been flourished at demonstrations. He has exhibited across the world, including solo exhibitions at Imperial War Museum, London; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; and the United Nations.
He was inspired to hold aloft the banner of montage by the German anti-fascist and pacifist John Heartfield (1891–1968), who pioneered scissors and paste as his political weapons in the 1930s,
There is a bonus for visitors to the Whitechapel exhibition to which entry is without charge: a copy of a free “newspaper” in large format showing some of Peter’s most acute anti-war montages, including one of an armed forces spokesman being sprayed with a can of “PR Quick Polish,” and the Haywain with Cruise Missiles.
The exhibition is supported by A/POLITICAL, a platform “working with artists who interrogate the critical issues and dominant narratives of our time;” and by Richard Saltoun Gallery based in Mayfair and Rome, which specialises in contemporary art, with an emphasis on feminist, conceptual and performance artists from the 1960s onwards.
Image captions:
Peter Kennard with his Peoples University of the East End placards.
A multitude of Kennard’s powerful photomontage posters.
Thatcher Unmasked, 1986. Photomontage. Gelatin silver prints with ink on card. A/POLITICAL
Haywain with Cruise Missiles, 1980. By Peter Kennard. Chromolithograph on paper and photographs on paper. Tate: purchased from the artist 2007. © Peter Kennard.
The Gamble, 1986. Photomontage. Gelatin silver prints and ink on card. A/POLITICAL.
Portrait of Peter Kennard Photo: Teresa Eng.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until January 19, 2025.
