Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent, Whitechapel Gallery, exhibition review: ‘Fury made sublime’
Peter Kennard’s Haywain with Cruise Missiles, 1980. Copyright: Peter Kennard
The power of images to shape how we see the world has been known since we first started daubing paint on the walls of caves.
Over the past half century, Peter Kennard has honed our readings of world politics with his forceful montages, a selection of which are collected at the Whitechapel’s retrospective, Archive of Dissent.
Few will be unfamiliar with Kennard’s iconic works such as Warhead 3 depicting a skeleton over a mushroom cloud, the fist-enclosed rocket in Crushed Missile, and the missile-spitting gasmask in Union Mask that have graced the pages of newspapers and magazines over the years.
Peter Kennard. Photograph: Teresa Eng
Taking as his subject matter aggression from the Cold War to current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, Kennard superimposes images of violence and greed to dissect the pecuniary motives behind those who build weapons, launch attacks, and oppress ordinary people. He also shows us the various ways that activists can fight back.
As Kennard says of the exhibition: “My art erupts from outrage at the fact that the search for financial profit rules every nook and cranny of our society.
“Profit masks poverty, racism, war, climate catastrophe and on and on… Archive of Dissent brings together fifty years of work that all attempt 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.”
The Gamble, 1986. Copyright: Peter Kennard
One of the great strengths of the show is that it goes beyond Kennard’s posters and newspaper visuals to include a wide range of recent multimedia works that are truly magnificent, including Double Exposure, in which haunting tapestries of destitute children, torture and environmental destruction are overlaid with stock market listings from the Financial Times.
Kennard’s art is fury made sublime, and a visit to the gallery is bound to stir thoughts of your own role in the political.
Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent runs until 24 November at Whitechapel Gallery, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX.