Peter Kennard - Exhibitions and Projects

Exhibitions and Projects

Peter Kennard abandoned painting in the 1970s in search of new forms of expression that could bring art and politics together for a wider audience. This search has resulted in making photomontage and installation work over many years covering major political events. The visual language he has developed to the present day uses common news imagery, photojournalism and the face. He has often worked in collaboration with writers, photographers, filmmakers and artists such as Peter Reading, John Pilger and Jenny Matthews.

"Dispatches from An Unofficial War Artist" is his autobiography and was published in 2000. In it, Kennard writes about the possibilities of undertaking an aesthetic practice in relation to social change, and considers how his art has interacted with the politics of actual events. The narrative is thematic rather than chronological, showing how a visual motif can be re-used in different contexts. Kennard's original artwork is often reproduced alongside the newspaper or poster in which it appeared.

Since the build-up to the second Iraq War in 2002 Kennard has sometimes been working with printer Cat Picton Phillips. John Berger has said of this collaborative work:

In these memorable images, in these images that refuse to be forgotten, go very close to the griefs being inflicted – they are still-lifes of grief, and, at the same time includes the time-scale of the mountain. They are the opposite of news flashes. They are full of history’s irony, fury and anger at the mistakes made in its name. They reveal the tawdriness of the Gang’s half-truths. They acknowledge the pain of what is happening. They might be quoting Simone Weil who wrote: “There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute supplicants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.” And they are exemplary because, in face of such inevitable speechlessness, they remind us of the need to speak out in protest, the protests of the dead and the living.

Kennard's latest project in 2011 is @earth, a story without words told in the language of photomontages. It takes the form of a small book priced at £9.99, published by the Tate Gallery, which Kennard believed was a reasonably cheap and accessible way of getting his message to young people outside the artworld. The book contains a variety of images from Kennard's 40-year career and, as a result, attracts the criticism that its targets are too general. Kennard's reply was that he wanted "to encourage people to think about their own situation and activate, but I'm not trying to tell them to do this or that. I'm just trying to show how I see the world at the moment."