Event overview
The Department of Art Public Talks Programme Summer 2017 welcomes artist Peter Kennard.
Peter Kennard (Born 1949) is a photomontage artist born and based in London. Kennard started as a painter but moved away from painting to photomontage in search of new forms of expression, with hope of finding another way of addressing his political views after his involvement in anti-Vietnam war movement. He found that photography wasn’t as burdened with similar art historical associations.
Kennard defines his role as that of a “communicator” and his aim is not to create propaganda but rather reflect current events. Kennard intends to make people think and to show the ‘stupidity and horror’ of the way the world is being run. Many of Kennard’s images are now themselves icons of the medium, defining the tenor of protest in recent times and informing the visual culture of conflict and crisis in modern history.
Since the early 1970s, he has brought his art to street level, either as fly posters, protest placards or T-shirts in support of a variety of groups, including Amnesty International. His photomontages are bold, monochrome hand-crafted images that defined protest imagery for the CND and Greenham Common generation. Since 2002, Kennard has collaborated with Cat Phillips, producing digital images that push the boundaries of technology, using flatbed scanners and image manipulation packages with a hand-crafted photomontage approach. Aside from this, Kennard is certainly no stranger to censorship. Their collaborative piece, Photo-Op (2005) is perhaps the defining image of the 2003 Iraq War, with a digitally imposed, grinning Tony Blair taking a selfie on the election trail atop a photograph of an inferno at an Iraqi oil field.
Kennard has extended his practice as an image-maker to explore the effects of online animations, video works and installations in public spaces. Kennard understands art as a mode of production – of an object and a message – and his artworks are by no means produced solely for the art market. His approach to the publication of his images is to create what has been called ‘image-events’, activist moments when the images themselves become the subject of public or media attention.
Kennard’s work has featured in numerous solo and group shows in Europe, the Middle East, North and Latin America between 2004–13, with a major retrospective Peter Kennard: Unofficial War Artist opening at the Imperial War Museum, London, in May 2015.
This event is free. No booking is required. All welcome.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 10 May 2017 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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