kennardphillipps - artists peter kennard and cat phillips

SHOVE billboard intervention at Dismaland 2015

Embedded Art, Akademie Der Kunst, Berlin, Germany, 2009

_DSC4216Control Room 2 6m x 18m oil, acrylic, pigment ink, paper on billboard print

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 the Allied occupation of 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.

we had to paste up a base layer of random billboard sheets, donated by a mate, Fibs helped us - thanks Fibs!

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

relief when we finished pasting up the base image

 

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the public could view the work from above..............

the public could view the work from above…………..

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photos by Kristian Buus

Forms of Resistance:Artists and the desire for social change from 1871 to the present. 2007

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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.

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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.

Nakba 60 billboard series

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The Nakba 60 commissioned a group of artists to create a series of billboards to highlight the destruction of the state of Palestine at the moment Israel was created. It ran the billboards as Israel had their 60th anniversary celebrations in London.

Nakba 60 billboard by kennardphillipps on Kilburn Highroad

Nakba 60 billboard by kennardphillipps in Kensal Rise

Art Media & Contested Space

Interface will present a large-scale public art project situated across 36 Belfast city-centre locations, where artists have been invited to produce a 48-sheet billboard image. Artists’ works will appear alongside advertising sites during the busiest shopping period of the year, leading up to Christmas.interface-belfast-billboard1artmediacontestedspace-1artmediacontestedspace2-2

Nakba 60

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Nakba 60
billboard in kensal rise, london
2008

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