Anyone who has been politically active on the left over the last 50 years will have come into contact with the posters and artworks of Peter Kennard. They are so ubiquitous that they have become a constant accompaniment to a wide range of political actions. Now the Whitechapel Gallery in East London is exhibiting a sizeable body of his political work.

Archive of Dissent brings together work from across the artist’s five-decade career. It includes images from the Vietnam War, Anti-Apartheid Movement, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Stop the War Coalition campaigns in the 2000s, through to the present wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It includes newspapers where his images were first published, as well as the posters and books through which they continue to circulate.

Some of Kennard’s images have become iconic. His 2003 photomontage Photo Op (in collaboration with Cat Phillips) of Tony Blair taking a selfie against a backdrop of burning oil, was described by the Guardian as “the definitive work of art about the war”. That may not be in the exhibition but his adaptation of John Constable’s The Hay Wain (Haywain with Cruise Missiles), is – and you can take it home with you in a free newspaper containing this and other images.

The exhibition also looks at Kennard’s process of making his work, with a selection of photomontages from the 1970s on. As the exhibition notes state, “The works not only serve 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’.”

Kennard himself has said: “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. It rails at the waste of lives caused by the trillions spent on manufacturing weapons and the vast profits made by arms companies.”

“Art in itself doesn’t change anything,” he has also said. “But when it’s aligned to a political movement, it becomes its visual arm.” This show underlines that.

The exhibition is free and runs until January 19^th 2025.

Images: c/o Labour Hub.