Britain: art exhibition on Iraq war

This video from the USA says about itself:

15 December 2011

Major combat operations have ended in Iraq. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks down the casualties and financial cost of the war started under President George Bush.

From London daily The Morning Star:

Putting art into action

(Monday 18 December 2006)

EXHIBITION: Obscenity
V22, 10-16 Ashwin St, London E8

JUDITH AMANTHIS discusses how worthwhile political art has the ability to inspire a passive audience into action.

As an artist, what do you do about the horror of war? With much energy, Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-Phillipps tear into the images of Iraq that come up on our screens and newspapers every day.

In some pieces, the artists literally tear their material open. In all of the work, a fierce negativity is exposed.

Many images recall pre-digital black and white negatives – intensely black shell holes on white ground, blurred grey repeated figures, bleak outlines of collapsed buildings, everything beige, grey, black and white with smeared edges.

Human figures are deprived of dimension.

A dead man, flattened out with hardly a face, without legs and an empty shoe just beyond his dead hand’s reach, is the only image of human suffering in the show.

Some of the images, because of the war against the Iraqi people, have already acquired negativity – Donald Rumsfeld‘s face in charcoal and chalk, spectre-like blindfolded prisoners, a squaddie kicking down a door.

Intent on what? Murder? Rape of the shadowy veiled figures in the distance?

Is the soldier really the criminal?

In whose heads reside the brains that planned all this horror and brutalisation?

Tearing open conventional images and installing truth in them, like installing nuclear warheads in Constable‘s comfortable British countryside, is vital political art and Kennard has famously and consistently contributed to Britain’s peace and environmental movements.