Peter Kennard: Silent Coup
Silent Coup by Peter Kennard
Text: Simran Tuteja
A pioneer of photomontage, Peter Kennard’s Silent Coup is his first creative collaboration with his son Matt Kennard, an investigative journalist, who concurrently released a new book of the same name alongside Claire Provost, an investigative journalist. In his new work, the artist reveals new ways to show the rise of corporate power and how it intrudes into our everyday life as well as our planet. He makes use of sequencing imagery with the help of Nigel Brown who programmed a Raspberry Pi microcontroller. The exhibition opened on May 19th, 2023 and will be on display till July 1st, 2023 at a/political, London.
Silent Coup by Peter Kennard
Global corporations and mega corporations' political interferences in democracies have been taking over the world. They decide who has access to resources, territories and control the justice system. Kennard responds to the above mentioned problems in his new work. He manages to unveil that corporations only care about profit regardless of the circumstances (such as poverty, climate change, brutality, and war) by sharing their price listings and logos. The artist chooses Boardroom as a series of anonymous faces displayed on large wooden boards with their mouths replaced by logos of corporations (such as Shell, BP, and BAE Systems) to show the audience how these corporations have been dictating democracy.
Silent Coup by Peter Kennard
In another work called Double Exposure, Kennard uses a time-based photomontage of market data that reveals corporate profit that is usually hidden from the general population. The audience is greeted with two long lines of printed newspaper that shows the day’s share prices when they enter the gallery which is then followed by a montage of weaponry, climate breakdown and war victims. Kennard doesn’t shy away from calling out the current truth of the society and the effects of big corporations' gluttony for profit at all cost. Silent Coup is exemplary of Kennard’s adroitness, inventiveness and anti-war activism.
Silent Coup by Peter Kennard
Born in 1949 in London, Peter Kennard currently works and resided in Hackney, East London. He teaches Political Art at the Royal College of Art, London. He is known for his anti-war activism, political art since his work protesting the Vietnam War in 1968 and participation in other protests. Kennard’s photomontages, installations and paintings have been featured in galleries, newspapers, magazines, posters and books. In 2015-16, his year-long retrospective called ‘Peter Kennard: Unofficial WarArtist’ was displayed at the Imperial War Museum. He is an author of six books including ‘Peter Kennard: Visual Dissent’. His works have been included in many group exhibitions and solo exhibitions as well.
