Political Photomontage: Peter Kennard and Loraine Leeson in discussion

About

Peter Kennard is renowned for creating uncompromising and hard-hitting political photomontage. He will discuss his exhibition, A Document on Chile’ with text by Ric Sissons, which was made for the Half Moon Photography Workshop in 1978. It recounted the history of Chile from before Allende's Popular Unity government through to the barbarism of Pinochet’s rule. This laminated show travelled around the UK, to community centres, colleges and youth clubs. The exhibition is being re-staged at Four Corners Gallery as part of Chile 50: Political Art, Solidarity and Resistance. Kennard's book, Visual Dissent, chronicles his work over the last five decades, and discusses how dissenting art can be an integral arm of socio-political struggle and protest.

Loraine Leeson is a visual artist particularly known for her community-based cultural activism in which photomontage has played as major role. She will talk about the transition from her image/text and film/video work in the 1970s to montaged posters produced with health workers’ unions, then the 1980s photo-murals of the Docklands Community Poster Project. Following this, how the creation of collective narrative produced through fragmented imagery served to bring voices of the least heard into the public domain, an approach that continues through her arts-based research at Middlesex University. Loraine is a long-term resident of East London with much of her work rooted in the communities of Tower Hamlets. Her recent book is Art:Process:Change - Inside a Socially Situated Practice, Routledge 2018. http://cspace.org.uk

This event is part of Four Corner's current exhibition, Chile 50: Political Art, Solidarity and Resistance, which explores how political art was used to sustain solidarity and resistance in the face of incarceration, torture and exile. It includes photomontage work by Peter Kennard - including original collages, arpilleras by political prisoners and activist photography by Migrar Photo, Nicole Kramm, Carlos Vera and Julio Etchart. It marks marks the 50th anniversary on 11 September 2023 of the violent military coup in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. (See exhibition link for information on other events.)