OCCUPY EVERYTHING: kennardphillipps
kennardphillipps is an artist collaboration forged between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps during the build-up to the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2002. The two artists work together to create pieces that confront political and corporate power in solidarity with the social movements that form in resistance against state and commercial oppression. Each piece is adapted to exist in various environments: in galleries, on the street, for publication in print and on the internet. Occupy Everything centres on their work relating to the global protests and occupations which were widespread in 2011, with a large proportion of it having been already used on the street by Kennard and Phillipps. Photographs and documentation showing the work in action will also be exhibited. Most of the materials used to make the work are newspaper based, with a lot of the work being printed, drawn and painted on the pink pages of the Financial Times.
The 'make do and ready' aesthetic connects the individual works into an overall installation that is a low tech laboratory of insurrection and spreads through the gallery, both on the walls and into three dimensions. It is a space of protest, not an illustration of what's been happening globally in the form of reportage but an integral part of that protest. Some of the work has actually been used in London as part of the protests; all of it could be taken out of the gallery and used in the future.
Peter Kennard was born in London in 1949. Originally trained as a painter at the Slade School of Art and later at the Royal College of Art, Kennard has been a politically involved artist since the late 1960s-early 1970s, creating works that engage politically with both the viewer and the environment. An artist-activist since the time of the Vietnam war, he has been recognized by Art in America as "one of the very few artists - the only one it might be said - who has had a direct effect on recent British politics". One of his latest projects is the book @earth, a story without words of global destruction and resistance told through the language of photomontage.
Cat Phillipps was born in Edinburgh in 1972 and moved to London in 1996 looking for work. Phillipps studied photography at London College of Printing and worked in the photographic industry of advertising, fashion and journalism. In 2000 Phillipps began printing for the photojournalist collective Network Photographers and rapidly built the small print house kandc which specialised in colour printing for photojournalists. As the editorial space afforded to socially concerned journalism collapsed across Britain's newspapers, Phillipps developed a practice of creative installation for photojournalism that took the work towards presentation in galleries and public space. Combining Kennard's photomontage work, Phillipps' print installations and their political stance, the duo has been working together for the past 10 years in a variety of media, video, photomontage, print, painting and posters. They have been exhibited both within gallery spaces and on the street. Most recently their posters and cardboard collages were used by activists of the Occupy movement.
Among key exhibitions of kennardphillipps' works are group shows at Tate Britain (London, UK), Design Museum (London, UK), Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), Houston Centre for Photography (Houston, TX, USA), Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany), Freie Akademie (The Hague), as well as numerous other shows in Finland, Palestine, Estonia, Hungary and France. Their works are in the collections of The Imperial War Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Design Museum, The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
