CODE RED: PETER KENNARD
6 – 26 November. Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm. Free entry. No Registration required.
The Out of the Blue Drill Hall, 36 Dalmeny St, Edinburgh EH6 8RG
A print installation by one of Britain’s foremost political artists Peter Kennard.
Preview: 5 November 2021, 6-8pm. Free entry but Registration required. Book at https://code-red-peter-kennard.eventbrite.co.uk.
Through the use of photomontage Peter Kennard turns his outrage into images. Throughout CODE RED Kennard re-appropriates the beautiful photo of the whole earth taken by the Apollo astronauts in 1972, cutting and tearing and combining it with images of industrial chimneys, oil refineries exploding, polluted dust, gas masks, parched earth and floods. His image of the earth surrounded by a clock symbolises climate/nuclear destruction, whilst in another image planet earth is transformed into a seed sprouting a tree. Kennard’s work makes visible the increasing devastation of the natural world, revealing this breakdown not as inevitable but the direct result of human activity. The resulting montages can then be used as a visual arm of the struggle for climate justice.
“We’re living in a time of absolute emergency. We’re tottering through the rubble of the rampant free market. It’s a time in which images can open up a critical space that can jolt assumptions and break through denial. The poet Shelley wrote that ‘we must imagine what we know’. By picturing the result of extracting wealth out of the ground by every means possible I’m trying to picture what we know will happen if we don’t stop this plunder.” Peter Kennard
