FESTIVAL VISUAL ART | Protest Art kennardphillipps, Here Comes Everybody, [Study#2 Austerity] (2015)
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and as a part of life. Part of our exhibition is to show people what’s been going on, so you get an aesthetic experience, but it also might activate them, even if that might take 15 years.’ This trickle-down effect can be seen in the way the Greenham protests against Trident – which Kennard likens to ‘a living collage’ – inl uenced the Occupy movement’s collective actions that re-engaged people with grassroots protest following the politically moribund New Labour years.
kennardphillips is a direct result of this, with their best-known work probably being ‘Photo Op’, which fuses together an image of a grinning Tony Blair taking a seli e on his mobile phone against a backdrop of a burning oili eld in Iraq. Described by the Guardian as ‘the dei nitive work of art about the Iraq war’, kennardphillipps’ 2005 piece was chosen by the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester as the image for a poster to promote an exhibition about the relationship between contemporary art and war. With two of the UK’s biggest advertising companies refusing to display it, this exposed how public spaces can be controlled by commercial forces.
Phillipps agrees with Kennard that their fusion of activism and art aims to ‘activate a conversation. The space in Stills for Here Comes Everybody is very much a space for conversation, and that’s going to develop into a conversation with the stuff that’s already there at the moment as well as the stuff that’s going to come in, but there’s a verbal conversation as well, and the space has been designed as a place to hang out as much as anything. There’s no one thing that dominates the space, and it’s going to be completely different in a couple of weeks.’ This will be the result of whatever comes from kennardphillipps’ War on War Room, an open access workshop space that will set up shop in the St James Centre, where, assisted by kennardphillipps with Glasgow artist Scott Laing, people will be able to make their own work which will then form part of Here Comes Everybody. ‘I think that’s where I see what art can do,’ says Naughton. ‘It’s about inspiring people to take an issue and come to the shopping centre and express how you feel about it. It’s not just showing the history of something. It’s showing how public protest can change things.’
kennardphillipps, Here Comes Everybody, Stills, 622 6200, until 25 Oct, free; The War on War Room, St James Centre, until 31 Aug, free.
Pop and Boom, Gayi eld Creative Spaces, gayi eld.co.uk, until 20 Aug, free. The exhibition will open with Launching The Bomb on 6 Aug, featuring performances by Mark Thomas, Vladimir McTavish and Samba Sene and Divan, plus appearances by Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps.
98 THE LIST FESTIVAL 6–13 Aug 2015
CALL AND RESPONSE HANNA TUULIKKI AND SARAH HARDIE
Sarah Hardie is an artist, art writer and curator, specialising in the human voice. Artist, composer and vocalist Hanna Tuulikki (pictured below) works across a range of visual and audio forms, with a focus on the voice as a means to build worlds out of sound. Here they talk about their respective performances: songs for someone who isn’t there and SING SIGN.
Sarah Hardie: It seems we are very interested in call and response, but we actually work with this form in different ways: your commission for the Edinburgh Art Fesival, SING SIGN: a close duet, captures a longed for reciprocity which I i nd our moment of promised connectivity (eg. social media) often actually fails to deliver, whereas mine, songs for someone who isn’t there, is very interested in the call and (lack of) response, a failed reciprocity, a violent silence … Hanna Tuulikki: Interesting connection. Within SING SIGN: a close duet, there is call and response, but the relationship shifts with neither vocalist dominating the ‘call’. In terms of call-response as performance, in my work the audience encounters a formal exchange, a duet. In yours, they seem part of the exchange. Do the vocalists in your performance call out to the audience?
SH: Yes, my work generally calls out to an imagined or lost ‘someone’, which is each member of the audience and none of them simultaneously. Ed Atkins, David Austen, Crispin Best and Marco Godoy’s works presented in songs for someone who isn’t there, alongside my guiding work of song, can each be read as a ‘lullaby’ to someone who isn’t there – by ‘lullaby’ I mean a way of understanding oneself as alone. I’m testing the ground between the singer and the ‘someone’ – asking ‘someone’ to sing back, playing out the inevitable failed promise of reciprocity. songs for someone who isn’t there sees song as a kind of (dead-end) pathway to reach the lost ‘someone’. I wanted to ask you about this idea of song as pathway in relation to SING SIGN.
HT: Quite literally, my score derives from pathways, from a 1765 Edinburgh street map. The wordless melody splits between the singers in accordance with the ‘closes’ branching off the Royal Mile. Adopting BSL, the choreography translates street names into gesture. Like you, I’m interested in paths – closes – as metaphors of connection and separation. ■ Hanna Tuulikki, SING SIGN: a close duet, Gladstone’s Land, 226 5856, until 30 Aug (live performances, Fountain Close, 8, 15, 29 Aug), free, edinburghartfestival.com
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