Peter Kennard: CODE RED
Saturday 6th - Friday 26th November 2021 (closing at 2pm on 26th November)
Monday - Saturday 10am - 5pm, free entry
CODE RED – a print installation by one of Britain’s foremost political artists Peter Kennard.
PREVIEW
Friday 5th November 2021, 6-8pm
Free but ticketed. Register here
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
In August this year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their report. Their findings, prepared by 234 scientists from 66 countries, warn that human activity has warmed the climate to a point that is unparalleled by anything in the last 2,000 years and that by 2019 atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at anytime in at least two million years. The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the IPCC report was the ‘code red for humanity, the alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable’.
Through the use of photomontage the artist 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, which Kennard cuts and tears, 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.
CODE RED is presented by Peace & Justice (Scotland) in partnership with Street Level Photoworks to coincide with COP26 – UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Supported by National Lottery Community Fund, Jackarts and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.
https://peaceandjustice.org.uk
Tags: CODE RED, Exhibition, Peter Kennard
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