Abstract
The exhibition Re-making Picasso’s Guernica at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK (8 November 2014 – 15 February 2015) displays the large scale textiles project Re-making Picasso’s Guernica, a collective, collaborative activist art project. On display is the protest banner created by the collective through a series of public sewings. Nicola Ashmore, Louise Purbrick and Megha Rajguru in the College of Arts and Humanities from 2012 have collaborated on this project with representatives of Amnesty International, Brighton Anti-Fascists, Gatwick Detainee Visitors Group, Migrant English Project, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Between July 2013 and October 2014, this collective have held fourteen public sewings in: Jubilee Library, Friends Meeting House, Phoenix Art, National Institute for Design in Ahmedabad, India, Brighthelm Centre, Working Class Movement Library, V&A, University of Brighton, Cowley Club Social Centre, Phoenix Brighton, 198 Gallery, and Pallant House Gallery. The textile work has also been displayed at three community meetings and it has been carried in protests since April 2014. Its presence at protests connects historic and current events, developing connections between old and new fascisms and past and present attacks on civilian populations. The Remaking Picasso’s Guernica banner has a blog, which enables the on going interaction between the project and members of the public who participated in the public sewings. It facilitates users to keep up to date with the project; it can be followed, commented on and shared.
Purbrick has presented this project at two symposia (Working with Monica Ross, University of Brighton, 14 March 2014; Object or individual? Phoenix Brighton, 24 May 2014). Ashmore and Rajguru have delivered two academic papers on the project at the conference: Subversive Stitch revisited: The Politics of Cloth, 29-30 November 2013, London. A podcast of which is now available. And at the Designs for War and Peace, Design History Society annual conference, Oxford 4-6 September 2014, which will be podcast through Oxford University’s continuing education programme.
The banner is currently displayed alongside the Conscience and Conflict: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War exhibition at Pallant House Gallery (8 November 2014 – 15 February 2015). Rajguru, worked most closely with the exhibition’s curator to support the involvement of the banner. An article by Nicola Ashmore, Maude Casey, Louise Purbrick and Megha Rajgura, appears in the 2014-15 publication of the Pallant House guide. The impact of the Remaking Picasso’s Guernica project has been considerably widened through its exhibition at Pallant House Gallery. In the first six weeks the exhibition was opened there were 6786 visitors, a total of 59,988 visitors to the Gallery for the year.
Following the Pallant House display the banner's next exhibition is at the 2015 annual Len Crome Memorial conference of the International Brigade Memorial Trust titled Guernica: the destruction of a town the creation of a masterpiece. The banner will be accompanied by Nicola Ashmore and two other collective members.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 8 Nov 2014 |
Event | exhibition - Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK Duration: 8 Nov 2014 → … |
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Nicola Ashmore
- School of Art and Media - Principal Lecturer
- Centre for Arts and Wellbeing
- Centre for Design History
Person: Academic
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Megha Rajguru
- School of Humanities and Social Science - Associate Dean Education and Student Exp
- Centre for Design History
Person: Academic