Peter Kennard’s photomontage work has become engrained in British popular culture. His images for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War Coalition stop you in your tracks with their bleak and prescient messages, often foretelling total annihilation. Where Monet had waterlilies, Kennard has gas masks, knives, skulls and nuclear warheads.

Where Monet had waterlilies, Kennard has gas masks, knives, skulls and nuclear warheads.

This summer, Whitechapel Gallery will present Archive of Dissent, a specially conceived show that will be one of the most extensive displays of Kennard’s work to date. Taking over three galleries within the former Whitechapel Library space, the exhibition brings together work from across the artist’s prolific and influential five-decade career, offering an important repository of social and political history while illuminating an artistic practice that has continuously countered and protested the status quo.

Archive of Dissent also includes two of Kennard’s most recent and ambitious installations Boardroom (2023) and Double Exposure (2023) which use light, glass and projection to deconstruct the medium of photomontage, as well as a new work, The People’s University of the East End (2024). Taking its title from the colloquial name for the former Library space, the work draws attention to its original purpose as a democratic local resource, while continuing to harness and evoke the iconography and forms of protest.

Kennard said of the Whitechapel Gallery’s new exhibition, “Archive of Dissent brings together fifty years of work that all attempt to express that anger by ripping through the mask by cutting, tearing, montaging and juxtaposing imagery that we are all bombarded with daily. It shows what lies behind the mask: the victims, the resistance, the human communality saying ‘no’ to corporate and state power.”

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent will run from July 23rd to November 24th, 2024.