Peace & Justice (Scotland) is delighted to invite you to the in-person preview of CODE RED – a print installation of photomontages by one of Britain’s foremost political artists Peter Kennard who inaugurated our Peace Cranes exhibition on 6 August 2021 in conversation with Kate Hudson, historian and General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Please note that safety measures remain in place with regards to signing in on arrival, mask wearing, reasonable distance and hand sanitising.

"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.

Peter Kennard is one of Britain’s foremost political artists and has spent over fifty years creating uncompromising and hard-hitting protest art. He is Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art and he is the author of Images for End of Century: Photomontage Equations (Pluto, 1999). Since then, he has published numerous art monographs, and contributed his visuals to publications, magazines and news stories in the press. The exhibition Award by Kennard and Phillipps was exhibited at Street Level Photoworks in 2004, and he launched his recent monograph Visual Dissent at Street Level Photoworks in 2019.

CODE RED is a print installation by artist Peter Kennard presented by Peace & Justice (Scotland) at the main exhibition space of The Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh in partnership with Street Level Photoworks to coincide with COP26 – UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. The exhibition continues at The Out of the Blue Drill Hall until 26 November 2021. Monday – Saturday 10am – 5pm. Free entry. Open to all.

CODE RED is part of the Peace Cranes project curated by Iliyana Nedkova and Heather Kiernan which also includes the monumental peace cranes installation by artist Janis Hart spanning the heritage space of St John’s Church, Edinburgh and showing 6 August – 13 November 2021.

CODE RED is supported by National Lottery Community Fund and Jackarts in conjunction with Stop Climate Chaos Scotland. For further details please see: https://peaceandjustice.org.uk/news-and-events/our-workshops-and-events/2/

Images: Renewables and Cracked © Peter Kennard as featured in CODE RED