War on War Room Workshop

Kennard and his sometime collaborator, Cat Picton Phillipps, working together as kennardphillipps, received an Arts Council-funded residency at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, which coincided with the group exhibition ‘Caught in the Crossfire: Artistic Responses to Conflict, Peace and Reconciliation’. Kennardphillips transformed the Herbert Studio into the ‘War on War Room’ photomontage workshop, exploring how art can communicate emotionally charged topics and relate them to social and political agendas. Eight workshops over a two-week period engaged community groups, including Get A Life care agency, Peace House shelter, excluded young people and the FolesHillfields Vision community group. A combination of activism, public dialogue and photomontage constitute key components of kennardphilips’ working methodology; the development of a workshop framework that incorporates community engagement, significant media production, and the transformation of authorship through action is central to their artistic research. Produced as a formal output of the workshop, the resulting mass of digital and manual assemblage, signage and placards was exhibited in the Museum’s transitory spaces and entrance to the exhibition ‘Caught in the Crossfire’. Focusing on contemporary images of conflict, violence, war and peace, ‘Caught in the Crossfire’ drew from the permanent collection of the Herbert Art Gallery, including works by Banksy, Graham Sutherland, Langlands & Bell, Ori Gersht and Terry Atkinson. A section of the exhibition focused on work by kennardphillipps relating to cultural and political discourses surrounding the Iraqi conflict. The War on War Room workshops led to further events which incorporated this methodology and provided participants with creative, reflective, and materially productive environments. These included ‘It’s Your Write: A Celebration of the Self-Published!’, V&A Museum of Childhood (2011); Forcible Frames, part of the ‘no.w.here’ summer school (2013); and the exhibition and related workshop, Iraq: How, Where, For Whom? For the A. M. Qattan Foundation, London (2013)