Protest is Beautiful

Protest is Beautiful, (slogan billboard, postcard) is a Free slogan-sculpture first made in silk flowers produced by a funeral florist in 2007 at the time of the resurgence of protest after the invasion of Iraq in 2005. Since the protests failed to stop the war, subsequent protests were seen by many as destined for the same failure. At the same time every protest was narrated by the media and political leaders as ugly, violent, chaotic, destructive and pointless. Freee used a wreath to represent both the apparent death of protest and its neglected beauty. Holding the wreath joyfully with friends at the reconstruction site of a building burnt down by rioters in Tottenham in 2011, the slogan challenges the dominant narrative of the Tottenham riot as nothing but the criminal act of defective consumers, an interpretation immediately given to events by Conservative politicians and the media which prominent Left intellectuals uncritically adopted.
Photo by Ben Fitton.

This showing of Protest is Beautiful, is the latest site-responsive iteration of Coalesce, an evolving exhibition initiated by curator Paul O’Neill in 2003/4 at London Print Studio Gallery in collaboration with artists Jaime Gili, Eduardo Padilha and Kathrin Böhm.

On this occasion the exhibition, titled Coalescence: Sometime Later, is co-curated by Paul O’Neill at The Showroom with the participation of recurring artists Böhm, Gili and Padilha, who, together with newly commissioned artist George Storm Fletcher, intervene in the architecture of The Showroom to construct a collaborative environment for other artworks and performances. Along with the reappearance of artists from previous editions such as Sarah Pierce, Harold Offeh and Freee Art Collective, artworks co-mingle to provide the stage for a curated series of performance activations by Zein Majali and Vivienne Griffin co-curated with Offeh.

Coalescence: Sometime Later reflects upon, extends and expands the spatio-temporality of the exhibition-form as a work-in-progress without a linear narrative nor conclusive statement. Here, exhibition-making is posited as a co-productive practice where an accumulation of agencies, actors and actions transform the gallery into an exhibition as a public stage for possible encounters.