At the pivotal moment of a good joke, the familiar takes an unexpected turn and the world appears tilted on its axis. It is a stretch to describe Peter Kennard’s dark-as-hell photo collages as jokes, but there is certainly shared methodology. Kennard weirds the familiar, creating jarring juxtapositions, and delivering electrifying visual shocks by way of punchline.
Archive of Dissent at Whitechapel Gallery covers over 50 years of Kennard’s work. His golden period arrived in the late 1970s and 1980s – the era of Thatcher, the GLC under Ken Livingstone and the protest camps at Greenham Common and Faslane. The political foes were iconic, the protests popular, and a flourishing print culture offered rich material to work from.
