Watch back this online event with Peter Kennard, Britain’s most influential political artist, and Kate Hudson, historian and General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, discussing how art changes minds.
In 1963 a CND poster, titled ‘Stop Nuclear Suicide’, F H K Henrion integrated a mushroom cloud with a macabre grinning skull. Twenty years later, the artist Peter Kennard wanted to inject renewed meaning into the images of nuclear war which had become clichéd. The photomontage ‘Never Again’ combined the images of a mushroom cloud and a skeleton in order to reconnect the explosion with its horrific consequences for human life. The poster adds the exact dates and times at which nuclear bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, underscoring the fact that they were real events. “In Conversation with” will examine what role art can play in bringing about social and political change.