Peter Kennard uses art to resist genocide and Western silence in new Gaza exhibition

"This is the most horrendous thing in my lifetime, which is a very long lifetime," says Peter Kennard, the 76-year-old British photomontage artist, speaking to The New Arab over Zoom one Monday afternoon.

He is, of course, talking about Gaza and the unrelenting genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli regime for close to two years – a city now reduced to rubble.

Peter does not offer this statement lightly. The London-born and based artist has used his canvas for over five decades to protest the violence enacted by world powers across the globe.

His work has reflected on the Civil Rights Movement in America and the Vietnam War, to the Iraq War and the G8 summit in 2013.

But the violence orchestrated by Israel's occupying force towards the Palestinian people, he says, is just too grave to ignore.

So, as any politically motivated artist would, he put his tools to work.

The result is Gaza, a powerful exhibition on display at Edinburgh's Palestine Museum, showcasing new and repurposed work as the artist endeavours to highlight the barbarity and complicity of Western imperialism through the suffering of “Palestine in the same image.”

Peter has produced impactful and devastating visuals that blend paint, drawing, photomontage and double-exposed photographs to reflect the context and complexities of the harrowing situation.

"There's something you can do with montage," he explains. "You can bring things together that are always kept separate in our society."

'Artists should use the privilege they have'

Peter cites Nouvelle Vague auteur Jean-Luc Godard, Soviet montage filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, as well as American writer and critic Susan Sontag, as influences on his work.

He quotes Susan, who once said: “A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

With the rise of AI-generated images, Peter understands that Susan’s statement might not hold the same truth now as it once did.

However, he explains: “If you use an image, or one taken by me, and work with it, it takes you back to the subject quicker than painting would for me.”

Still, a 'death mask' is an apt descriptor for the hundreds of thousands of photographs coming out of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, where no man, woman or child is safe from Israeli bombs and snipers.

Yet, for Peter, it was important not to exploit those traumatic images. Instead, he wanted to convey the violence without dehumanising the Palestinian people.

Take Mother and Child, for example — a black and white image of a woman carrying a baby as bullets trail through them. It invites empathy for the innocent while exposing the targeted violence against them.

“In this country, it seems important to make a different sort of intervention than all the horrific pictures we're seeing coming back of children under rubble,” says Peter. “We've got to see those, but I wanted to make something that has more of a narrative about why it's happening.”

Another piece, Government UK, features Labour’s rose logo, its petals dripping with blood across the political party’s name.

Below it, hands hold a phone showing military planes and missiles aimed at a screaming face on the screen.

It explicitly portrays, Peter says, “what the Labour Party is doing, which is [enabling] genocide”.

Peter refers to UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s comment that a Palestinian state will be recognised by the UK in September unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire.

“How many more Palestinians are going to be killed in a month?” Peter asks. “They don’t get it, and there’s so much pressure on them from Israeli groups and the Zionist groups that they kowtow to it.”

That same pressure, he says, extends into the art world. Galleries and artists alike have faced backlash and censorship for their critique of Israel, whether through their work or by signing open letters condemning the genocide.

“Artists, especially artists who make money off their work, are worried because their collectors might object,” he explains. “That has happened in a couple of cases, where artists have signed things supporting Gaza and then taken their name off because their dealers have said, ‘Look, we've got collectors that don't like you getting involved in this.’ It reaches deep into our culture.”

Still, many continue to resist. Artists like Peter, protest groups such as Artists For Gaza, and galleries like Hope 93 — which is currently hosting photographer and activist Misan Harriman’s debut show The Purpose of Light — have refused to be silenced.

Then, there’s the Palestine Museum. Established in 2018 in Woodbridge, Connecticut, USA, it opened its Edinburgh branch this May, coinciding with the 77th anniversary of the Nakba.

It underscores the strength of this growing resistance movement — what Peter describes as “a new counterculture, like there was at the time of the Vietnam War protests.”

He credits “millions of young people, all over the world, expressing themselves on Palestine” as fuelling the momentum, even at the risk of their careers and futures.

“I’m much more privileged than your generation, and your generation is now paying the price for what we did,” he reflects. “But I feel that artists should use the privilege that they have to make a critique of what’s going on in the world.”

'It's a struggle, and we go on struggling'

Last year, Peter retired from his position as Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art. He recognises the financial independence he had compared to the current generation of artists who do not.

“I spent 40 years teaching, that's how I made a living, and that gave me the freedom to make work that wasn't saleable and often not showable,” he says.

“Now, the art world is split much more, but some students are thinking about how they can make their work relevant to the situation and climate, and amazingly, there are still artists in Gaza who are making work which is incredible.”

He hopes more Palestinian artists, both in Palestine and the diaspora, have their vital work recognised, just as his has been over the past five decades. His art exists outside of copyright, so it can be reshared and repurposed by future generations.

But it is a bittersweet reality that his archives of dissent remain as pertinent now as they were when first created.

“I’m not proud of them because the fact is they are still relevant,” he says. “But I suppose it means that it's not a lost cause — it's a struggle, and we go on struggling.”

Peter Kennard’s 'Gaza' exhibition will run daily from 9–31 August, 11 am–6 pm, at Edinburgh’s Palestine Museum. It is free to attend and runs concurrent with the Edinburgh Festival

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint