7 Weeks, 7 Residencies, 7 Ways to Activate Change
In collaboration with the Live Art Development Agency

“Art that cannot shape society and therefore also cannot penetrate the heart questions of society, [and] in the end influence the question of capital, is no art.” Joseph Beuys 1985

Over the course of seven weeks, the Stanley Picker Gallery handed over its entire exhibition space to host a series of week-long Live Art residencies. Co-curated with the Live Art Development Agency, London, through an open call for proposals, “Louder than Bombs”: Art, Action & Activism was an ambitious programme of public workshops and live events that focussed on challenging social, political and global issues of the day, addressed through the seven invited artist/activist’s individual working practices and the Gallery audience’s direct participation and responding involvement.

Its title borrowed from a compilation album by iconic anti-establishment beaus The Smiths (in turn borrowed from Elizabeth Smart’s extended prose poem By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), “Louder than Bombs”: Art, Action & Activism addressed the highly charged political possibilities of Live Art that have been taken to new levels by a new generation of politically invested artists who are blurring the boundaries between art and activism in exciting and engaging ways. “Louder than Bombs”: Art, Action & Activism was developed as an extended element of an wider collaborative research project “The Art of Intervention: The Intersections of Public and Private Memory” between Kingston University and Kyoto Seika University, Japan.