These iconic protest posters will make you want to take to the streets

Authoritarian governments have always suppressed protest and dissent, but democracies have done so as well. Ironically, we are now witnessing increasing restrictions on the right to protest from governments whose very foundations were built through the kinds of protest they now seek to suppress.

Historically social crises reach the mainstream via protest – which can take many forms – this helps society reevaluate and evolve, making it more understanding and tolerant. More caring. We should remember without protest we would not have a Welfare State (nor an NHS) – this happened because of protests like the hunger marches (with marchers making banners and posters to express their ideas).

The Right to Protest exhibition uses our recent past (1960s to the current day) to remind the art and design community of its active role in protest. How it has given a voice to voiceless communities, helped explain complex issues and gone beyond commercial gain. 

With governments and corporations actively silencing voices they disagree with, the need for artists and designers to be involved in protest is crucial.

If we think of art as a way of making the intangible visible, and design as the process through which we consciously shape the world, then every word we speak and every object we create carries these capacities. Human society would be unimaginable without them.

But both art and design require a moral compass. Falsehoods can be strikingly imaginative, and the atomic bomb is, in its own way, a masterpiece of design.

From the outset, we imagined the exhibition as an environment that would invite discussion. We’re interested in opening up conversations, and those can be as much about what is missing as about what we have included. In that sense, curating an exhibition is a beginning rather than an end.

We are a small group with limited resources, so we worked with the materials and contacts available to us, often through direct connections or one or two steps removed. Our intention was never to create a fully comprehensive or objective survey.

There are so many exciting works and stories. We invite Creative Bloq readers to come to the exhibition, experience them for themselves, and meet us in person.

Because it is raw, witty, current, historic, inviting, problematic, warm, unresolved, sympathetic, ridiculous, challenging – a cornucopia and a cacophony that is at once serious and fun.