Imperial War Museums (IWM) has announced that the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries will open at IWM London on 10 November 2023, ahead of Remembrance Sunday. The new galleries will present a significant new venue in London for phootgraphy of conflict from 1914, based on the museum's holdings of 12 million photographs and 23,000 hours of moving image.
Thanks to generous support from main funder, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries will be the UK’s first to explore how artists, photographers and filmmakers bear witness to and tell the story of war and conflict. Works including John Singer Sargent’s monumental painting Gassed, Steve McQueen’s response to the 2003 war in Iraq, Queen and Country, and works by artists including Paul Nash, Laura Knight and Rosalind Nashashibi, demonstrate how artistic interpretation can uniquely shape our understanding of war. With diverse displays from filmmakers including Peter Jackson, Geoffrey Malins and Omer Fast, and photographers including Olive Edis, Cecil Beaton and Tim Hetherington, the new, permanent galleries will reflect global conflict from 1914 to the present day.
Caro Howell MBE, Director-General of Imperial War Museums, said: “Artists, filmmakers and photographers are eyewitnesses, participants and commentators on conflict. Their work provides critical insight and perspective, while also having the power to deeply move us. We are therefore extremely grateful to our supporters, particularly the Blavatnik Family Foundation, for their generous support in making these beautiful galleries a reality, for enabling us to shine a light on our exceptionally rich visual media collections and for bringing them to a wider audience. Within these Galleries visitors can explore the ways in which art, film and photography shape, challenge and deepen our understanding of war and conflict.”
Sir Leonard Blavatnik, founder of the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the predominant funder of the project, said: “I have long taken an interest in the history of conflict and the experience of those who suffer its impact. I am proud that my Family Foundation has supported this new initiative at the Museum, which confirms its pre-eminence in the field."
The development of the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries is part of the third phase in the dynamic transformation of IWM London. They enable IWM to share works from its exceptional art collection, one of the world’s most important representations of twentieth-century British art. The Galleries will include around 500 works from IWM’s collection, showcasing some of the vast and era-defining film and photography collections, which include over 23,000 hours of footage and over 12 million photographs. This is the first time in IWM’s history that a permanent gallery space has been created to display the three collections together - visual art, film and photography.
Stepping into the Galleries, visitors will learn how the museum has been collecting and interpreting artistic responses to conflict since its inception during the First World War. Objects on display will include Peter Jackson’s award-winning 2018 film They Shall Not Grow Old, which transformed original archive footage into colour for a reimagining of the First World War. Artworks from renowned artists from the First and Second World Wars will include works by Paul Nash, John Lavery and Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breec -ring, one of the most inspiring artworks to come from the period. More contemporary works include Paul Seawright’s Mounds, commissioned by IWM in 2002 to respond to the war in Afghanistan and photographs from John Keane who recorded the war in Iraq in 1991. Together, these objects reflect a century of seismic change culturally, socially and politically.
A series of spaces further explore how artists, filmmakers and photographers have been driven to respond to and record conflict. For the first time, these galleries will be presented thematically – a significant change from other major galleries at IWM London.
At the centre of the Galleries Practice and Process will include objects such as a wooden pencil box belonging to artist and Second World War prisoner of war Ronald Searle and paintbrushes carried by John Nash on the Western Front. On display for the first time will be documents and a press pass belonging to Paul Eedle, a war reporter and filmmaker who produced Channel 4 News’s award-winning coverage from Baghdad of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Images of filmmakers, artists and photographers at work in conflict zones will reveal their privileged viewpoint and special access on the ground, as well as the challenges and risks – including threat to life – that they face.
Mind and Body will explore how the scale, brutality and disruption of twentieth and twenty-first century conflict has changed the way the human body is seen and recorded. John Singer Sargent’s Gassed will take centre stage, returning to IWM London for the first time since 2016. The six metre-long painting has recently undergone extensive conservation work, including the removal of discoloured historical varnish, providing fresh insights and an opportunity for state-of-the-art imaging work. Other works include A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory by Anna Airy, who was one of the first female war artists, employed by the newly founded Imperial War Museum in 1918. Images including those from the portfolios of renowned photojournalists Cecil Beaton and Tim Hetherington, reveal how the artistic decisions of practitioners made on the ground have evolved from the First World War to the present.
Perspectives and Frontiers will show how artists, photographers and filmmakers have defined how we imagine and understand conflict spaces. Notable First World War artworks, including The Menin Road by Paul Nash, and the newly conserved A Battery Shelled by Wyndham Lewis and Oppy Wood by John Nash, will show how artists have captured the harsh realities and devastation of war on the ground. Second World War film footage from the RAF’s Bomber Command, paintings by Eric Ravilious and Mahwish Chishty’s By the Moonlight – a striking reimagining of the menace of drone warfare - will explore how practitioners have captured how conflict is fought in the air.
Power of the Image will explore the role of visual art as a form of propaganda and protest in twentieth and twenty-first conflict. It will include material from First World War Germany, posters from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, as well as film created by Britain’s Ministry of Information in the Second World War. This section also looks at how artists, photographers and filmmakers bear witness to the crimes and atrocities committed in conflict, and how their work is used as evidence. The official War Crimes Photography taken by Sergeant Alfred Edward Mcroy Pearce, and a new acquisition, Abu Ghraib, 2022, by artist Mohammed Sami, will be on display.
The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries will also have a dedicated Screening Space, showcasing a rich and diverse programme of IWM’s historical film collection, including war epic The German Retreat and Battle of Arras, which has been recently restored by IWM in collaboration with the University of Udine. The space will also allow the public to see many of these films for the first time. The Art Box, the second of two dedicated screening spaces within the Galleries, will focus on contemporary moving image and will feature exceptional works by Coco Fusco, Omer Fast and Shona Illingworth.
As in previous developments at IWM London, the Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries will be free to enter, making more of IWM’s world-class collection available and accessible to all. The Blavatnik Art, Film and Photography Galleries will open at IWM London on 10 November 2023.
Comments