The Right to Protest: the exhibition navigating counter-culture through archival activist design

The design that underpins social and environmental justice is the Museum of UnRest’s bread and butter. During its first iteration as Paddington Printshop in the 70s and 80s, it designed posters with activists, community groups, and local bands – the likes of Sex Pistols and The Clash’s Joe Strummer. The space then morphed into London Print Studio over the 2000s and again, into today, it became the Museum of UnRest, where The Right to Protest is currently exhibiting.

Across its walls, bright and bold screen-prints read ‘Read, rebel, revolt!’, ‘No War with Iran’, and ‘You are charged with conspiring to work for peace’. Spanning decades of protest, the exhibition hosts a collection of works marking major social movements from anti-apartheid South Africa, to the trial of Soviet-Russian human rights activist Vladimir Bukovsky, and opposition to the Iraq war. To find out more about the radical artwork on display, It’s Nice That spoke to co-curators Dave Bell, Clive Russell, and John Phillips to flesh out this body of work.

“There’s a precarious balancing act since design is rarely neutral nor should it be. There’s always a message, whether it’s against ocean floor dredging or for selling canned tuna,” says Dave, who was previously part of the team at KesselsKramer-run gallery KK Outlet. Each print withholds a story and is soaked in history. The Net is the world’s largest screenprint from Ocean Rebellion, the maritime counterpart of climate group Extinction Rebellion. The record-breaking print represents the 150 metre wide “jaws of a bottom trawling net and has a scale and presence that’s confronting”, says Dave, who sees it as an exhibition stand-out. Clive was part of the crew who created it – he’s a previous member of Extinction Rebellion and designed their recognisable graphic identity too. Through Clive, Dave was introduced to John Phillips – founder of Paddington Printshop in 1975 and has closely followed its journey to today’s Museum of UnRest.

As the right to protest is increasingly threatened by governmental policies across the globe, a call for radical change reverberates; digital artist and satirist Pig Meat’s print spells out: ‘A government that can’t tolerate protest can’t tolerate democracy’. Dave shares: “Protest has always been a catalyst for change, even in the face of mounting pressure, often from a new version of an old threat.” Looking at the collection from the 1960s to today, these pressures feel evergreen, protest art has and still continues to have a vital role in the distillation of complex issues into visual memory.

Archival research is the foundation the exhibition. The co-curators were set on bringing in lesser-known works to sit alongside more well-known pieces to bring a wide breadth of design history to the forefront. This philosophy of doing justice to counter culture extends into bringing lesser known actions to the forefront too and The Right to Protest included an open call for participating artists. Clive says, “Visually there is no one expression of being radical – the radical nature of anything resides in its production process, its agency and its social purpose.” The cross section of these visual rebellions are intersectional and multifaceted. One stand out piece is from See Red Women’s Workshop, a feminist-run printing studio producing screen prints to fight back against culturally sexist perceptions of women. One vibrant print reads ‘underneath every woman’s ”curve” lies a muscle!’.

The preservation of print rebellion is, by extension, the preservation of the voices behind them. Agency is kept alive in the archival process, making collections like these necessary for social change. “The exhibition is a call to arms to all artists, designers, and citizens,” Clive shares. “It’s time to give a shit about what’s happening in the world. It’s time to use whatever tools you possess in defence of care and freedom.”