Glastonbury was absolutely incredible, thanks to everyone who called into the Hell Bus in Shangri-La. A massive thanks to everyone at Shangri-La for having me, and to my amazing Hell Bus hard party/work crew: @thetwopack, @kestra.laurent.dances.the.bug, @pineapple_king___ and @hannahslogic. It was hard to get any photos inside the bus when it was full as when it got full it was very full and the queue was out the door. I’d say around two thousand people crammed through this thing over 5 days altho I suspect more than that. The response was amazing and ran the gammut from “is this by Shell?” to “Its fucking boss that innit!” and “that was the most randomest thing ever” to “it’s an astonishing piece of work”. But overall it was super positive and I couldn’t have asked for a better crowd and a better reaction. All that work paid off and now we know it works and doesn’t fall apart when countless numbers of smashed people smash through it.
I was interviewed by Jonny Walfisz for Euronews about my work and some of the nonsense I’ve gotten up to over the years.
Football is incredibly popular in Palestine but the occupation makes it difficult to flourish. The Palestine national team faces restrictions on travel and dozens of its most promising players have been frequently imprisoned, injured, permanently disabled, and killed after attacks and raids by Israeli forces. In 2014 two young national team players Jawhar Nasser and Adam Halabiya were shot repeatedly in the feet and legs near an Israeli checkpoint in occupied Palestine. Palestinian football stadiums and fields have been bombed by Israeli forces and sections of the separation wall were built down the middle of the pitch at Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University.
Next month is the opening of an exhibition about subvertising I’ll be co-curating at Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Berlin. The opening night is on Friday 17th, 5pm-11pm. All welcome. There will be DJs and drinks. I’ll be exhibiting some new and old work in the show alongside a ton of incredible artists. The other curators and myself are hoping to show much of the history and techniques of anti-advertising artwork and the ongoing creative resistance to the commodification of both public space and the space inside your head. The exhibition runs from 18th June-21st August 2022. More details on the Kunstraum Kreuzberg website. Artists include: Vermibus, StealThisPoster.org, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives, Special Patrol Group, East London Strippers Collective, Rocco und Seine Brüder, Oneslutriot, Michelle Tylicki, Matt Bonner, Luther Blissett, Illustre Feccia, Hogre, DoublewhY_Y, Black Sex Worker Collective, Berlin Strippers Collective, Berlin Buster’s Social Club, The Yes Men, Want Some Studio, Vytautas Rimkevicius, Space Hijackers, Soofiya, Reclaim the Streets, Public Ad Campaign, Proyecto Squatters, Protest Stencil, Poster Boy, Molly Crabapple, Il Male, Hushidar Mortezaie, Hannah Meese, Guerrilla Spam, Guerrilla Girls, Gold Peg Furett, Frank Riot, Frad, Food Liberation Army, Dr. D, Dog Section Press, Dies Irae, Diego Pérez Lozano, Daniela Rey, Christina Corpse, Camille Aboudaram, Brandalism, Billboard Liberation Front, Barnbrook, Art in Ad Places, Antonio Velez, Adbusters
A few people asked if I was doing prints of my Jesus Christ Van Hire poster that appeared on the tube a little while back so I decided to do a small A5 print run of them for £17 each. You can order here.
I made some Energy Efficiency Rating stickers for digital advertising spaces to let the public know just how much electricity these things burn through per year. You can get four stickers for £1 from my shop: www.spellingmistakescostlives.com/product-page/energy-efficiency-rating-sticker-for-digital-ad-spaces (For legal/research purposes only obvs)
My Hell Bus project about Shell’s greenwash advertising featured in the 2021 Channel 4 documentary Joe Lycett Vs the Oil Giant (Watch the full documentary here). The Hell Bus is currently free to visit at the Museum of Neoliberalism in Lewisham, London every weekend until the 4th June 2022. More information on the Hell Bus at RoyalDutchHell.com.
My Qatar 2022 poster has started appearing in bus stops. More work like this here.
Check your own university’s investments in apartheid here: www.palestinecampaign.org/university-complicity-database/ UPDATE: The posters have started appearing on the London underground
FIFA WORLD CUP QATAR 2022 In 2022 I printed 6500 Qatar world cup football stickers and started adding them to Panini sticker packs and returning them to stores. The back of each sticker featured facts about migrant worker abuse and deaths in the building of Qatar’s world cup infrastructure. I…
I’ve just about recovered from the Hell Bus deadline and journey to and from Glasgow. It was an extremely stressful, frenetic and expensive project but it was also incredible fun and pretty exhilarating to be working on a large-scale exhibition again, (the biggest, and definitely the most complicated I’ve ever done) after the non-year of 2020. I absolutely love a deadline. There’s nothing like the fear of letting people down and making a prize tit of yourself to get you out of bed in the morning. The response to the exhibition was amazing, which I’m sure had nothing to do with the fact I was sitting at the end of the bus grinning and prodding at visitors as they left. The enthusiasm of the response encouraged me as to the viability of properly touring the bus in the new year. (If you run an event that could host the bus in spring/summer 2022 get in touch!)
The Hell Bus and me will on telly in Joe Lycett Vs the Oil Giant on Channel 4, Sunday 24th Oct, 9pm. Also available to watch online.
I brought the Hell Bus down to Shell HQ today with Joe Lycett. Parked it outside for almost an hour while the staff inside went into a self-imposed lockdown. The bus was being filmed for a new documentary Joe is making about Shell’s greenwashing PR, which will be out later this month. More details when I have them! The bus will be going to Glasgow for COP26 at the end of the month, and the exhibition inside is still under construction. I’m posting regular updates of my DIY nightmares over on my Instagram story.
I made a new poster for a Brandalism campaign exposing Barclays’ dirty fossil fuel links and their funding of rainforest-clearing agribusinesses. It’s part of a campaign across 20 UK cities and towns with 200 billboard and bus stop posters. There’s more info and photos of the other artist’s posters in the campaign on the Brandalism website. More of my previous subvertising work here.
My neon ‘BOMBS’ sign in the window of the @artthearmsfair exhibition which opened today, alongside a photograph of a genuine free gift given out to arms fair delegates at DSEI, collected by the artist and undercover arms fair attendee @jill_gibbon. The exhibition is at 50 Brook St, London W1K 5DR. Open 11-16th Sept 12pm-8pm, and on the 15th &17th Sept 12pm-5:30pm
WELCOME TO THE HELL BUS The Hell Bus is a pre-apocalyptic marketing suite showcasing all the ideas oil and gas companies have come up with to save the world from oil and gas companies. First opening at COP26 in Glasgow 2021, since then the Hell Bus has toured the UK,…
For the last month I’ve been working on a new anti-Shell exhibition that I’ve been hoping to install inside a single-decker biodiesel powered bus to bring up to the COP26 environmental conference in Glasgow in November and some other events on the way, including the Lakes International Comic Festival. Unfortunately, this morning I just found out one of the main sources of funding has been cancelled for unrelated reasons, so I’m launching a last-minute crowdfunder to try and still make this happen.
I made a poster to promote @ArtTheArmsFair‘s ‘Bomb Boutique’ exhibition which opens in London next week, and to draw attention to the world’s biggest arms fair, DSEI, which is currently attempting to arrive at London’s ExCel Centre but is being heroically resisted by StopTheArmsFair and other groups. There’s a stomach-turning irony that the building that was used to house the NHS Nightingale Hospital is currently being turned into a showroom for machines that kill people. If you have the time please consider getting involved with the blockade and protest of DSEI. Stop The Arms Fair are there every day in the run up to the DSEI opening (and during) with daily events. More details at www.stopthearmsfair.org.uk/join-in/ Arms fairs in Liverpool and Glasgow have both been cancelled due to public pressure and activists campaigns forcing local authorities to refuse to host the arms fairs on public property. While the Mayor of London has condemned the London Arms Fair (in honestly quite surprising and welcome terms) DSEI continues as they are not reliant on council premises for their venue. They are however reliant on the ExCel Centre. And the ExCel centre has only two roads to get all their weapons and exhibits through. If activists can block those roads for long enough then it is possible to shut down the arms fair. Previous campaigns (the arms fair returns every two years) have seriously disrupted and came close to wrecking the event for arms dealers. That is part of what I think makes the #StopDSEI campaign so exciting, that it is actually possible to stop the world’s biggest arms sale by standing in the road. See what events Stop the Arms Fair are up today here, and updates on current actions on their twitter here. I also have […]
The first draft of The Times infamous cutaway diagram from 2001 detailing the extent of Bin Laden’s Mountain Fortress.
