Category Updates
SAME SHIT DIFFERENT SHOVEL
Good riddance to the red Boris Johnson. A man incapable of telling the truth, who lied his way to the top all so he could arm, enable, and provide diplomatic and legal cover for a genocide. Beholden to corporate interests…
PEACE MUSEUM – TACTICAL FRIVOLITY
My NUKE Powder box is being shown as part of a new exhibition at the Peace Museum in Saltaire, West Yorkshire (just north of Bradford) which runs until the 30th August. From The Peace Museum website: Fifty years ago, a…
NEW SHOW AT THE MUSEUM OF HOMELESSNESS
For the last month or two I’ve been working on some new work for this group show at the fantastic Museum of Homelessness, opening on the 21st May. It’s free and open for 10 weeks! Here’s the details: “A historical exhibition exploring 400 years of criminalisation of homelessness featuring new work from 10Foot, Gemma Lees, Matt Bonner, Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives, and Surfing Sofas. The exhibition, staged in an English perennial meadow at the museum’s site in Finsbury Park, will show that how we think about homelessness today comes from ideas that were created long ago. When people talk about the criminalisation of homelessness, it’s usually the Vagrancy Act of 1824 that is the focus. But there is much more to this story.
APARTHEID APARTMENTS – MIDDLESBROUGH
Apartheid Apartments comes to Middlesbrough this month with a new location opening at 18 Newport Crescent, (Captain Cook Square) Middlesbrough, TS1 5UA from the 26th Sept – 4th Oct 2025 (Private view 25th Sept). (Viewable 24 hours a day) Map link Video:
APOCALYPSE MUSEUM + HELL BUS
This year at Glastonbury the Hell Bus will be moving to the Greenpeace field where I’ll be opening an Apocalypse Museum with my co-curator on the Museum of Neoliberalism, Gavin Grindon. I’ll also have some work in Shangri-La which was the original home of the Hell Bus, and where the Hell project itself started in 2017.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Quick update on current and upcoming events/exhibitions:
APARTHEID APARTMENTS
I’m currently working on a new art installation which will be opening in Doncaster on the 16th May at Art Bomb Hub, 60 Hall Gate, Doncaster DN1 3PB. Running until the 2nd July, the exhibition will be viewable 24 hours a day. Map link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/eYrPuosnNf2Fk1H39
MUSEUM CLOSING PARTY
Due to high demand I’m going to open the Museum of Neoliberalism for three final days this week before I’m finally kicked out of my studio, ending with a closing party on Saturday night. Museum open this week Thurs-Sat, 26th-28th Sept. 11am-7pm Party on Saturday from 8.30pm til late. All welcome. Also on Saturday from 7-8.30 is a small event where I’ll be interviewing Ralph Billington, a local 88 year-old self-described revolutionary socialist and artist, and showing an exhibition of his artwork. Spaces are limited due to seating capacity. Ticket link in my story. Also here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-audience-with-ralph-museum-of-neoliberalism-closing-event-tickets-1025005919297
HELL BUS X MASSIVE ATTACK
I’m really looking forward to the Massive Attack ACT 1.5 climate action accelerator gig in Bristol later this month, the Hell Bus will be there in the activist area alongside the likes of Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Doctors without Borders, Novara Media, Kennard Phillips, Frank Riot and many more.
SHUT UP AND STICK TO FOOTBALL
Some of my work, the Occupation diorama and my Qatar 2022 project are going to be in this group exhibition opening at The Bomb Factory in London this week. 99-103 Long Acre, WC2E 9NR Open Thurs-Sun 12-6pm from 14th June-14th July 2024
MUSEUM OF FREE DERRY
I visited Derry yesterday and the Museum of Free Derry where my Bloody Sunday Bayeux Tapestry is on display. It’s such an honour to have my work here, and it was great to see the museum itself, which is an important and fascinating history of the Troubles and of the anti-Catholic apartheid in the North which was instrumental in triggering the conflict. In many ways the city of Derry is like a microcosm of the colonisation, subjugation and partition of Ireland. The scale of state violence from the plastic and rubber bullets, chemical weapons, batons with nails driven through them, and live ammunition that were used against a civilian population is hard to get your head around, particularly when this was happening in what is, ostensibly at least, a UK city, and within living memory.
HELL BUS TOUR
The Hell Bus tour is happening! It’s been quite an intense logistical nightmare to get this thing on the road and it wouldn’t have been possible without Ad Free Cities and SwitchIt.Green who have essentially organised the entire tour leaving me to worry about what’s actually going on inside the bus and fill up on windscreen-wiper fluid.
GLASGOW EXHIBITION
I’m coming back to Glasgow in September to do a solo exhibition of my prints at @thealchemyexperiment. Opening night is 14th Sept 7-9pm. I’ll also be doing a talk/screening there on Weds the 20th from 7pm-9pm, all free entry. See you there!?
ART THE ARMS FAIR 2023
I designed a poster for the @ArtTheArmsFair & @dED_ucation art exhibition and auction raising funds to #StopTheArmsFair – when a parade of global arms dealers, aka @DSEI_event, returns to London in September. More info at: www.artthearmsfair.com
HELL BUS IN LONDON
The Hell Bus blocking the road at Whitecross Street Party last weekend. Massive thanks to @basic.bogan.bitch and @__laurie____loads__ for their help getting the bus resupplied and open on time, and to Gary Seabrook for driving the bus from Bristol! @spellingmistakescostlive on TikTok I’ve brought the bus back to my studio for the next month for some essential repairs before it’s planned UK tour in October. The Hell Bus exhibition was mostly built and bodged together in a mad 2 month rush in 2021 and the heat and cold and vibration of a working bus, plus the thousands of people who have been through it so far means it’s well overdue some fixing up. I also want to add some new exhibits. It’s going to cost a bit of cash and materials so if anyone wants to chip in towards the refit, you can donate some quids at RoyalDutchHell.com or order some Hell merch there too. It all goes towards keeping this thing together and on the road. There are plans in the works to bring the Hell Bus on a UK tour of universities this October. If you work at a university and can help get the bus invited onto campus for a few days please get in touch. For details of future events sign up to my mailing list or check RoyalDutchHell.com
GROUP SHOW – FLORENCE
Italian friends – I have work in this group exhibition from the 24th of June to the 8th July at an art space called ZAP (Zona Aromatica Protetta). Address: vicolo di Santa Maria Maggiore 1 Opening hours: Monday to Saturday 08:30 to 22:00 – Sunday closed
SOLIDARITY WITH JEREMY CORBYN
Solidarity with @jeremycorbyn who has far more patience for the Labour Party than I ever will. Pictured here when he called in to the Hell Bus at @theworldtransformed last year. Im so angry about what the right wing ghouls who run Labour and the hacks in the press have done to Corbyn and the way they smeared our movement as cranks and racists, when we simply wanted a better world unleashed from the neoliberal death march. Now they’re doing the same thing again while telling us we’re Tory enablers if we don’t roll over and thank them for it. All this, while they reshape the party into one that actual racists will feel comfortable voting for. And not a peep from the press about any of it. They’ll never get my vote again. Absolute worst people in the country. I’m so grateful that I have an art practice where I can put this anger or else I’d be getting arrested right now. Fuck Starmer. I will see him in Hell.
HELL BUS @ LIVERPOOL
I recently returned from Liverpool where the Hell Bus was featured at The World Transformed for 4 days in the centre of town. The reaction to the bus was fantastic and I was delighted to be able to show Jeremy Corbyn around too. We had a chat about nuclear weapons, the daily mail and solar powered tanks. He really liked my Don’t Believe Everything Billionaires Tell You image which I made during the 2019 election so I gave him a sticker of it and a Mini Daily Mail lol. Massive thanks to Beth and Chris (Silent-K) for putting me up while I was in town!
HELL BUS @ GLASTONBURY
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.
BERLIN EXHIBITION
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
HELL COMPLETE
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!)
HELL BUS AT SHELL HQ
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.
ART THE ARMS FAIR
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
HELL BUS CROWDFUNDER
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.
STOP THE ARMS FAIR
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 […]
QUEEN CONTENT DELETED
Instagram thought the below drawings and video could lead to serious violence and/or were an instruction on how to kill the Queen.
RARE BOOKS/MANUSCRIPTS
Due to a clerical error of some kind, three of my ‘books’ have been acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. Get in the historical record you little bastards! If you’d like them for your own self you can order here.
VITAMIN D3
They’ve only gone and put me in a proper art book. Right next to Robert Crumb too, AND I’m on page 69 which is objectively the funniest number in the alphabet. It’s called Vitamin D3 and is published by Phaidon.
MUSEUM CLOSED
I’m closing the Museum of Neoliberalism until further notice to avoid contributing the to coronavirus problem. The government’s response has been slow and ineffectual and we can’t wait for them to take the lead on this. Take care everyone. We’ll reopen once things start to improve.
2019
I finally got round to doing a recap of my work last year which went out to my mailing list. You can read it here. Sign up to my mailing list here.
MUSEUM OF NEOLIBERALISM NOW OPEN
The Museum of Neoliberalism is now open! Standard opening hours are 11am – 7pm Thurs-Sun, but please book free tickets at museumofneoliberalism.com to make sure someone is here when you visit. Proper website coming in the New Year!
MUSEUM OPENS THIS WEEKEND
museumofneoliberalism.com #Neoliberalism #Thatcher
MUSEUM OF NEOLIBERALISM
Some photos from the Museum of Neoliberalism I co-curated with Gavin Grindon and which opened for 4 days in Brighton at The World Transformed. Now we’re raising funds to open it semi-permanently in London in November. There’s a bunch of great and awful rewards for backers on the crowdfunding page. All the objects in the photos below are actually real I’m afraid, not satire. You can see more photos of the first exhibition at www.museumofneoliberalism.com
MUSEUM OF NEOLIBERALISM
This weekend is the launch of a Museum of Neoliberalism I’ve co-curated with Gavin Grindon, at The World Transformed 2019 festival in Brighton. Tickets are still available, but if you can’t make it I’ll be posting photos next week. We also hope to show it elsewhere, including at WAR Gallery, and have been thinking about it as a starting point, and a sort of prototype for, The Thatcher Museum I was banging on about a few years ago. I’ll also be talking at the ‘Subvertising Symposium’ at The World Transformed on Sunday alongside Ad Block Bristol, Matt Bonner, Michelle Tylicki and Dog Section Press.
ART THE ARMS FAIR
My work on display as part of the Art The Arms Fair group show which runs until the 13th September in Peckham, raising funds for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT). All these works are for sale for CAAT. My ‘Empire Air‘ short film is also being shown.The show is split across three locations:Safehouses 1 & 2 (137 & 139 Copeland Rd) for the main exhibition, 12pm–8pm weekdays and 10am–8pm at the weekendAMP Gallery (1 Acorn Parade) for Peter Kennard’s takeover, 12pm–8pm weekdays and 10am–8pm at the weekend AMP Studios (897a Old Kent Rd) for more art, 6pm–8pm on weekdays and 10am-8pm at the weekend (plus all the evening events – see the Art the Arms Fair website)A ctions to try and stop the arms fair are continuing, if you have the time please consider getting involved, more details at stopthearmsfair.org.uk
