Resistance with Steve McQueen

A new exhibition Resistance - How protest shaped Britain and photography shaped protest has just opened in the UK. The exhibition is curated by legendary film director and artist Steve McQueen, and is accompanied by a beautiful book, which includes an essay by me.

Resistance celebrates the people and movements who fought for change and shaped the world we live in, wrestling power from those in charge to create a fairer world.

The Turner Contemporary Gallery is on the south coast of Britain, so close to the sea that the waves almost lap at the gallery walls. It's a place of free, public art with glorious huge windows that look out across the water and draw light into the galleries. To walk through Resistance is to walk through a century of activism, from the radical women's suffrage movement in 1903 to the largest-ever protest in British history - the 2003 Anti-Iraq War Protest.

There are illegal court room photos of suffragettes - taken by a reporter who cut a hole in his top hat and covered the click of the camera with a cough. There are photos of the hunger marches of the 1930s where people marched across the country to protest unemployment and poverty and of the lesser-known Blind March of 1920 which sparked the ongoing fight for disability rights.

There are joyful photos from the Gay Liberation Front and the Women’s Liberation Movement and the deeply sobering but inspiring fight against fascism in the 1930s and 1940s - culminating in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 where the local Jewish and Irish community came together with trade unionists, communists and anarchists under the flag: No Pasarán - They Shall Not Pass. From that momentous day, the exhibition draws a thread to the Battle of Lewisham in 1977 and the the Black People’s Day of Action on 2nd March 1981.

A placard to hold

The protestors in these photos are so familiar and so loved. Their presence is what makes Resistance so powerful and so moving - the home-made placards, the expression as the friends raise their fists to the sky and shout, the coal-dusted hand on a shoulder, the printed hearts on a mourners headscarf, the badges pinned to denim jackets and Sunday-best suits. The feeling that if you were transported into any of the photos you'd have been given an arm to link, a batch of sandwiches to make, a sound-system to guard, or a placard to hold.

We need these opportunities to not just acknowledge, but feel, the presence of those who came before us. I walked around the exhibition like a small wooden bead on a coiling necklace - linked in a centuries-long chain with everyone who resisted before me and everyone who will take up the cause in the years to come.

Steve McQueen - Hold It Together

Another highlight of the exhibition was meeting Steve McQueen and hearing him speak about what Resistance means to him and why he finds this work so inspiring:

"I'm thinking of a child, of a young person, who is nineteen years old, who is going to come to this exhibition and see these images for the first time, and understand that the reason why they are doing what they are doing is because other people came together in order to turn the trajectory of the landscape to where they wanted to be."

"They did it because they were a community," McQueen continued. "They put all their hands on the steering wheel to change the trajectory - the direction of where things were going."

It is impossible not to draw parallels with these photos of the past to where we find ourselves today, with the rise of fascism, racism, war and environmental crisis. Steve McQueen says the exhibition could not have happened at a more vital, critical time and likened where we are today as being in a heavy-weight boxing championship.

"We're being pummelled, we're being hit, we've been winded, we've been thrown around the ring - and we have to hold on. We have to hold on."

"This [opponent] hopefully he's going to box himself out - maybe in the fifth or sixth round. That's when we can start putting together some combinations because he'll be spent. So right now, we've gotta hold it together. Hold it together. It's bloody difficult. It's bloody shattering. But having a room like this and seeing a show like this gives me great hope."

"Just hold on, and come out with that jab - sixth round."

Observe, Record, Act, Remember

The book and exhibition are a celebration not just of protest but of photography as it emerges as a vital form of activism, one capable of amplifying the voices of groups pushed to the margins of British society.

At the exhibition, gallery director Clarrie Wallis highlighted the idea of Observe, Record, Act, Remember and the importance of Resistance in challenging conventional narratives about British history. What has been created here is a very different picture of Britain - this is not a 'tea and scones with the Queen' postcard, but the stark reality of a country built on conquest and oppression. Resistance shows the labour, the hunger, the discrimination, the war and the oppression that characterised the last century. But crucially it shows the people and movements who as Clarrie says - 'drove social progress before they were noticed'.

In these dark times we have a duty to continue to disrupt oppressive narratives.

Don't Attack Iraq

The piece I wrote for Resistance closes the century of protest. I documented my memories of the 15th February 2003 global anti-war demonstration, where two million people marched through London to say NO to the war on Iraq. I was a student at that time, heavily involved in the LSE Stop The War Student Society and working with my friends every hour of the day to make the protest as big as possible.

The peace movement plays a central role in Resistance - from the anti-nuclear protests of the 1950's to the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, to women dancing on silos at RAF Greenham Common, to the vast movements against Bush and Blair's wars. My piece accompanies an essay called Mobilising Against War by CND's Kate Hudson. Resistance chose to focus on the time before digital cameras took over. Photo-wise, all I have from 2003 are a few grainy crowd shots taken on a disposable camera. No selfies, no posts, no 'content' - just some of the strongest and most important memories of my life.

The exhibition is a joy and the book - with powerful introductions from Steve McQueen and brilliant journalist Gary Younge is an exceptional tribute to a century of people who faced their darkest and most painful days united in courage and resistance.

I am grateful to Steve McQueen and the entire wonderful team at the Turner Contemporary. Thank you.

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See you sometime soon - I am deep into album mode for the book but please know that I miss writing here and will be back when I can.

In solidarity, Tansy.