Plinth

Resistance was conceived by film director and artist Steve McQueen, and throughout his oeuvre, there is a relentlessness and simplicity of gaze—a kind of silent contest of who will look away first. Here, the artist and his longstanding collaborator—Turner Contemporary Director, Clarrie Wallis—present far-reaching archival photographs with equal weight, in black and white (even those originally in color, desaturated for consistency) with the same dimensions, a curatorial approach that embodies the same steadfastness which characterises McQueen’s work behind the camera. The effect is cinematic, a storyboard unfolding across a century.

'We started by mapping out key protests from 1900 to 2000, breaking them into themes,' says Wallis. 'But it didn’t quite work. 1903 was such a pivotal year for the suffrage movement, and then the question became: where do we end?' After much research, particularly in 2020 amid the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, McQueen and Wallis decided to stop before the smartphone era. 'The rise of social media, smartphones, Instagram—the Arab Spring—marked a fundamentally different era,' Wallis continues. 'Ending with the 2003 Iraq War protests felt right. It made sense to bookend the exhibition between these two moments.'

For many, the Iraq War protests, the largest in British history, remain a watershed moment. The nation marched, the streets closed in and kettled us. The war continued. In the years since, protests have felt increasingly polite—pre-planned, pre-approved, a far cry from the raw energy of past demonstrations. The police response, meanwhile, has grown more punitive. The arrests of women in 2021 at the Clapham Common candlelit vigil for Sarah Everard (who was murdered by a policeman) serve as a painful reminder that resistance is often met with force. Protests can leave us feeling powerless, if not entirely without hope; Resistance gently blows on those near-suffocated embers of defiance, reconnecting viewers with a powerful history.

This exhibition is the result of years of research and collaboration. In fact, Wallis curated the first-ever show McQueen was in, Acting Out, 31 years ago, when he had just finished at Goldsmiths and she was a student at the Royal College of Art. More recently, they worked together on Year 3 at Tate Britain. 'When that opened in 2019, Steve mentioned an idea for a documentary photography show about resistance,' says Wallis. 'Year 3 was a portrait of London—its potential. This exhibition, I think, is a portrait of Britain, looking at its history through photography and the idea of resistance—what it has meant and what it could mean.'

And what a portrait it is. Disaffected children leap from windows onto piles of mattresses. Hunger march follows hunger march, as if in one continuous thread across decades. Riot shields loom behind a woman tending to two young children, on a regular day. Just as Renaissance artists would use light and shade to draw the eye—often to the divine—here black and white draws the eye to facts: white ambulances, edging through a crowd below bodies huddled together on a sloped rooftop. White t-shirts billow on a washing line in South Wales. Police charge, riding horses with white streaks on their noses. All these facts feel tinged with morality as you gather them – moral because they are imbued with the world, so how could they not be? In Christine Spengler’s 1972 photograph, a young Catholic boy in Derry strikes a heroic pose as he hurls a stone at a British Army Saracen—David against Goliath. Pollarded trees and rubble. When fascists attack Mile End Road in 1936, a week after the Battle of Cable Street, a line of fire cuts the image diagonally, one side blackened with soot. Nearby, Tish Murtha’s 1981 photograph echoes that diagonal in its composition—out-of-work ‘Carl on Eileen’s couch’ blows a trail of smoke across the living room.

Meanwhile, this is a story of photography itself—of mugshots, surveillance, portraiture, and the adoption of photography as documentary—such as the work of Norah Smyth, who documented the Suffragette movement in the East End while serving as Sylvia Pankhurst’s chauffeur. The influence on McQueen’s own work is unmistakable—Resistance lays bare his enduring preoccupation with the exhibition’s titular theme, from the 1971 trial of the Mangrove Nine retold in his 2020 film Mangrove to the 1981 New Cross house fire, which was explored in the documentary Uprising, 2021. His 2008 feature Hunger is echoed in Resistance’s hunger marches, while documentary Subnormal finds its counterpart in archival images of grassroots education activism.

'British history, going back to the Magna Carta, is built on the right to protest,' Wallis says. 'Steve feels very strongly about that—the fundamental importance of challenging the status quo.' How do you challenge the status quo? 'The show is also about how you create change,' Wallis reflects. 'Take supplementary schools in the 1970s—mothers coming together because they felt their children were being failed by mainstream education. Or the origins of Friends of the Earth, sparked by an act of resistance against a corporate bottle dump. These grassroots actions reshaped the landscape.' The adoption of pilgrimage and long marches by the Suffragettes in 1903 inspired later movements, from the Jarrow Crusade to the People’s March for Jobs in 1981, which retraced the same route. These strategic patterns highlight how movements adapt, adopt, and learn from one another.

As well as railing against injustice, 'resistance can also be joyful,' says Wallis, quoting Gary Younge’s catalogue essay. 'You see it in the photographs of same-sex couples kissing in the 1970s, in images from Greenham Common, or in the founding of Notting Hill Carnival. These moments show resistance resonating in different ways.'

Writing about photography is, to borrow that old dictum, like dancing about architecture—far better to go and play McQueen and Wallis’ game of chicken, to look protestors and policemen in the eye, to stand on the sidelines of so many protests for as long as you dare. After all, this exhibition has a lot to do with proximity—bodies coming together. How close one moment is to the next. One march follows another. How far off or how familiar these snapshots feel to our present. Whether in the streets, the courts, or the classroom, Resistance is a portrait of a defiant Britain. But within the exhibition, there are plenty of individual portraits, too. This is their record, and our inheritance.

By Sammi Gale

Cover image: Paul Trevor, Anti-racists gather to block route of National Front demonstration, New Cross Road, London, August 1977 © Paul Trevor