Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation 2015

Exhibitions/Events:

2015 – Guernica in Manchester
Residency and Exhibition, MIRABEL Project Space, Manchester

2015 – Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation
Working Class Movement Library, Salford

2015 – Modern Histories Volume III (curated by Lynda Morris)
Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre

Date:
2015

The following year a heavy canvas was untrusted to some art students in Manchester who set about finding a place in which to show it. This was no simple task as the size of the work ruled out many venues but eventually they decided on a car showroom where they unrolled the canvas, banged some nails through it and attached to the wall. The people of Manchester had their first sight of one of the icons of the 20th century – Picasso’s Guernica.
James Hayman The Battle for Realism: figurative art in Britain during the cold war 1945 – 1960, p.160

Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation was a drawing project based on an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the exhibition of Picasso’s Guernica in a car showroom in Manchester that is reported to have occurred during the first two weeks of February 1939. The project included a quarter scale “mapping” study of Guernica and a number of text-based drawings based on written descriptions of direct encounters with the painting. Drawings were informed by reference to the ‘Manchester Foodship for Spain’ archive material in the Working Class Movement Library, and eyewitness commentaries of the Manchester Guernica exhibition, including two previously unknown accounts from students who studied at Manchester School of Art in the late 1930s. The project was underpinned by the notion of a ‘conspiracy of Guernica’ proposed by Herbert J. Southworth in his classic text Guernica! Guernica! A study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History. The narrative of a drawing’s production process, it’s constant erasures, adjustments and re-workings allude to, metaphorically at least, a representation of history that has been constructed through a ‘dialectic of doubt’, the product of an exchange between the possibilities of certainty and the anxiety of uncertainty.

A number of written texts emerged from the Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation project. ‘Footnotes to a Drawing’ derives from the extensive set of references that were consulted during the production of the drawing, functioning in the same way as conventional academic footnotes. There were also two essays produced with the title Guernica in Manchester Re-Representation one published in Red Pepper October/November 2015, the other in North West Labour Review in Summer 2016.