About the exhibition:
Wolstenholme Creative Space (WCS) Presents, as part of Liverpool Art Month, SPECTRUM: 15 solo exhibitions, with 5 Liverpool based Artists, Duos and Collectives from various stages of their careers, exhibiting each week. Noisy, political, personal, humorous, intelligent and determined – a reflection of the city's current creative community.About our project:
By inviting visitors to share, through social media, an image of themselves amongst this sound installation and to take home and display the hand painted signs which made up part of it this project aimed to disseminate the alternative name for the Falkland Islands by which they are known throughout Latin America, Las Malvinas. The installation featured a spoken sound piece which explored the power of the English language both to conquer and colonise and its potential to unite international movements of resistance. Various commercial objects produced by global brands littered the exhibition space with the intention thinking through contemporary manifestations of Empire.Context:
April 2012 marked the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War, a 74 day conflict from which Margaret Thatcher's Britain emerged victorious in a strategic reassertion of colonial power following the post-WWII disintegration of the British Empire. The Falklands victory revitalised the career of Margaret Thatcher and her previously unpopular Tory government in the 1980s and allowed her to press ahead with the devastating structural adjustment that decimated working class communities in Liverpool and across the UK.In the weeks leading up to the Spectrum exhibition the Falklands had come back to the fore, the Union Jack had been burned by protestors during riots outside the British embassy in Buenos Aires, Prince William had visited the islands on his pseudo-military PR campaign, Britain had started illegally drilling for oil in the contested territory off the Falklands coast and David Cameron had been politically posturing in an attempt to revisit the warmongering glory of his predecessor.