PROTEST! is a new major retrospective of British artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman
The major retrospective will address Derek Jarman’s important contribution to film, alongside his body of work as a painter, writer, set-designer, gardener and political activist.
PROTEST! will be the first time Jarman’s work has been brought together since his landmark exhibition at the Barbican in 1996.
Crucial bodies of work from the 1960s and 1990s will be showcased, PROTEST! aims to capture Jarman’s engagement with both art and society alongside his concerns with political protest and personal freedoms arising from the AIDS crisis. Many of Jarman’s work displayed in PROTEST! has never been seen by the public before.
Jarman was part of the same painter group as the pioneering David Hockney and Patrick Procter while he studied at Slade School of Art during the early 60s. By 1967 Jarman was included in the Tate Young Contemporaries and the 5th Biennale des Jeunes in Paris, a remarkable achievement of someone in their mid-twenties. Jarman didn’t progress into film-making until the early 1970s.
When Jarman was tragically diagnosed with HIV in 1986, (AIDS at the time was non-treatable and fatal) it transformed his practice into a new form of activism, working religiously to raise awareness of AIDS. At the time he was one of the only public figures to have come out with the disease.
PROTEST! is curated by Seán Kissane and will be shown at the IMMA in Dublin then touring to Manchester Art Gallery, HOME and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton.
