Posters from the Palestinian Revolution

I'm going to blog some of the posters and maybe some other things I saw at the RichMix venue in London's Bethnal Green Road tonight at the exhibition, The World is With Us, Global Film and Poster Art from the Palestinian Revolution, 1968 - 1980.

But first up I must say what a tremendous success the evening was.  The RichMix has various levels and the reception, you know, drinks and nibbles was on the ground floor and the exhibition was downstairs in the basement.  Karma Nabulsi opened the proceedings by explaining what the exhibition was all about and she made the now customary reference to Palestine Film Foundation director, Nick Denes, who has worked very hard to bring the whole thing together.

The exhibition consisted of several old televisions positioned around the room on tables and posters adorning the walls.  The age of each TV was matched to the age of the film it was showing and there were headphones wired to each TV so each one could be focused on individually.  I didn't actually pick up a program for the event so I can't say what any of the films were. Some were colour and some were black and white.  There was also an old radio and an old reel to reel tape player to show the kind of technology that was available to our revolutionary heroes during the period under view.

Anyway, here are some of the pics I took and tweeted in the order that I took them:

That's simply the view from the ground floor down to the basement and here's what you see as you land:

But the downstairs wasn't open yet so that was a sneak preview.  Here's the poster announcing the event and the series:

And here's Karma Nabulsi introducing the event:

And here are some of those TVs I mentioned:

 

See that last one?  Can't see a thing on the screen hardly. But look at those phones.  Quaint huh?

And now some posters:

Now I'm hoping the posters will mostly speak for themselves because I spent the whole evening snapping and tweeting the narratives so if you want the narrative I tweeted with the pic please check out @jewssf on twitter:

 

 

Now that last one doesn't hang well with the others.  It was narrated on the wall as 1980 and nothing else, or artist unknown.  It's the only one that drew criticism on twitter and I must admit I found it kind of perplexing.  But see what Nick Denes had to say about the whole exhibition over at MEMO :

It was a lengthy and quite difficult process choosing these posters, as there are so many striking works one might choose," says Nick Denes, Co-Director of the series. "But our aim has been - insofar as we can restrain ourselves - not to pick the 'best' or our 'favourite' works, but rather ones that were widely used or seen in their time, and, or which represent key aesthetic or thematic concerns.

And it's that "thematic concern" that this last poster conveys: international solidarity, the magnet that draws so many of us to the Palestinian cause.

Here are some afterthought shots taken just while the event was closing and I was leaving:

 

And here's my parting shot:

There's a whole site, The World is With Us, devoted to the exhibition and its whereabouts at any given time. It does the exhibition far more justice than I have done here but you really have to be there to appreciate what the exhibition has achieved.