"Resisting Resignation" by Miranda Anderson (Keywords: Resistance; Protest; Activism; Photography; Collective Action)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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Miranda Anderson reviews Resistance, curated by Steve McQueen and Clarrie Wallis, and Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, edited by Steve McQueen, Clarrie Wallis, and Sarah Harrison (Monument Books, 2025).

At Turner Contemporary, the human drama is given an oceanic backdrop. Margate’s washed-out seascape offers an expanse of diffuse light that resists my gaze’s search for an end point.

My footsteps echo across the floors of a gallery that seems nearly empty of people or art. Yet as I wander the gallery, I am mirrored by swarms of people that seem to flurry across the walls. From behind the glass of orderly, and often rather small, black and white photos, jubilant masses rush towards me arms raised, sometimes alongside grim-faced placard-carrying companions, while in others children play amidst rubble, friends embrace, and couples kiss. I am reminded of sitting on the floor of a darkened room in New York’s sedate Metropolitan Museum of Art, when Wolfgang Tillman’s video installation of pounding music, flashing lights, and twirling mirror ball appeared on screen, creating a reflection not only on the artificiality of that dance club environment, but of that which we were in.

As I cross room after room, I am passing through a century of Britain’s past. Resistance, curated by Steve McQueen and Clarrie Wallis, is itself an act of resistance: like many of McQueen’s other works, it questions, extends, and complicates existing historical narratives. Gathered together from a wide array of often underfunded archives, the photos record humans rising up, or laying down, in protest against the supposed norms and conventions in which they found themselves. Shifting between individuals, couples, and collectives gathered together by some feature for which they were oppressed, such as their gender, sexuality, race, religion, disability or occupation, the quality of the black and white printing of the photographs gives some a trompe l’oeil depth, while highlighting continuities across diverse causes and already creating a nostalgic sense of historical distance from this largely pre-smart phone era. These photos are printed and presented with a care that underlines the importance of the stories they tell: the transformation of human rights and improved living conditions that we still just about hold in our grasp.

These photos are printed and presented with a care that underlines the importance of the stories they tell

The accompanying book interweaves critical reflections on achievements in the century spanning a 1903 Suffragette March and the 2003 Anti-Iraq War Protest. The photograph that greets you as you enter the gallery is of Annie Kenney, a suffragette and cotton mill worker, being arrested in London in 1913. Dressed in white with her hair flowing lyrically around her face, her ecstatic expression seems to surge from out of the frame. Amidst the chartered streets of tenements and dark waves of police enclosing her, Kenney’s certainty in the rightness of her cause cascades out of this historical moment, directly at the viewer. In his introduction, Gary Younge observes that “resistance has a life of its own”, a physics-like quality such that even when individual actions have failed, energy is transmitted across people and places sustaining and inspiring a “cascading sense of possibility” (15, 25). The figures in the photographs create haunting images that gesture towards alternative futures that may have come to pass were it not for the acts of those who resisted. Their captured energies are presented to us as catalysts for our own lives, even or especially when their aims have not yet been achieved.

Like the rooms of the exhibition, the chapters in the book takes you through the emergence and evolution of protest movements throughout the century, including women’s, worker’s, unemployed, black, LGBT, and disability rights, anti-fascism, anti-nuclear, anti-war and environmentalism. Reflect on each area in turn and the extent of what was accomplished across the century is wonderous: take almost any British individual you pass on almost any street and there will be some way in which they have benefited because these people protested. In 1903 almost eighty percent of the UK population were disenfranchised. The recentness of some changes still holds the power to shock: Northern Ireland did not gain universal suffrage till 1969, the first disability rights law was 1995, and equality of the homosexual age of consent was 2000.

Yet despite such gains, around us there rises resignation to immorality and injustice amidst a marketized digital and technological proliferation that while proffering optimisation of our lives, instead delivers dysfunctional bureaucracies and incalcitrant automated shopping tills. While we apparently exist in a century that is widening access to knowledge, Paul Gilroy stresses the amplification of biased narratives alongside the elision of others. The commodification of attention, social media filters, and search engines primed with others’ intentions and interests are generating “a weakening of the imagination that incubates the loss of hope” (119). This exhibition is a timely reminder of the possibility of change through protest: it celebrates the roles of both individual and collective action, and foregrounds the role of the arts as modes of intervening in injustices and transforming beliefs and practices.

These works in concert with the exhibition itself convey the need for us to scale up our imaginations beyond our own transitory individual lives

The parallel story is that this was an epoch that saw the transformation of photography in the century spanning the Suffragette and the Anti-Iraq War protests. Emma Lewis comments that awareness of photography’s power predates this: Frederick Douglass in his 1861 lecture on “Pictures and Progress” was already lauding photography’s capacity to change thought and so transform society (48). Evident here too are surveillance images taken by police or press which sought to constrain and undermine those captured on camera. In some, those photographed deliberately attempt to outwit their image capture through distorting their faces into odd expressions or closing their eyes, as if this might make them vanish. In the period when people were simply unused to being photographed or as photography was morphing from no longer requiring prolonged stillness, the eerily transfixed gazes create in the viewer too an imitative moment of surprisal, and then a question: how did just being observed in this way mark their minds by memorialising that moment?

The exhibition prompts viewers to a moment of reflection amidst what Antony Gormley terms “the flow of lived time”: outside the gallery, one of his cast iron men stands motionless amidst the waves, seeming now to embody our peculiar lack of concerted response to rising seas; as does Mona Hatoum's work Hotspot, a companion work located in the gallery entry. Hatoum highlights the scale of current issues through materialising the entire earth as a “hotspot”: a human-sized flickering red neon cage through which the sea line on the horizon is visible beyond. These works in concert with the exhibition itself convey the need for us to scale up our imaginations beyond our own transitory individual lives to the epic and global scale needed to tackle today’s crises and to reflect on how our own words and acts are serving to create the future. Unlike T.S. Eliot’s “humble people” imagined on Margate Sands who “expect nothing”, it is instead, as Michelle Obama urges, time for us to “Do something!”

Miranda Anderson is an Honorary Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Lecturer at the Open University. She is a philosopher of the arts and humanities, literary scholar, historian and curator. Her book, The Renaissance Extended Mind and four edited volumes reveal ideas and practices in the History of Distributed Cognition between antiquity and the twentieth century. She curated The Extended Mind with Talbot Rice Gallery with works by thirteen international contemporary artists. She has several works forthcoming on the fission-fusion framework and its implications for contemporary culture and society.

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