The Cardinal’s Song – In honour of Suzi Gablik and her bright bold inspiring words
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May 26, 2022
Amongst the White Oaks and Hickory trees at the headwaters of the New River, the Cardinals are singing. Their brilliant red wings flashing amongst the silver branches and trunks. Spring time in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Appalachia. Suzi Gablik is leaving her body behind. As breath moves slowly in and out of her lungs,...
Time to kick Oil out of Football? – The Economic War, part 3
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Mar 23, 2022
Roman Abramovich under sanctions! Chelsea up for sale! Scandal engulfs Everton FC as a key donor Alisher Usmanov is added to the UK government’s list of ‘named Oligarchs’. The Economic War has opened a new front on the pitch. Football is pulled into the Russian invasion of Ukraine just as Western corporations and the oil...
Iraq, BP and the British Museum – look upon these works and hang our heads in shame
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Mar 14, 2019
I had read in advance the briefing that Culture Unstained had put out to accompany the planned action. The protest at the British Museum was to be against BP’s sponsorship of the exhibition ‘I am Ashurbanipal: king of the world, king of Assyria’, a display of treasures from the land of Iraq. I read lines...
The slow dismantling the house of oil – The Gulbenkian Foundation divests
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Mar 18, 2018
Quite unexpected comes remarkable news! Lucy Neal, a long-term part of the Platform family, e-mails out of the blue, forwarding an article from the Algarve Daily News, published on 1st February in southern Portugal. The headline reads: ‘Gulbenkian Foundation gets out of the oil business’ That truly is unexpected. Lucy had not foreseen this coming...
Bill McKibben slams Shell sponsorship at elite climate conference #CHclimate
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Nov 4, 2014
350.org’s Bill McKibben just gave a keynote address at Chatham House’s annual conference on climate change. Bill didn’t know it when he agreed to talk at the conference, but its headline sponsor is Shell. Here is what Bill said to a room full of “senior officials from businesses, government, NGO’s and academic institutions”: Shell is...
Oil money and theatre – questions from the Green Room
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Jul 10, 2014
Last night saw a wide variety of folks from the world of theatre come together to discuss the growing controversy of oil sponsorship of the arts. Many in theatre now recognise that climate change and environmental damage are pressing issues that need to be addressed, both in the very content of the work, and the...
Picture This – artist Raoul Martinez on why oil sponsorship must end
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Jul 3, 2014
Over the past week we’ve published chapter by chapter the text from our new report ‘Picture This’ against BP’s sponsorship of the National Portrait Gallery’s Portrait Award. Below is the final chapter, ‘Picturing the Future’, brilliantly and calmly reasoned by artist Raoul Martinez. Raoul has been 3-times shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award and has...
New report ‘Picture This’ on the BP Portrait Award – extract on National Portrait Gallery
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Jun 25, 2014
Our new report Picture This – A Portrait of 25 years of BP sponsorship is in 5 parts. Each part addresses a different aspect of the issue, and should cause deep concern in any institution’s corporate sponsorship department that wants to operate ethically. Even though its publication is triggered by the 2014 BP Portrait Award...
Art in the face of climate change – Deller, detachment and William Morris
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May 12, 2014
Recently I gave a short talk followed by a lengthy discussion in a ‘Green Drinks’ forum organised by Artsadmin at Toynbee Studios in Whitechapel, London. The audience was comprised mainly of people in the arts engaged with ecology, and people in the ecological movement engaged with the arts. The text of the talk ran as...
A Temporary Difficulty? The Tate Modern audio tour revamp
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Apr 25, 2014
Guest blogpost by Phil England. It was four years ago this week that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded while drilling into BP’s Macondo oil well, killing eleven people. In a report issued last week, the National Wildlife Federation records that over 900 bottlenose dolphins have been found dead or stranded in the area since...
Time for Tate to stop being so shady over BP sponsorship
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Apr 4, 2014
We’re a more open organisation than any equivalent organisation in the world… —-So said Nick Serota back in 2008. More open than the National Gallery, for instance, who took three weeks to reveal its £30,000 /year sponsorship deal with Finmeccanica to Campaign Against the Arms Trade? Or how about the Natural History Museum, who took...
Arts and Ethical Fundraising Policies – you know they make sense
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Mar 19, 2014
In the context of the furore that’s raging about artists provoking the Sydney Biennale to reject funding from Transfield Holdings – who run offshore detention centres for asylum seekers – now is the moment to really grasp just how incendiary the sources of our funding can be. Or to put it positively, just how important...
