While exhibiting protest graphics in a show titled Hope To Nope, London’s Design Museum decided to host an arms industry fundraising event in their Kensington premises. Many of the exhibitors were so angry about what they saw as an unethical affront to their presence in the show, they physically removed their work from the museum with two weeks still to run. In an act of ingenious protest, those same exhibitors are now mounting their own exhibition of the work they removed, and then some.
From Nope To Hope website
In the Design Museum’s exhibition, covering 10 years of protest graphics from 2008 to 2018, the chronological nature of the show produced an undeniable air of negativity with Trump being the end point of the show. It was almost as if the championing of the effectiveness of protest graphics throughout the rest of the show was bought to an end by Trump being elected – it felt as if all that had passed before had been pointless. For the museum’s director to then brush aside concerns by exhibitors that the gallery was aiding and abetting the arms trade, created an increased air of negativity around Hope To Nope in what otherwise was an excellent show. In a twist on the original show, the organisers, under the name the Nope To Arms Collective, have fittingly reversed the Design Museum’s title to now read From Nope To Hope.
What this new show does is to revive positivity, both in terms of putting on the exhibition itself, and in the word play on the original title. The Design Museum’s stance, (at the time of writing), on not developing an ethical fundraising policy, is now the ‘Nope’; while displaying the removed work for free has become the new ‘Hope’. This semantic about-turn breathes belief back into protest graphics, while putting on the new exhibition is an act of protest in itself.
