An Unknown Soldier: An Exhibition by Henningham Family Press
Tuesday 4th November 2014 – Sunday 4th January 2015
Opening Event 7th November 7.30pm (booking essential)
Open Daily Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 8pm
Poetry Library
Level 5
Royal Festival Hall
London SE1 8XX
We are very honoured to announce that the Saison Poetry Library, which is the major British library for modern and contemporary poetry, has invited us to stage a solo exhibition of all our work from An Unknown Soldier to date. This will be part of the Southbank Centre‘s programme of First World War Centenary events. This will be a mini-retrospective of dozens of prints and books made between 2011 and 2014, some on display for the first time.
First World War casualties can now be identified with saliva gleaned from postage stamps on their letters home. This DNA technology unintentionally transforms the memorial to the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey forever. In his anonymity he had stood for those lost to the destructive power of industrialised war. In our poem An Unknown Soldier we reconstruct him as a body of text, interrupted by trench-like letter forms, and ask: Has the Unknown Soldier, in the DNA age, become a symbol for our failure to learn from the past?
There will be a FREE Opening Event on Friday 7th November, 7.30pm at which we will be reading an extract from An Unknown Soldier with the assistance of James Wilkes and Erica Jarnes. We will also be giving out a small, free limited edition print. Booking is essential by email to:
specialedition [at] poetrylibrary [dot] org [dot] uk
The exhibition will include the four screenprint editions from our SGM Lifewords commission. The original 43 million Active Service John’s Gospels came off the same presses that printed recruitment propaganda, yet Father God and Fatherland presented contradictory visions of peace, both contending for the allegiance of soldiers in the form of printed words.
Details on Poetry Library website
Details on Southbank Centre website
An Unknown Soldier Project Page
An Unknown Soldier Blog Thread
