Protest Objects consists of 4 projects which were made over a period of a year. They were not conceived as a group, but I later decided to bring them together under a new heading, as they all explore the same territory. I think that all my work addresses questions about political agency and power in some ways - but these works are set apart because here my concern was primarily formal.

The starting point for all these projects are images of protest, which I collected in the wake of the 'anti-globalisation' protests. Looking at these, I became interested in the relationship between human agency and the media. I decided to focus on the objects people were making to put their messages across, and was interested in the relationship between these objects and 'art objects.' I attempted to point to this relationship in these projects by copying these 'found objects' in site-specific installations and performances.

I have borrowed the play on words in 'Protest Objects' from Jeannette Winterston's title 'Art Objects', because I agree with her that art is somehow about objection or resistance. My underlying motivation for making these pieces was my interest in the possibilities of resistance in the world, and the relationship between these possibility and art.

(A further reason for bringing these 4 works together is that this allows me to separate them from a number of other works, which have aspects in common, such as aesthetics, but are in many ways quite different Weapons of Mass Construction, Luxury Apartments from The Dumby Record and Recycled Banners).

09 / 2005

Read the essay: On Making Bridges, New Work by Lyn Löwenstein by Louise Milne 2002