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Piper & Rodney: Adventures Close to Home

Collaboration at The Pentonville Gallery. 1987
Date: 7 August, 1987 until 5 September, 1987
Organiser: Pentonville Gallery

From the Press Release for this exhibition:

“This is a show about policing. More specifically this is a show charting the growing catalogue of atrocities which have punctuated the recent history of policing in this country. It is not only the slide towards a more paramilitary style of public order policing which is of concern to us here. It is also the increased scope of that policing. Tactics and technologies first bloded (sic) in the North of Ireland, then imported and perfected against Black people in this country, have in recent years been employed with vigour against sectors of the population as diverse as striking miners and travelling hippies.

Whether this represents an increased democratisation of brutality is open to debate, what it does mean is that for an increasingly large section of the community the possibility of becoming the subject of such policing is brought closer to home. It is also in the realm of personal policing that atrocity has been brought closer to home. Where as previously the common sense assumption was that if you were young, male and black, if you dressed in an unorthadox (sic) way or moved in a group of more than one, if you stood on a street corner, or on a picket line, if you choose to excercise your democratic right of protest, then you run the risjk of over vigours (sic) policing. Our mothers would often tell us to look respectable, keep good company, stay home and keep off the streets. In Autumn 1985, all of these assumptions were blown out of the window.

The homes which we had been told were havens of safety were entered by policemen bearing arms. One mother was shot and paralysed, another was killed. Atrocity had been brought not just close to home, but into the home. The cases of Chery Groce and Cynthia Jarrett make chilling reading. However, this is not the full story, but it is the starting point for this show.

KEITH PIPER and DONALD RODNEY are BLK artists who have decided to jointly stage shows around issues of shared concern. First exhibiting together as members of the BLK ART Group in the early eighties, they have maintained the conviction that their work should discuss issues of personal and collective relevance. THIS IS THEIR FIRST JOINT SHOW.”

The exhibition garnered a significant amount of press coverage.