‘Art the Arms Fair’ returns

'The exhibition will coincide with days of witness against DSEI, which returns to London’s Excel Centre in September.'

Art the Arms Fair (AAF), the partly-Quaker-founded arts exhibition, will return this year. AAF uses ‘creative resistance’ against Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI), the huge arms fair.

‘We’ve been working hard to bring you the most radical exhibition of the year,’ the group announced on social media, with news that the London exhibition ‘We Ain’t dED Yet’ will include work by the artist Darren Cullen. Other artists to contribute include Gavin Turk, Ed Hall, Kyle Goen and KennardPhillips (a collaboration between Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps). Quaker artist Jill Gibbon will also contribute work – she spent several years infiltrating DSEI in disguise. Jeremy Deller will create a limited edition print for the show.

The exhibition will coincide with days of witness against DSEI, which returns to London’s Excel Centre in September. According to Demilitarise Education (dED), AAF’S partner, this year’s DSEI will have 2,800 suppliers, and more than 230 new exhibitors. Attendance is expected to surge.

Zayna Al-Saleh, who curates the AAF exhibition, said it: ‘is testament to the presence and operations of the arms trade in our daily British lives: from its staging in our capital to its discrete dealings with our universities. These dealings provide the means for major human rights violations and have resulted in millions of refugees, many of whom are not granted safety from European waters.’

Darren Cullen said on X (the new name for Twitter) that he had designed a poster for the exhibition, which will be auctioned. Previous years have seen contributions from Banksy, with his Civilian Drone Strike selling for £205,000 in aid of Campaign Against Arms Trade and Reprieve. This year’s art will be sold to support dED.

In 2018 AAF was awarded The Observer and NESTA ‘New Radicals’ Award. The fair was co-founded in 2017 by Sam Walton, who previously worked for Quaker Peace & Social Witness. This year’s exhibition will be held at Gallery 46 in London, over 11-17 September.

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