At first glance it is a simple picture. A number of paths, nestling between two modest hills, disappear into the far distance. The light is flat and uninteresting, the sky blank. Yet there is something odd about it. The scale is disconcerting. The place looks ravaged, utterly bleak. Then, on closer inspection, rocks are revealed as canon balls; they are everywhere, strewn all over the landscape, tens, perhaps hundreds of them, disappearing towards the vanishing point.

Theatres of War: by Mark Power

The Canary and The Hammer is a response to the ﬁnancial crisis of 2008 and its  exposure of the Western world’s determination to accumulate wealth, detailing the inherent human reverence for gold and its signiﬁcance in the ruthless endeavour for progress...

Everyone Has a Story About Gold: Lisa Barnard

 To hear the big fellows talk, they wage war from fear of God and for all things bright and beautiful, but just look into it, and you’ll see they’re not so silly: they want a good profit out of it, or else the little fellows like you and me wouldn’t back ’em up. 

The Missile and the Paperclip: Julian Stallabrass

What does it mean to speak of ‘drone aesthetics’? The term has been used to describe artwork – by artists like James Bridle, Omer Fast, Trevor Paglen, George Barber and others – that takes drone warfare as its subject. Drone aesthetics is a modern idiom, a shorthand for new modes of representing war from the extraterrestrial perspective of a machine. But like ‘aesthetics’ itself – called upon variously to designate the artistic or the beautiful – the term is an imprecise one, naming a specific practice but obscuring the more complex relations that drive it. 

Drone Aesthetics: Eugénie Shinkle

The third of May 1979 was a defining day for me, the moment when I finally threw off any attachment to my gilded public school and Oxbridge background. It was election night, when a fractured and fractious Labour Party succumbed to the inevitable Tory landslide...

Six Inches of Power: Jeremy Till

The pinched lips of eight cloned Margaret Thatchers smile unnaturally in unison, eyes fixed narrowly. Although a Thatcher far from her 1970s heyday, her rigid, manic expression is unchanged...

Maggie and the Fairytale of the Free Market:  Sarah James

The title chosen for this arresting body of work is as taut, condensed and suggestive as the images themselves.  In post-Kleinian psychoanalytic thought, specifically that of Wilfred Bion, PS<->D denotes the constantly operating forward thrust and regressive pull of two very distinctive states of mind, or attitudes to life and to the world – what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions.... 