00:00I'm Jane Boiru, I'm Principal Keeper here at Leeds Art Gallery, and we're here in the exhibition
00:06Steve McQueen, Resistance, How Protest-Shaped Britain and Photography-Shaped Protest.
00:13We brought it here to Leeds because it makes so much sense to have here as a city of resistance
00:18and protest, and I hope that our audiences will find many connections with the incredible
00:25images within this exhibition, of which are over 150.
00:28Steve McQueen is an internationally renowned artist and filmmaker, and he's been working
00:32on this project for over five years to select these iconic, moving images, which celebrate
00:39individuals and collectives who've come together to make a difference, make change that they
00:46didn't know would happen in their lifetime, come together about causes that they really
00:50cared about to make a difference to their communities, to the planet, and I hope that visitors will
00:58take inspiration from what they see here of people's struggle for justice.
01:03We're incredibly excited to welcome this exhibition to Leeds.
01:07An enormous amount of research went into the development of it, both by curators and historians
01:15of photography and historians of social history, about four years of research prior to the exhibition taking place at Turner
01:26Contemporary.
01:26It then travelled to National Gallery Scotland, up in Edinburgh, before coming to us.
01:32The exhibition is huge in scope and multi-layered.
01:37It basically runs through the suffrage movement from the early 1900s all the way through to protests against the Iraq
01:47war in 2003.
01:48And that cutoff point was a very purposeful and meaningful decision on the part of the curators to end the
01:57story prior to the advent of smartphone technology.
02:01So where everyone kind of became a citizen journalist with a camera in their pocket.
02:05It's just really fascinating to see how photography has been used over the century to document resistance.
02:16Within the exhibition you'll see photographs from archives, some photographs have never been seen before, some are press photographs.
02:23It's been amazing to work on this in terms of the different types of images and then just the number
02:28of photographers that are brought together within the exhibition.
02:32Each individual photograph, you could spend so much time with looking at it as a photograph but also exploring the
02:41story behind it and the context in which it was made.
02:45Some are photographs from artists who were within their communities photographing the struggles that they were experiencing.
02:52So there are many untold stories that you may not have heard about before that Steve McQueen has brought to
02:59light through this exhibition.
