Impact case study database

Gibbon’s research highlights how weapons sales in the arms trade are normalised through cultural rituals and sponsorship of events. Her research informed a play on the arms trade and resulted in BAE Systems’ withdrawal as sponsor of two national cultural events.

Influencing public awareness of arms trade cultural sponsorship

Gibbon’s research enhances understanding of how weapons manufacturers appropriate cultural rituals to ‘artwash’ products. New insights from her exhibitions on arms fairs were shared with combined audiences of 2,114,442 (Source: Kantar), attracting international press coverage from Al Jazeera (2014), BBC Radio Four (2018), The Guardian (2014; 2018), Folket i Bilt (2019), Frieze (2019), and BBC World Service (2014, 2018), who introduced Gibbon as ‘ lifting the lid on the murky world of arms sales’. (5.1)

Exhibitions at Bradford Peace Museum (BPM) and Royal West Academy (2014) attracted high audience numbers.(5.2) Alison Bevan described the 8,046 visitors to Royal West Academy as the ‘ highest ever visitor numbers for the period’(5.3), resulting in an 8-month extension of the exhibition in an off-site gallery, attracting 899 visitors (5.2). The exhibition changed people’s understanding of the arms industry. For example, audiences ‘ did not know that the UK makes arms that are sold around the world and that are responsible for harming civilians’, and also thought that Gibbon’s ‘eye-opening exhibition unpicks the mystique of the arms trade’. (5.3)

Raising artists’ awareness of arms trade and reshaping arts production

Gibbon’s BPM exhibition was instrumental to the development of Common Wealth Theatre Company’s play I Have Met the Enemy, a scene depicting an arms fair was based on Gibbon’s drawings, which revealed a world previously inaccessible to the actors. Co-Director Evie Manning: ‘The exhibition's observations and depictions of the 'performance of respectability' has informed our play in such a way that we have built a significant opening scene around this idea and the characters, action and gestures that The Etiquette of the Arms Trade explored’. (5.4) Audiences of 980 people saw the play in Bradford and Newcastle. The play travelled to Cardiff (2019); and will tour Edinburgh and London in 2021 (delayed by COVID-19). Artists involved with GEON were previously unaware of the arms trade’s ‘art washing’ strategies. Artist Emily Hesse said that Gibbon’s work, ‘gives us an insight into something that we are not shown, this is a world which is hidden from us, and that’s how I really feel that her work was very beneficial to me at that time because it allowed me to see what was really going on behind the scenes in these arms fairs that I would have never otherwise seen.’ (5.5) Hesse documented this experience in an article for the book Black Birds Born from Invisible Stars (2018).

Influencing collective action

Gibbon’s research made a distinct and material contribution to the campaign that resulted in GEON dropping BAE Systems’ sponsorship in three ways. First, Gibbon co-founded ‘Art Not Arms’ and wrote the petition garnering 2,366 signatures and national press coverage. (5.6) Second, Gibbon’s drawings persuaded headliners the Commoners Choir to pull out of GEON, re-joining after BAE’s withdrawal. Choir leader Boff Whalley’s assertion that Gibbon’s work ‘alerted me to a side of the international trade in weapons that I hadn’t understood – that arms dealing is normalized with music, entertainment, and wine’, (5.7) is echoed by Hesse’s view that ‘the campaign did definitely make a lot of artists aware of it [the arms trade’s use of art washing]’. (5.5) Third, Gibbon’s research was used by artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan’s in their installation at BALTIC during GEON (seen by 166,851.(5.8)), which featured a history of anti-power stances, with Gibbon’s research an important reference. According to Tatham, the installation ‘included a description of Gibbon going undercover into arms fairs, her drawings revealing a world, which, with its string quartets and champagne seeks to create an impression that weapons are no different from any other object of exchange…[her] project provided both a resource for our own exhibition and demonstrated how the forms and approaches of contemporary art practice can enact political enquiry. ’ (5.9).

Art Not Arms demonstrably influenced the cultural sector, highlighting arts organisations’ responsibility to check sponsors’ backgrounds. The BBC cited its impact on Turner Prize sponsorship, stating, ‘What has also become absolutely clear over the past 12 months is that arts organisations have to up their game when it comes to basic due diligence before accepting a sponsor’s money’ (5.10). Following Gibbon’s second Art Not Arms petition against BAE’s sponsorship of The National Festival of Making (23/04/2019), BAE was dropped after two days. (5.6)

An ARTnews article ‘The Year in Protest’ identified activism as a key influence on the art world, especially ‘protests and petitions that called attention to abuses of power, inequity, and privilege in the cultural sector’, citing Gibbon’s campaign as example of ‘[one of] the year’s notable art-world disruptions’. (5.10)