Designs by Matt Bonner from various guerrilla billboarding actions by Brandalism. These clandestine ad space takeover operations involve replacing commercial adverts on billboards, bus stops and tube carriages across the UK with 'subvertising' that subverts the their branding and exposes fossil fuel companies' hypocrisy and inaction on tackling the climate crisis and the need to transition to clean renewable energy.
Co-curation and graphic design for a protest art exhibition in Berlin showcasing international artists and collectives appropriating and altering billboards and other advertising spaces in the service of political art and social issues. It featured ‘subvertising’ on themes ranging from hyper-consumerism, the climate crisis, and surveillance capitalism to police violence, religious authority and the criminalisation of sex workers.
The exhibition included a retrospective history of the practice - from avant-garde montage in the early twentieth century to ‘culture-jamming’ in the 1990s - featuring Guerilla Girls, Adbusters and The Yes Men. It was the first exhibition to demonstrate how they have become a central, sustained and evolving aspect of the art of protest.
Werbepause ran at Kunstraum Kreuzberg between 18th June and 21st August 2022.
Illustrations for The Street Art Manual, an illicit, tactical handbook to creating art in public and taking over urban space. The book features sections on graffiti, stencilling, subvertising, large scale murals, wheat pasting, urban projections, aerial art, yarn bombing, guerrilla theatre, banner drops and projectiles, each technique illustrated with step-by-step drawings by Matt Bonner.
Poster designs by Matt Bonner for Brandalism’s mass takeover of public advertising space calling out HSBC’s investments in fossil fuels. In defiance of HSBC’s ‘net-zero ambition’ in 2020, artworks were created by 15 artists parodying and responding to the bank’s “We are not an island” billboard campaign.
Ad spaces in 15 British cities were illicitly taken over to highlight the environmental damage being funded by HSBC bank. Since the international Paris Climate Agreement was implemented in 2016, HSBC has poured £67 billion into fossil fuels alone.
Advertising Shits in Your Head calls adverts what they are—a powerful means of control through manipulation—and highlights how people across the world are fighting back. Equipped with stencils, printers, high-visibility vests, and utility tools, their aim is to subvert the adverts that control us. Featuring case studies and interviews with Art in Ad Places, Public Ad Campaign, Hogre, Resistance Is Female, Brandalism, and Special Patrol Group, the book showcases the ways in which small groups of activists are taking on corporations and states at their own game: propaganda. This is a call-to-arts for a generation raised on adverts. Beginning with a rich and detailed analysis of the pernicious hold advertising has on our lives, the book then moves on to offer practical solutions and guidance on how to subvert outdoor advertising spaces.
Book design and illustrations for the Internationalist Commune of Rojava. Make Rojava Green Again is an introduction to the social ecology of the Rojava Revolution - a vision and a manual for what a free, ecologically harmonious society can look like. Rojava is the Kurdish area located in Northern Syria where people are developing one of the most important revolutions of our time. In the midst of a devastating civil war, maintained by the Turkish and Syrian governments and Isis, Kurdish people are building a multi-cultural society based on feminism, direct democracy and ecology. Through social ecology, the book argues that, only when we end the hierarchical relations between human beings (men over women, young over old, one ethnicity or religion over another, etc.) will we be able to heal our relationship with the natural world.
All proceeds from sales of the book, published by Dog Section Press, support the work of the Internationalist Commune of Rojava.
A six metre high inflatable depiction of President Trump as an angry baby, designed by Matt Bonner, complete with a malevolent constipated grimace, orange skin, nappy-clad and a mobile phone clutched in his tiny hand.
The balloon was part of a series of protests against Trump’s first visit to the UK as president in July 2018. It was flown on his first day in the UK on Parliament Square in London, where tens of thousands of protestors attended and in Edinburgh the following day, where protests were also held.
Trump Baby garnered worldwide media attention, with Nigel Farage calling it "the biggest insult to a sitting US president ever." Donald Trump himself said of the balloon that "I guess when they put out blimps to make me feel unwelcome, no reason for me to go to London."
When President Trump returned to the UK in June 2019 for a full state visit in London, Trump Baby flew once again in Parliament Square. Hours before Trump’s arrival, a projection of Trump Baby lit up the famous White Cliffs of Dover and when Trump attended the 75th D-Day anniversary commemorations in Portsmouth the following day, images of Trump Baby appeared in bus stop advertising spaces across the city.
1. Emory Douglas, Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party.
2. A tribute to all martyrs of the Kurdish freedom movement, featuring Sakine Cansız, Abu Layla (Faisal Abdi Bilal Saadoun), Arîn Mîrkan, Şehîd Şahîn Qereçox (Farid Medjahed), Ş.Hêlîn Qereçox (Anna Campbell), Lêgerîn Çiya (Alina Sanchez), and Ş.Bager Nûjiyan (Michael Panser).
3. Abdullah Öcalan, political prisoner and founding member of the militant Kurdistan Workers' Party.
4. Ahed Tamimi, Palestinian activist from the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
5. Berta Cáceres, Honduran (Lenca) Honduran environmental and Indigenous activist and martyr.
6. Angela Davis, African American political activist, professor, author and once political prisoner.
Screen-printed t-shirt designs by Matt Bonner for Palestine Solidarity Campaign on the themes of the Palestinians’ right of return to their homeland and their struggle for freedom, justice and equality. The key is a symbol of support for the right of return - some Palestinians still hold the keys to the houses that they were forced from in 1948. Printed in collaboration with THTC. Photography by Ryan Ashcroft. Available to buy here.
Promotional images and materials for various Palestine Solidarity Campaign events and demonstrations.
Ad-space takeover posters and event flyers by Matt Bonner for Stop The Arms Fair and the massive mobilisation against DSEI, the world's biggest arms fair. Every two years, the international weapons industry showcases weapons and military hardware at ExCeL London, does deals with governments that include some serious human rights abusers, and makes a killing from conflict and repression. These designs appeared in bus stops, billboards and tube carriages across London to protest the 2017 arms fair and to promote various events and actions resisting it.
Posters created working with the youth-led campaigning group Legally Black, challenging the lack of black representation in the media. After the posters appeared in bus stops in Brixton their campaign garnered the attention of news outlets such as BBC, ITV as well as national press.
Poster designs by Matt Bonner for Brandalism COP21, a mass takeover of public advertising space across Paris during the COP21 summit, highlighting the corporate capture of the climate talks. 600 works by 80 artists drawing the links between advertising, consumerism, fossil fuel dependency and climate change.
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Flyers, stickers, posters and online materials for events by the direct action network, Reclaim The Power, including a mass action camp of activist training and workshops with a day of simultaneous direct actions against the fossil fuel industry, and an airport flashmob protesting aviation expansion.
Printed using soya inks using risograph printing that's low emission and requires 98% less energy than photocopying.
Artwork for No Pride In War, a coalition of LGBTQI+ and anti-war activists, in reaction to the increased military presence and the Ministry of Defence's plans for a Red Arrows flyover at the Gay Pride March 2016. The design appeared in bus stops along the march route and at Glastonbury Festival.
Two poster designs by Matt Bonner for TTIP Game Over in response to the signing of the CETA trade agreement in 2016.
The designs were two of 80 artworks that were illicitly installed in advertising spaces across Brussels as negotiations took place. This subvertising was part of a wave of action against the TTIP and CETA free trade agreements that give corporations new powers to sue governments through a special corporate court and have serious implications for the environment, workers' rights and food safety standards.
A series of portraits highlighting the UK's complicity in police and state violence both here and abroad, opposing the Security and Policing 2016 trade show - a Home Office-sponsored secretive shopping spree for the world's police and military forces, including delegations from some serious human rights abusers like Bahrain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, not to mention the UK itself. It's where private security companies make huge profits from racist policing, intrusive surveillance, violent border controls and endless wars.
Solidarity poster for the Plane Stupid activists who were sentenced in court for blockading a runway at Heathrow airport to highlight the contradiction between airport expansion and the desperate need to reduce global carbon emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The poster appeared in bus stops around London during the week before sentencing.
Campaign materials, including a twelve paged newspaper, for Global Justice Now and their mobilisation in Paris at the COP21 climate negotiations.
Subvertising by Matt Bonner for Banksy's Dismaland in protest against the taxpayer-subsidised DSEI arms fair, raising awareness of the atrocities being committed as a result of weapons sales facilitated by the UK government at the event.
The designs mimicked the look of Transport for London informational posters, an advert for the venue and arms company BAE Systems. The designs later appeared on underground tubes across the capital.
Petition card and poster for War on Want and their No TTIP campaign, subverting the famous Lord Kitchener military recruitment poster.
Flyers, placards, banners and online materials for Occupy Democracy and their political occupations of Parliament Square, challenging the systemic problem of corporate influence on government.
