Helen Cammock has removed her video installation Persistence from the National Portrait Gallery. The Turner Prize-winning Artist’s work came down on Monday, after a week of escalating pressure, including a letter signed by more than fifty peers calling for its removal. Cammock said the decision was hers. The gallery said it respected it.
Persistence is a forty-minute narrated video that Cammock made in response to the NPG’s permanent collection. It had been on temporary display for ten months and was due to run until August. In the work, Cammock compares Oliver Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland with Winston Churchill’s conduct during the 1943 Bengal famine, describing what she calls Churchill’s wilful starvation of the Indian population. That line became the centre of a dispute that moved quickly from critical disagreement to coordinated institutional pressure.
The letter to the gallery’s board was organised by the historian and peer Andrew Roberts, who described the installation as an ideologically motivated rant. Among the more than fifty signatories was Sir Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson. The Telegraph ran a piece criticising the work, describing Cammock’s characterisation of Churchill’s role in the famine as incorrect and framing the famine itself as a lethal food shortage caused by natural disasters and exacerbated by local mismanagement and wartime supply problems.
The academic debate around Churchill and Bengal is considerably less settled than that account suggests. Other historians have argued that Churchill ignored repeated warnings of rice shortages and that policy decisions, including diverting food supplies across the British Empire rather than directing them toward India, substantially worsened the famine in which an estimated 3 million people in eastern India died. That dispute has been running in academic literature for decades and shows no signs of resolution, which is part of what makes it such a charged subject when it surfaces in a public institution.
Cammock has been direct about what she thinks happened. “There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst,” she said in a statement. “I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society, and art is intrinsic to this.” She also cited Nina Simone: an artist’s duty, as far as Simone was concerned, is to reflect the times. The quotation was well chosen. The gap between what Cammock said she was doing and what her critics said she was doing is, in the end, a disagreement over whose account of history gets treated as settled fact in a publicly funded institution.
The gallery’s position was careful. It defended artistic freedom, acknowledged the upset caused, noted that the work was presented as an artistic piece rather than a documentary, and confirmed that the views expressed did not necessarily reflect those of the NPG. None of that stopped the removal. Whether Cammock withdrew the work to protect it from further institutional compromise or because the situation had become untenable is a distinction the public statement does not quite resolve, and perhaps cannot.
Cammock jointly won the Turner Prize in 2019. Persistence had been commissioned as part of a programme that invited artists to create personal, creative responses to the NPG’s collection. The gallery said it recognised the legacy of those portrayed on its walls, just as it respected artistic expression. Both things, it turns out, are easier to say together than to hold together in practice.
Top Photo: Helen Cammock Photo by Thierry Bal, courtesy of Whitechapel Gallery.