Beachhead's Peace of Mind.

The premise of the show states the following: the selected art works, which politically share a common ground demanding critical thinking, social justice, and global peace, the exhibition retrieves an archival image found on the Internet associated with the newspaper, Beachhead, which appeared in Venice of California in 1968. Inspired by the unique history of Beachhead, Allen Ginsberg’s “Flower Power” and also the rich New Zealand history of political protests against land confiscation, nuclear energy, and racial discrimination, Beachhead’s Peace of Mind is constructed through an urgent call for peace.  Borrowing Beachhead’s strategy of writing, printing and distributing an open ended form of content development, and process based community oriented editorial approach; the project does not only investigate the currencies of how we can imagine a better world, but it commits to generating an online blog of artistic research, archive material and content in the public domain on collectivity, physicality and contemporaneity of resistance and hope.  With contextual focuses on specific projects from the Middle East with links to its location and global agenda, the exhibition operates as a critical agency for rethinking how migration, national borders and transnationalism influence our understandings of peace, the ethics of war and global terrorism. The programme includes two closed events in different locations with strongly referential histories and highly relevant currencies that aim to generate critical reflections through the re-visits that this project undertakes.