TRUTH TO POWER

TRUTH TO POWER is a new touring exhibition based on the long-running socially engaged participatory theatre project Truth to Power Café by award-winning performance maker and activist Jeremy Goldstein. The touring exhibition reworks an extensive international archive of lived experience to create a compelling and inspiring gallery show of participant testimony, photography, poetry, audio-visual material, objects and flags by UK’s leading banner maker for the Trade Union movement Ed Hall.

At its core, the exhibition is structured around a simple but powerful provocation: “Who has power over you, and what do you want to say to them?” Personal, professional, political, speaking truth to power is a non-violent means of conflict resolution, the origins of which lie in the anti-war movement.

Drawing on over 1,000 participants in 11 countries, the exhibition celebrates the radical power of lived experience and shared humanity through a significant living archive of personal testimony, social history, and collective experiences that shape modern life. The exhibition creates a unique space where local audiences can enter an intimate exploration of the archive, contribute to it via public programming, and, in some cases, use their voice, vulnerability, and endurance to speak their truth to power in front of their own communities before the people who matter to them.

Driven by memory, power and desire, untold stories of loss, hope and resistance from participants in Australia, the USA, Canada, Europe and the UK combine to create a unique meditation on time, place and community, and the complexities of the human condition and our evolving relationships to power.

TRUTH TO POWER is inspired by the political and philosophical beliefs of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter and his inner circle, The Hackney Gang, who included Jeremy’s late father, Mick Goldstein, and poet and actor Henry Woolf, whose sublime poetry bejewels the exhibition. The Hackney Gang maintained their belief in speaking truth to power and remained firmly on the side of the occupied, the disempowered, and their allies. It is these people we have invited to take part in the project and speak their truth to power.