The exhibition at The Drawing Room, London  demonstrates the power of drawing to challenge and question, its capacity to record and reflect protest, and to produce images that bear witness to social injustice and even the horrors of war. The drawings move beyond documentation of man’s inhumanity to man, and become active agents in understanding how political ideals are corrupted, and a reminder not to stand by, but to act. Drawing is particularly suited to representing evidence as it is a legible medium; to look closely at a drawing is to trace the history of its making and in this sense each drawing acts as its own witness.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2007 (demonstration drawing #78), 2007  (Source: Drawing Room)

The artists in Graphic Witness employ different drawing modes to produce evidence of conflict and suffering, commentaries on injustice and as tools to prompt social change. These wide ranging graphic responses question accepted histories, speculate on alternative scenarios and propose new trajectories.

Artists: Mounira al Solh, Catherine Anyango Grünewald, Andrea Bowers, Nidhal Chamekh, Eugenio Dittborn, Joy Gerrard, Leon Golub, Beatriz González, George Grosz, Erik van Lieshout, Lorna Simpson, Nancy Spero and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Graphic Witness (18 May – 9 July 2017) is curated by Kate Macfarlane