Helen Cammock Withdraws 40-Minute NPG Film After 50 Peers Challenge Churchill Famine Claim
Updated
Updated · BBC.com · Jun 22
Helen Cammock Withdraws 40-Minute NPG Film After 50 Peers Challenge Churchill Famine Claim
1 articles · Updated · BBC.com · Jun 22
Summary
Helen Cammock removed her 40-minute video installation "Persistence" from the National Portrait Gallery on Monday after a public row over its claim that Winston Churchill was responsible for the "wilful starvation" of Indians in the 1943 Bengal famine.
More than 50 peers, led by Churchill biographer Lord Roberts and including Churchill's grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, signed an open letter calling that description false and an "ideologically motivated rant".
The gallery said the work had been presented for 10 months as an artistic response rather than a documentary and that the views in the film did not necessarily reflect the NPG's position.
Cammock, a Turner Prize winner, said the piece was grounded in academic debate and argued artists and institutions should resist pressure to stay "benign at best and silent at worst".
The dispute turns on Churchill's contested role in a famine that killed an estimated 3 million people, with critics blaming wartime policy and defenders citing a typhoon and Churchill's efforts to secure grain.