Sacrilege

Deller’s Sacrilege was aimed at people of all ages as a light-hearted way for people to think about one of the UK’s most iconic historic monuments and to induce a sense of play. 

Sacrilege was a co-commission between Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art and the Mayor of London, with support from Arts Council England. The project travelled to 26 locations around the UK as part of the London 2012 Festival.  For further information see:  www.sacrilege2012.co.uk 

Jeremy Deller 

Jeremy Deller is a celebrated British artist who makes politically and socially charged performance works. He was born in London and studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art.  Deller was winner of the Turner Prize in 2004 for his installation Memory Bucket (2003) a documentary about Crawford, Texas the hometown of George W Bush and the siege in nearby Waco. Acting as catalyst or instigator, Deller creates provocative works about social history or recent events that encourage us to look at one kind of ‘culture’ through the lens of another. The History of the World flow diagram maps ‘a thought process in action’ which connects traditional Brass Bands with Acid House music. The work shows that the two musical forms have a lot in common; they are both types of British folk music with strong northern roots, and have at times been associated with civil disorder. The Battle of Orgreave documents a re-enactment of an actual, violent conflict during the 1984/5 miner’s strike. The installation It Is What It Is originated as a project to provoke conversations about Iraq. Its centrepiece is the tangled, burnt-out corpse of a car which was destroyed in a bomb explosion in Baghdad.