Around ten years ago I began a new web site, My London Diary, mainly to provide a record of things I saw happening in London that never made the news. Among these were protests, some about local issues, some national and others global in their scope. I’d been photographing protest for years, but saw this as a new way to make my work available to others, create a historical record and gain publicity for the causes.

There are now over 50,000 pictures on My London Diary, as well as my comments about most of the events. Many have been used by activist groups in newsletters and flyers (usually without charge for unfunded organisations) and some published in newspapers, books and magazines in the UK and abroad. Some are also available though picture libraries.

From its earliest days the site shows the international nature of protest in London, with the handful of pictures from 1999 including a Westminster protest calling for NATO to get out of the Balkans, Jubilee 2000 calling on the UK government to “cancel the debt”, solidarity with East Timor and members of London’s Kurdish community calling for the release of Abdullah Öcalan.

So far in 2011 as well as local marches against the cuts in Islington and Hackney, UK Uncut actions, students protesting the loss of EMA, protests against unfair testing for disabled benefits, against privatisation of Royal Mail, calling for the release of Shaker Aamer from Guantanamo, I’ve also covered protests calling for freedom for Kashmir and Khalistan, opposing cuts in the BBC World Service, solidarity with the Libyan, Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and more – including a pillow fight against unsuitable high-rise development in Walthamstow.

A small selection from the site will be projected at Rich Mix during 6 Billion Ways – but the whole growing collection can be seen on-line at http://mylondondiary.co.uk

Peter Marshall

Images in this post are © Peter Marshall

Celebrate Peoples’ History is a project by US-based artist collective Just Seeds. Its a gradually expanding collection of posters produced by different artists to help remember and celebrate the struggles of ordinary people against injustice, and for dignity, decent livelihoods and liberation from oppression. At 6 Billion Ways we will be displaying a selection of their 12 year project inside Rich Mix.

The exhibition coincides with the UK release of a book which brings together the full range of posters with an introduction by project co-ordinator Josh MacPhee and a foreward by Rebecca Solnit.

In 2010, in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, art activists staged a dramatic series of performances in cultural institutions to protest against oil companies like BP and Shell sponsoring gallery spaces like the Tate. Gushing from floral skirts, spilling elegantly from giant white eggs, jetting from paint tubes across the floor of the iconic Tate Turbine Hall, the flood of oily resistance that followed has generated a fierce debate in the art world around oil, ethics and sponsorship.

The Liberate Tate exhibition of iconic photographs from the performances will be shown at 6 Billion Ways in collaboration with PLATFORM and Art Not Oil, and documents both the striking esthetic of the interventions, as well as a number of choice quotes that have come out of the ensuing public debate.

For more detail on the arguments against oil sponsorship of the arts, download the “Licence to Spill” pamphlet (pdf).

Liberate Tate workshop

London’s biggest cultural institutions take money from the UK’s biggest oil companies BP and Shell. What do the oil companies get out of this arrangement? More than a free trip to the opera? In the past year 6 performance interventions have occurred inside galleries and musuems. In this workshop Platform and Liberate Tate will tell the story of Big Oil’s sponsorship of the arts, creative resistance against it, and how we can push for change.

This workshop will take place at 5pm in the self-organised space in Rich Mix’s bar area.