Hostilities Will Slip

Holly Graham’s commissioned poster Hostilities Will Slip continues her engagement with Tony Dowmunt’s film Cultural Herb Festival (1983), which Graham screened in 2022 during her 2022 project ACTION!. Hostilities Will Slip was made in the wake of this year’s Notting Hill Carnival and after a turbulent summer when far right anti-immigration terrorists took to the streets. Graham’s poster draws on imagery from Dowmunt’s Cultural Herb Festival and considers how community events serve both as spaces for unity and cohesion, and act as symbols of vibrant multiculturalism that hide deeper systematic issues.

Cultural Herb Festival will be screened alongside other materials from the London Community Video Archive (LCVA), at FormaHQ as part of the wider screening programme for AFI'24, 26 September - 26 October 2024.

Profits from the sale of Graham’s poster will be donated to Young Roots, a Southwark-based charity that supports young refugees and asylum seekers, most of whom are alone in the UK without their families. 

Designed and gifted by Holly Graham in response to Artists' Film International 2024 at FormaHQ. 

With stills from Cultural Herb Festival (1983), Tony Dowment. Courtesy of Albany Video and the LCVA.