Cold War and ‘Other Narratives’

This exhibition presents work by postgraduate students from the MA Design for Art Direction at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. The work was developed within the Collaborative Unit led by Senior Lecturer Lucy Sanderson, in partnership with the research project Cold War and ‘Other Narratives’ by Autograph's director Professor Mark Sealy and Dr Jack Bowman, and the Imperial War Museums.

Taking the Cold War as its starting point, the exhibition looks at how global power was shaped and maintained across the West’s colonial territories. Often understood as a stand-off between East and West, the Cold War was also lived through proxy wars, independence movements, propaganda, surveillance, and everyday forms of control. Many of these experiences were recorded visually.

Working with material from the IWM archive, students engage with photographs, posters, pamphlets, diaries, and printed ephemera, many of which depict violence. These images were not neutral. They were produced within systems of empire and used to define allies and enemies, insiders and outsiders.

The works in this exhibition examine how ideas of the ‘other’ were constructed and circulated, and how categories of race, gender, class, and power intersect and shift. The exhibition brings together perspectives from across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and beyond, resisting a single, fixed narrative.

The exhibition is designed as an invitation for reflection and sit with difficult histories. Rather than offering conclusions, Cold War and ‘Other Narratives’ asks how images shape memory, how archives shape understanding, and how design can open space for more nuanced and dialogic ways of engaging with the past.