Four Corners was an independent film workshop originally formed in 1974 by a group of students at the London Film School. What made Four Corners' work distinctive was its engagement with local communities in London's East End and a film practice that sought to represent marginalised lives and experiences in the workshop's immediate environment. Alongside its film productions, Four Corners organised film workshops (a practice which continues today) and an ambitious series of film screenings and discussion groups exploring issues that remain resonant and pressing today - including women's lives, representations of gender, sexuality and race, poverty and political activism. This project will explore Four Corners' experimental film production and exhibition work in the 1970s and 1980s through an understanding of the social, cultural and political contexts in which they were making and showing films. It will explore the workshop as part of a growing independent film culture in the 1970s and alongside other collectives and workshops supported by new funding from the Greater London Council, Channel 4 and the BFI. It will pay particular attention to Four Corners' locality in Bethnal Green, East London: the quintessential site of social investigation epitomised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott's 1957 book Family and Kinship in East London, and a socio-political landscape for industrial working-class and minority ethnic communities being reshaped under Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments. Four Corners' paper archive is held in the special collections at the BFI and Bishopsgate Institute, and was digitised thanks to a 2016 Heritage Lottery Fund grant. The digital archive holds a fascinating array of production files, photographs and film screening posters, which the project will use to explore the film workshop's history. These cover Four Corners' film projects - including, for instance, On Allotments (1976), a poetic documentary about a Newham allotment site facing demise in the form of an international lorry park development, and Bred and Born (1983), a feminist documentary centring on three generations of women in the same family living in Shadwell, which was developed from a series of public workshops exploring the theme of mothers and daughters held in Bethnal Green. The posters for film seasons and programmes held in the archive are testament to the way in which film exhibition was a key part of Four Corners' practice, offering vivid evidence of the workshop's social concerns, their intersecting work with political groups and their relationships with other film collectives and workshops in this period. Through a series of public events - including film screenings, talks and discussion groups - and publications, the project's aim is to develop a new history of the Four Corners' Film Workshop focusing on its work in East London from 1975 to 1990. Drawing on the collections held at the BFI and Bishopsgate Institute, as well as other archives including Tower Hamlets Local History Library and the LSE Women's Library, this project will contribute to a flourishing field of study exploring British independent film culture in the 1970s and 80s. It will interrogate the significance of Four Corners' work in the local area in which it was originally based; specifically, it will contextualise the workshop in relation to local, community histories, memories and issues facing audiences living in Tower Hamlets and neighbouring boroughs today.

'"The Materialisation of Persuasion": Modernist Exhibitions in Britain for Propaganda and Resistance, 1933 to 1953' investigates exhibitions developed for communication of propaganda and resistance from the inter- to the post-war period in Britain. The exhibitions that are central to this project were intended to influence or persuade, with ideas, not objects, as the central focus. Pivotal to this project is a vision, which the designers shared, of such exhibitions as active and participative 'demonstrations', as acts of provocation, rather than as 'displays' seen by a passive audience, primarily acting as platforms for displaying the fruits of commerce, trade, industry or the arts. This vision was initially inspired by exhibitions held in Russia and Germany and informed the visual language of the early British welfare state. This project will focus, in particular, on a range of exhibitions developed by the Artists' International Association (AIA) from 1933 and the Ministry of Information from 1940, intended to inspire hope, pride and to teach the populous new skills. These can, as shorthand, be described as "propaganda" or "information" exhibitions, although the complexities and contradictions of these titles will be addressed within this project. These were mounted by a network of designers including Misha Black (1910-1972), F.H.K. Henrion (1914-1990), James Holland (1905-1996), Milner Gray (1899-1997) and Richard Levin (1910-2000), all of whom worked on exhibitions during the two decades from 1933 and were members of interlinking personal, professional and activist networks, many of them recent arrivals fleeing the Nazi threat. AIA artist-members included many of the most significant British artists of the time: Henry Moore (1898-1986), Eric Gill (1882-1940), Augustus John (1878-1961), Vanessa Bell (1879-1961) and Paul Nash (1889-1946); while the Ministry of Information's Exhibitions Division employed celebrated Modernist architects Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) and Peter Moro (1911-1998). This research will connect propaganda exhibitions held across a range of locations around, and beyond, Britain during these decades. They were mounted by an extended network of designers, for whom group-work was an important manifestation of a belief in collaboration and collectivity. It will assert this as a key, but largely overlooked, element in British Modernism. Particular case studies will include various AIA exhibitions mounted from 1934 (for example 'Art for the People', 1939 held at Whitechapel Art Gallery and 'For Liberty', 1943, held on a London bombsite); The Peace Pavilion at the Paris World Fair, 1937; The Modern Architecture Group (or MARS) exhibition, 1937; Picasso's Guernica touring sites around Britain including a car showroom, 1937-8; Empire Exhibition, Glasgow, 1938 (in particular installations by Misha Black); the British Pavilion at New York World's Fair, 1939; Aid to Russia, 1942; Ministry of Information exhibitions mounted in sites such as Charing Cross Underground Station and travelling round Britain to shops and village halls from 1940-45; and by Central Office of Information from 1946; and Britain Can Make It, V&A, 1946, (specifically installations by Design Research Unit). Drawing on primary and secondary sources, this project will also make comparisons of the style, content and ideological impetus of other exhibitions mounted across Europe and North America during the same period. Major outputs of "The Materialisation of Persuasion" will be: a monograph entitled 'Modernism, Propaganda and the Public: Exhibitions in Britain 1933-1953'; a co-edited essay collection 'Beyond Boundaries: Art and Design Exhibitions as Transnational Exchange from 1945'; a methodologically-focused journal article; and a documentary film exploring British propaganda exhibitions during this period and assessing their significance today.