Artist Helen Cammock has withdrawn her video work Persistence (2025) from an exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery following controversy around the piece’s assertion that Winston Churchill had wilfully starved the Indian population during the 1943 Bengal famine.
The work had been on view since last September as part of the National Portrait Gallery’s Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture exhibition, inviting contemporary artists to create works in dialogue with the museum’s collection. Persistence considers the collection’s representation of well-known sitters to question ‘who has value and who has worth’, according to the museum website.
Earlier this month, an article by Craig Simpson for The Telegraph denounced Cammock’s work for its ‘attack on British leaders’, citing the video’s statement about Winston Churchill and other ‘historical “purveyors of violence”, including empire-builders Benjamin Disraeli and Cecil Rhodes’. An open letter to the gallery was then published by Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, claiming that the facts about Churchill were incorrect. The letter was signed by over 50 people including Nicholas Soames, Churchill’s grandson.
On 22 June, the BBC reported that Cammock withdrew the work. ‘There is an incredible pressure on artists and arts institutions to bend to external pressure; to be benign at best and silent at worst’, she said in a statement. ‘I do not accept this pressure. To question, challenge and explore ideas and histories is vital to a healthy society and art is intrinsic to this.’
