Media & Myth, Hundred Years Gallery
9 – 18 October 2014

The Media & Myth exhibition brings together material produced for the London College of Communication’s NAM project, which explored the role of the media in the Vietnam War.  Participants in the project have taken diverse approaches to this broad topic, from examining the ways in which photography was used to record the conflict, to looking at the culture of underground zine production that took place amongst US servicemen stationed in south-east Asia.

Media & Myth also includes photographs drawn from the Stanley Kubrick archive, which proved to be a key resource for many of the participants in the NAM project. On display are images produced during the making of the director’s 1987 Vietnam War film Full Metal Jacket, which reveal how Kubrick sought to dress and disguise the disused Becton Gas Works site in East London as the set of the battle-scarred Vietnamese city of Hue. Media & Myth coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident. This attack by North Vietnamese boats on the warship USS Maddox was used by the United States government as a pretext to escalate its military involvement in Vietnam, despite  furnishing only scant evidence in the form of a series of grainy and indistinct photographs. Curated by Lewis Bush and Monica Alcazar-Duarte, with Paul Lowe. Participating artists: Jacob Balzani Lööv, Madeleine Corcoran, Cinzia D’Ambrosi, Julia Johnson, Veronika Lukasova, Steve Mepsted, Amin Musa, Linka A. Odom, Lewis Bush and Monica Alcazar-Duarte.