Audio Transcript: Sir John Tusa, Managing Director of the Barbican, on Langlands & Bell

“What I like about this work is that it’s a very political work and I think that in general, political art is either not well done and very often not at all attempted.

And Langlands & Bell have taken something which is actually very complicated and then turned it into something which looks simple but is very subtle.

For example, most people apart from noticing that there are a lot of NGOs in a place like Afghanistan, wouldn’t look at the symbolism. The great thing is that Langlands & Bell then strip away the identity of the individual agencies by reducing them all to one typeface. That gives them a universality and that tells us, I think, a number of things. First of all the bureaucratisation of the whole aid business, secondly its distance from people, thirdly that these are letters which satisfy the people who have them but mean absolutely nothing to the people who are at the receiving end. And the desperate attempt of some like WIN or SAVED, as it were to convince the world that their name shows that they have compassion, I think only heightens the irony of what Langlands & Bell have found in this proliferation of agencies.

And the more the image proliferates into this grid of acronyms and initials the more painful the contrast between what they claim to be doing and what they are doing, seems to be.”