Puffing on a vape, Peter Kennard flicks through an old notebook, showing me cutouts of his first commission. The images are already fixed in the now iconic Kennard style — an ominous Richard Nixon delivering his State of the Union address, whilst Edward Heath and a crowd representing the British public subserviently pay witness. The piece is dated January 29 1971. The publication? Tribune.

Over fifty years later, I’m sitting in Kennard’s studio — tucked away in Hackney — speaking to the artist for the same publication. We’re surrounded by boxed-up art for his Whitechapel Gallery exhibition, titled Archive of Dissent, which documents work from across his long career. Next to us is a mountain of Kennard’s carefully filed art. It’s less of an archive of his work, he tells me, and more of a ‘social history than an art thing, because you’ve got all these amazing lefty and underground mags.’

Kennard’s leftist awakening came while studying art at the Slade School of Fine Art in the late 1960s, during the height of the Vietnam War. At that point, he says, ‘there was a real sense of a potential for change and art being a factor in that change.’ Kennard shifted from painting to photomontage because, he tells me, ‘a photo is using a bit of actual reality.’ This meant it was easier to comment on and reflect urgent current events.

Perhaps also a result of his exposure to the events in Vietnam, the central theme of Kennard’s work is war and the military-industrial complex: be it the CIA-backed coup in Chile, apartheid in South Africa, or the current conflict in Ukraine. This breadth of work is clear at the exhibition, where tons of posters, placards, and books containing his work are carefully laid out, offering a radical history of global protest and struggle.

Art must cover global events, he says, as ‘most people are not going to sit down and read a book by Chomsky, but they might see an image for a few seconds, and that image might just get them thinking critically.’  One of Kennard’s most popular works is a spoof of John Constable’s The Hay Wain: one of the most enduring depictions of the English pastoral in British art suddenly spoiled by cruise missiles. Chuckling, Kennard tells me that he has even liaised with Ministry of Defence staffers to provide their own internal photographs for his work.

What Kennard’s work does most often is juxtapose the normal, or the supposedly normal, to reveal the ridiculousness of our perceived normality. One piece features a skeleton holding the famous Protect and Survive pamphlet distributed by the British government in the 1970s to advise a wary public on surviving nuclear attack. Another piece — Defended to Death — depicts the Earth wearing a gasmask, whose eyes carry the UK and US flags, the mouth filled with missiles. The piece was a commission for the 2003 Stop the War protests ahead of the UK invasion of Iraq.

‘With montage, the meaning is within the image,’ says Kennard, which means ‘it’s difficult for people to hijack it.’ This isn’t always the case: Kennard tells me one story about his work Thatcher Regina, which juxtaposed the Conservative Prime Minister’s face onto that of Queen Victoria in response to the Tories’ call for a return to Victorian values. Laughing darkly, Kennard tells me Thatcher was flattered by the comparison, and he was told at a museum opening by an anonymous Number 10 visitor that Thatcher had the image hanging in the Downing Street bathroom. ‘Thatcher loved it,’ he frowns, ‘that’s a disaster if true.’

Kennard distances himself from photography, which he still values, saying his role is to ‘respond to the stuff coming in and to the news through images.’ Speaking to Kennard, I get the sense he sees the world in pieces, ready to be stitched together. When I ask whether his process of collage has changed in the digital age, he says he still prefers the physical cutting and splicing of physical imagery to Photoshop, enjoying the Brechtian qualities (Brecht, he tells me, is ‘really inspiring’) of traditional montage. Just as Brecht wanted to make theatre audiences aware that what they were watching was constructed, Kennard likes the viewer to know how his images are constructed, done so to reveal a hidden truth from the establishment information.

Whilst Kennard has constantly worked to produce images for protest movements in the twenty-first century, he tells me that his images tend to prove less sticky in the digital age. ‘It’s very difficult now to make an image that hangs around very long because you’re bombarded with stuff everywhere online,’ says the artist, ‘It’s difficult to make an image that sticks.’ And yet he tirelessly continues, even more so having recently retired from his role as Professor of Political Art at London’s Royal College of Art.

As our times closes, the conversation drifts — as these inevitably do — towards contemporary politics. Kennard is disaffected from the current political system and our new Labour government. ‘I have not got great hope in the Labour Party,’ he says, ‘maybe it’s another party that I need now.’ However, all is not lost: ‘I’ve got hope in young people, and I have been really inspired by the worldwide protests amongst young people.’

We get onto Palestine, which, Kennard says, is ‘at the top of one’s mind all the time.’ This has reflected in his artwork: including a Palestine flag where the red drips down and stains the white of the flag. Kennard argues that the ongoing Israel-Gaza War has a radicalising potential. ‘It’s just so powerful and so blatant,’ he says, ‘people can’t ignore it.’ Kennard tells me he has been reading a lot of poetry recently. ‘I find poetry quite similar to montage in some way because it’s working with images, you know, a whole line can be an image.’ As our conversation closes, he takes out his notebook to read me some lines by the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul:

‘In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political

I must listen to the birds

and in order to hear the birds

the warplanes must be silent.’