Contagious Acts
Contagious Acts interrogates the heritage, rituals and aesthetics of gathering; whether on the medieval battlefield, the dance floor, the factory floor, or the football stadium.
These spaces remain battlegrounds of power and protest while also functioning as sites of cultural production and resistance.
Drawing from an unlikely collision of cultural references, in Contagious Acts, Holman seamlessly bridges medieval art history with contemporary iconography, where record sleeves and song titles hold equal significance to illuminated manuscripts, tapestry, and post-Reformation painting. Holman explores the intertwined histories of class, governance, and the politics of collective gatherings—across the two fundamental spheres of working-class experience: Labour and Leisure or Work and Play.
Holman proposes that the act of coming together—whether in celebration, dissent, or tradition—is deeply political, inextricably tied to class, identity, and belonging, revealing what he describes as Britain’s ongoing crisis of identity.
Commissioned by The Whitaker & The Second Act, funded by Arts Council England
The Forlorn Hope, 2025
In Every Dream Home A Heartache, 2024
Contagious Acts, 2024
The Forgotten Five a Side, 2025
In God We Trust (Retreat), 2024
In God We Trust (Battle Cry)
England Expects, 2025
In Every Dream Home A Heartache 2, 2024
Destriers, 2024
Clapping Music (After John Cage) 2024
Anonymity, 2025
Dishing It Out, 2024
Suggestibility, 2025
England Expects, 2025
Chira, 2024
The Charge, 2024
Set Piece, 2024
Salient : Passant, 2024
The First Great Artwork of the 20th Century is... 2024
‘Contagious Acts’ began as ‘24 hands’ which expanded to become a museum take-over at The Whitaker
‘Public Order Act : Where 12 or more persons who are present together use or threaten unlawful violence for a common purpose; and the conduct of them (taken together) is such as would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his personal safety, each of the persons using unlawful violence for the common purpose is guilty of riot.’
Expressing the current and historic expression of governance and state violence across industry, working class people and protests. Holman's 'Destriers' series located governance and state violence in both public and domestic spaces, exploring working class protest, crowd theory and police control strategies, as part of an English heritage that first appears in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Ultimately concerned with the everyday banality of violence and these works are both bleak in their relentless overview of state oppression, while at the same time, uplifting in the hopeful resistance of ordinary people, during extraordinary circumstances.
Elements of this exhibition can be seen at Belfast Shadows & Labour / Leisure.
