Helen Cammock’s National Portrait Gallery video has ignited a dispute over Churchill, empire, and the limits of museum display
A 40-minute video by British artist Helen Cammock (b. 1970), on view at London’s National Portrait Gallery since September 2025, has drawn criticism for a passage linking Winston Churchill to the Bengal famine of 1943. The work, Persistence (2025), is part of the museum’s Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture project, but its historical claims have pushed it into a wider argument about interpretation, accountability, and artistic freedom.
The controversy intensified after The Telegraph reported that the piece criticizes several national figures represented in the taxpayer-funded museum and suggests that Churchill used mass starvation as a weapon of war. According to that report, Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, who published a 2018 biography of Churchill, called the claim a “barefaced lie.” The newspaper also said a letter to the National Portrait Gallery’s board, signed by 50 people including Churchill’s grandson, described the film as an “ideologically motivated rant.”
Cammock did not directly respond to the Churchill allegation in a statement, but framed the work as a yearlong inquiry into portraiture itself. She said Persistence considers “who is honoured and valorised and who is not; whose stories are told and whose are not,” and examines how histories are created and sustained through systems of social and economic power. She added that the work draws on research inside and outside the gallery’s archives and collection, moving between histories that are present in the institution and those that are absent.
The National Portrait Gallery said the work was commissioned in 2023 and that it supports “freedom of artistic expression” while not necessarily endorsing the views expressed by artists shown there. The museum also emphasized that it regularly invites artists to respond to its collection.
Persistence is one of nine commissions in Artists First, alongside works by Mary Evans, Charmaine Watkiss, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, and the duo Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley. The exhibition revisits one of the gallery’s founding principles: collecting portraits that privilege the celebrity of the sitter over the merit of the artist. Cammock’s film, which includes images of the NPG building, its archives, gallery works, and figures such as Ethel Smyth, Ada Lovelace, Charlotte Mew, and Nina Simone, turns that principle into a question about who gets remembered, and on whose terms.
