Medals of Dishonour exhibition

Medals are most often thought of as sports prizes, or ways to honour people - but they have a long history and other functions, as shown in this exhibition at the British Museum till 27 Sept.

The highlight is the medals of condemnation commissioned from 13 artists, and many can be seen in the "Object Highlights" on the exhibition's website.

We Know Who You Are, We Know What You Have Done by Cornelia Parker - the format of the medal implies that these two rascals are having a tete-at-tete to plan further nefarious deeds -
Yun-Fei Ji's Coalition of the Willing also uses the two-sided format to advantage -
The "artwork" for Grayson Perry's For Faith in Shopping is much larger than the finished size - the reduction process keeps the detail, and has been used since the 19th century -
Another type of artwork is the project proposal - this one by Mona Hatoum -

Felicity Powell's Hot Air started as a series of wax models, beautiful in themselves -

The choices for the medal have the ribbon wound between them (object 18 here)
Another way of working - carving into thick watercolour paper - this was used to cast the background of Ellen Gallagher's An Experiment of Unusual Opportunity (object 8 here). This infamous biomedical experiment consisted of withholding treatment for syphilis among black inmates at Tuskegee prison for 40 years, even though penicillin was available to treat the disease.
Langlands and Bell's Virtual World uses codes - abbreviations for airports, NGOs working in Afghanistan, and a mixture of state-sponsored and banned organisations on the colourful side, suggesting the violence that links them, and the internet domain codes of 60 countries on the other - showing that these organisations also operate in the virtual world.
Finally, a 1920 medal by Karl Goetz related to something I learned about via my son's studies in African history - the involvement of many thousands of African soldiers in World War I, fighting for France, their colonial overlord (and forgotten, unrecompensed by the French state, thereafter).

The caption says: "This German medal protests against the presence of black soldiers among the french troops stationed in the occupied areas of Germany's Rhineland after the First World War. Unfounded reports of sexual crimes are the basis of Goetz's attack agains what the artist calls The black shame'. On the other side of the medal (right) a black soldier is linked to France by the letters RF (for French Republic) on his helmet and the ironic use of the official French motto, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity'. The caricatured features and exotic earring underline the medal's racist message."