Year of Rage

Dan Donovan directed, filmed and edited Year of Rage video. He has worked on four previous videos for Deux Furieuses. Derbyshire born to a Welsh preacher, Dan moved to Fenland, England in the mid nineties and works as a video director, photographer, graphic designer, musician. After leaving school in 1976 with nothing more than a CSE grade 1 in Art, his life and career journey has been open and broad. The skills he has learnt have been self taught and the recent discovery that he is dyslexic led him to realise the importance of the leftfield thinking which has defined his style, approach and character.

Alannah Currie's work with Sisters of Perpetual Resistance and her 'Feel the Rage' blog directly inspired Deux Furieuses to use the red flag and black hood ideas for Year of Rage. She facilited the production at her Doyce Street, London art studio, made red flags, threw a party, made a cameo appearance in the video and was on hand to assist with art direction alongside Dan Donovan and husband Jimmy Cauty (formerly of The KLF) on camera duties.

Alannah Currie was born 1957 in New Zealand and trained as a radio journalist before coming to London in 1977 attracted by the idea of a punk revolution. The same South London squats which incubated the Slits and the KLF hatched Alannah’s first political actions – she formed an anarchic girl band called the Unfuckables.

“Although we did only one gig we destroyed a lot of sexist billboards with black paint. Feminism proved more potent than punk.”

In 1981 Alannah became one third of the hugely successful pop band the Thompson Twins. For 15 years she continued writing, recording, and performing around the world, working alongside pop giants including Debbie Harry, Madonna, Nile Rogers and Grace Jones. In 1996 Currie ended her music career and returned to the bush of NZ with her two children to live a more reclusive life. Here she began writing stories and retrained as a glass caster and welder.

ART AND ACTIVISM
In 2001 Currie founded and ran the notorious anti GM movement in NZ called MAdGE working alongside Greenpeace organising protests, marches and mobilising women in supermarket boycotts.
In 2004 she designed a series of protest billboards that caused controversy in New Zealand but won several international art/science awards.

MISS POKENO
Returning to London where she now works under the name Miss Pokeno, she continues to make art that fuses ″joyful dissent″ with disruptive/uncomfortable narratives. Her practice plays on the boundary between the humorous and threatening. In 2010 she began working with the militant feminist activists, the Sisters of Perpetual Resistance. The Sisters commissioned Miss Pokeno to create work for their South London HQ with the only brief being to “glorify that which is too ugly for words”. This caught the attention of Deux Furieuses who attended several art exhibitions at her Doyce Street art studio.