Exhibitions and displays allow us to share the archive beyond our reading room. In recent years artwork, objects, photographs and written records from our collections have been exhibited across the country and internationally.
Made up entirely of prints from our Guardian archive, this exhibition showcased more than 200 editorial images in the newspaper's bicentenary year.
Posy Simmonds' cartoons and illustrations have appeared in the Guardian since the 1970s. Our extensive collection of her original artwork has been featured in recent exhibitions at the Cartoonmuseum, Basel in 2021 and the Bibliothèque publique d'information, Paris earlier this year.
This exhibtion marked 200 years of The Guardian, bringing together items from our archive and the Manchester Guardian archive at the host instution in the newspaper's home town.
Our most frequestly exhibited objects include a collection of destroyed computer components. These smashed hard drives, monitors and USB sticks once contained NSA files leaked to the Guardian by Edward Snowden. They were destroyed on GCHQ orders and the broken fragments transferred to our archive. A dismantled MacBook Air from this collection is on long term loan to the V&A and currently on display in their Design 1900 – Now gallery. In recent years similar items have been included in a number of exhibitions across the UK and abroad:
Top Secret: From ciphers to cyber security. The Science Museum Group, London, Manchester and Bradford, 2019-2022
Breaking the News: 500 Years of News in Britain. British Library, London, 2022
From Luther to Twitter: Media and the Public Sphere. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin 2020-2021
Restless Youth: Growing up in Europe, 1945 to Now. House of History, Brussels, 2019-2020
As well as loaning to external museums and galleries, we use tours and displays to open up our collections to current Guardian and Observer staff.
Photography from: Cartoonmuseum Basel, Hervé Véronèse and Claire Mineur at the Bpi, Luke Dodd and John Rylands Research Institute & Library