Artist defends Churchill video at National Portrait Gallery after being accused of ‘barefaced lie’

A Turner prize-winning artist accused of telling a “barefaced lie” about Winston Churchill in a video piece installed at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) has defended her work, saying it was intended to create a “dialogue” about figures in the gallery’s collection. Helen Cammock ’s 40-minute moving image piece called Persistence has been at the centre of a row about the role Churchill played in the Bengal famine of 1943. In the work, Cammock, who narrates the piece, discusses Oliver Cromwell’s campaigns in Ireland , saying “he starved people, en masse, a little like the wilful starvation of the Indian population by Winston Churchill”. Lord Roberts of Belgravia – a biographer of Churchill – wrote a letter to the directors of the NPG, signed by more than 50 peers, describing the claim as a “barefaced lie” and calling the film an “ideologically motivated rant”. Cammock’s work was also criticised by the Telegraph, which called her assertion that Churchill caused the famine “incorrect”. In a statement to the Guardian, Cammock wrote: “The work thinks about the role of the portrait historically and its relevance today. It considers who is honoured and valorised and who is not; whose stories are told and whose are not … and how histories are created and then maintained. …