In July 2008, Kennard and his sometime collaborator, Cat Picton Phillipps, working together as kennardphillipps, were invited for a residency at the Interface Research Centre, University of Ulster, in conjunction with a series of events, workshops and lectures organised under the platform ‘Media and Contested Space’. The programme explored the influences of artists’ photographic practices on the shaping of perceptions of conflict and contested space. Within this framework, kennardphillips developed the Atlas World Times, a photomontaged bookwork produced through their adaptation of 3D printing and laser cutting equipment. Building up their image library with contributions from the Guardian digital archive and field-based photojournalists, kennardphillips resituated this archive of images into a pre-existing world atlas. As part of a larger public artwork initiated by the programme, kennardphillips created a billboard display in Belfast from Atlas World Times.
As a commission for the group exhibition ‘Embedded Art’ at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2009), kennardphillips used the compositional strategies developed in Atlas World Times to produce Control Room II, a large-scale site-specific photomontage installation. Atlas World Times was included in the group exhibition ‘Transformed: Artists’ Books and Bookworks’ where, alongside the book in a vitrine, individual pages were projected on the wall of the Imperial War Museum (2010). kennardphillips appropriated images from the Atlas World Times to construct placards included in ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’, a group exhibition at BWA Museum of Modern Art, Wroclaw, Poland (2012).
Talks relating to Atlas World Times and its methodology include: ‘The art of resistance’, keynote, The National Photography Symposium, Somerset House, London (2012); ‘Images of dissent’, Museum of the Image, Amsterdam Design Conference (2011); ‘Art and politics’, Political Association Annual Conference, Edinburgh (2010); and the ‘Art and war’ panel discussion, Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference (2010).