Often in military style video games we kill without much regard for the enemy. They are faceless or stereotypical, the Nazi or evil Cold War–era Russian. They are enemies that were fought on the battlefields of great wars, or they are aliens that have no resemblance to humans save for a general humanoid form.
In 1991, Gonzalez-Torres lost his partner Ross to AIDS (the artist would face the same fate in 1996). In a tragic and highly personal tribute to Ross, Gonzalez-Torres took a picture of his still-indented empty bed - an image of universal intimacy and loss - and placed it on two dozen commercial billboard spaces throughout New York.
"The Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s was a time of profound social change and progress for American Indians in the United States and Canada. In her outspokenness about the injustices facing Indigenous people, Buffy Sainte-Marie also sang for peace, the environment, women and children—believing that art can have impact and make a difference.
In many of his works, the Belgian-Mexican conceptual and performance provocateur Francis Alÿs questions the relationship between action, effort, and outcome. His works tend to inspire one toward a blurring of lines between the actions done in artistic expression and those in social response, making the viewer question the value and effect of the toil.
In order to raise awareness about the global issue of arranged child marriages, 21-year-old YouTube star Coby Persin decided to push the envelope by asking a 12-year-old 'bride' to pose with a 65-year-old 'groom' in the middle of Times Square. Child marriage is not only legal in 91 countries around the world, but even continues to be legal in the United States - with some having a cut off as low as 12 years of age.
In 1988, rap group the N.W.A from Compton, California released their second album, “Straight Outta Compton”. Without any radio play or media coverage, the album still managed to become an underground hit, and the notorious rap group successfully introduced socially conscious gangsta rap into the mainstream.
Following the controversy around Rick Ross's date rape lyrics in his rap on Rocko’s song U.O.E.N.O, the rapper lost his contract with Reebok and was the target of the media, anti-rape activists Ultraviolet, hip hop activists, and even his fans.
Does it vex you, the environmental impact of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch? Do you hear about the transportation of 30 icebergs from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland to be displayed in London as a memento mori for our inhabitable environment and judge the project a bit of an own-goal, sustainability-wise? You would not be alone – on personal evidence, this seems a popular response.
Photography has long been associated with acts of resistance. It is used to document action, share ideas, inspire change, tell stories, gather evidence and fight against injustice.
This group exhibition at the SLG, organised in collaboration with the V&A, brings together works by international artists and collectives who are using the camera to challenge and move beyond traditional protest photography.
On April 24, 2013, more than 1,000 lives were taken in the Rana Plaza Collapse. While history remembers this tragic event as the deadliest garment factory accident, activist and photographer Taslima Akhter reveals a story of dreams crushed by structural murder. Dedicating her career to the lives and struggles of garment workers in Bangladesh, she has continued to foster a community rallying together for safer working conditions.
Utilizing Tumblr, Peyton Fulford crafted Abandoned Love as a participatory art project with other users on Tumblr's social network. Asking her followers "to send phrases from their diary, text messages, and anything else they personally have written in their own words", Fulford noted how an overwhelming majority of the written responses were concerned with the theme of love.
In 1984, a group of women in New York gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of a protest. A group show, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, was showing 165 artists, 152 male artists exhibited alongside just 13 women.
Outraged, they attended the protest, bringing placards and chanting outside the museum. But a handful of women within the larger crowd learned something.
The "Democracy Wall" in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, New York was established in 2009. This wall is a long-term, community art activist project that is part wall mural, part past information archive.
To Battle Fake News, Ukrainian Show Features Nothing but Lies
KIEV, Ukraine — The studio lights dim, and the anchor taps a stack of papers on her desk and directs a steely gaze toward the television cameras.
What appears to be a nightly newscast is about to begin, only with a very Ukrainian twist: Everything is a lie, from start to finish.
In 2011, nine local artists staged a performance called “Let’s Add 1 Meter to Taipa Pequena (Sio Tam Hill)” in Macau, protesting against the controversial attempted rezoning of the mountain for high-rise construction by the developers. They lied on top of each other with their naked bodies, forming a one-meter-high pile of human nudity on the Taipa Pequena.
We are sitting at a dhaba – a roadside tea-shop in Pakistan often frequented by lower-to-middle income men. At our table: four women and camera crew. The reporter from ‘one of the most globally viewed’ [read: western], mainstream British outlets looks me in the eye: “So, how safe do you feel at the moment? We were just surrounded by a group of little boys [because of the cameras], do you think the situation can ever turn on you?"
The Folded Map Project is a project by Tonika Lewis Johnson, a photographer and community activist from Chicago. The project aims to investigate and change the racial and economic segregation that affects the city and its residents.
The Photoshop action — a downloadable file that applies an action with a single click — is aimed at art directors who may be creating such ads. The action, which was disseminated on Reddit and other places where Dove thought such art directors might visit, promised to add a skin glow effect, but actually reverted the image to its original state.
Young women in South Korea are fighting for a new future. The #MeToo movement which has highlighted sexual harassment and abuse around the world has taken a surprising hold in this socially conservative country.
In 2015, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini was developing a device called the Aspire Mirror. Onlookers would stare into a webcam and then see a reflection on their face of something that inspires them.
At least, that was the plan. But Buolamwini quickly noticed that the facial recognition software was struggling to track her face — until she put on a white mask.
Not far from the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou, approximately 30 kilometers, lies Operndorf Afrika, a village that’s governed by art and a global exchange of culture.
Judy Chicago, the pioneering feminist artist who made the iconic 1970s work The Dinner Party, has enjoyed a long and illustrious career rife with critical approval. Now, in anticipation of Earth Day 2020, Chicago is launching a new project called Create Art For Earth, wherein people from all over the world can submit their own creations to the campaign via a corresponding hashtag. “This is no time for abstractions,” the call for art reads.
Fast-casual chain Chipotle Mexican Grill added some spice to its long-running "Food With Integrity" sustainable farming campaign by teaming with Academy Award-winning design firm Moonbot Studios for The Scarecrow, an animated short film and accompanying mobile game created to increase consumer awareness of animal confinement, synthetic growth hormones, toxic pesticides and other fixtures of industrial food production.
Both Johnson and Lewis recognize that the personal is political, and vice versa. By making connections between storytelling and activism, the two young women are using creative approaches to achieving justice and equity.