The Balloon Project, is a three-year-in-the-making Art Installation by Yan Kong in support of world refugees and migrants. It pays tribute to human spirit, courage and survival. The Balloon Project is a multimedia work incorporating mechanical engineering and visuals to fuse art and politics. 32 balloons inflate and deflate to simulate refugee and migrants' breathing while fleeing their countries to seek safety and freedom in the world.
Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" campaign is the new face of viral marketing success. The uplifting promotional video generated record-breaking online interest, yielding more than 114 million views the first month. This was thanks in part to the Unilever brand's efforts to spread its message worldwide: Dove uploaded the video in 25 languages to 33 of its official YouTube channels, reaching consumers in more than 110 countries.
Gregg Segal -- a California-based artist who is known for using the medium of photography to explore culture with the "sensibility of a sociologist" -- travelled around the world asking kids to keep a journal of everything they ate in a week. Once the week was up, Segal made a portrait of the child with the food arranged around them:
The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, was an activity involving the pouring of a bucket of ice water over a person's head, either by another person or self-administered, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as motor neuron disease and in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease) and encourage donations to research.
Anti-Fur advocates have been protesting through demonstrations for decades, throwing red paint on women wearing fur coats, passing out leaflets and sporting the slogan “Fur Is Dead” on t-shirts and stickers and spray-painting it on buildings in cities throughout the globe.
The True Cost is a 2015 documentary film directed by Andrew Morgan that focuses on fast fashion. It discusses several aspects of the garment industry from production—mainly exploring the life of low-wage workers in developing countries—to its after-effects such as river and soil pollution, pesticide contamination, disease and death.
While Trump’s proposal to detain asylum-seeking and migrant families indefinitely remains open to public comment for the next week, families who have already been detained for longer than the 20-day maximum endure painful separations and terrifying uncertainty while they remain in limbo.
"Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues. One of her best-known works to date is The Crystal Quilt (Minneapolis, 1987) a performance with 430 older women, broadcast live on Public Television." (http://www.suzannelacy.com/)
To call attention to bullying, the Singapore Coalition Against Bullying for Children and Youth has released a video that gets shorter each time it is viewed.
Hosted on a site called Share It To The End, the short animated video depicts a boy getting bullied at school and telling us he always feels alone and doesn’t feel safe anywhere.
Photographer Donna Ferrato helped bring awareness to the epidemic of domestic violence in the United States through her raw and often graphic portraits of survivors of violence. But she fell into the work by accident after witnessing domestic violence firsthand.
As the female gaze comes to the fore, artists are beginning to examine and explore the possibilities of what exists, what it is to be a woman looking at the world outside of her self. For American artist Dani Lessnau, the gaze opened the door into uncharted realms in search of the things that a camera can capture that the human eye might otherwise miss.
Uncle Sam's Cultural Dissonance looks at the issues facing The United States, including Canada and Mexico. In countries like the United States, where some states are dotted with countless lakes and many people live within easy reach of an ocean, it may be easy to assume that drinking and recreational waters are limitless. This is absurd. This series focuses in on excessive overuse in by agricultural, residential, and industrial sectors.
It has been a tumultuous and anxious week for women in Turkey. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a decree at midnight last Friday, annulling Turkey's ratification of the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, women poured onto the streets of Turkish cities to protest. Further demonstrations are planned.
Artist and social activist Favianna Rodriguez collaborated with musician Pharrell Williams to create a documentary series focusing on migrants in America. The documentary consists of 3 episodes that focus on the role of artists in the political realm. The goal of the documentary is to change the perception of immigrant workers in America.
David Wojnarowicz was born on September 14, 1954, and died on July 22, 1992, at the age of 37 due to AIDS-related complications. Before he became an artist, he attended a Performing Arts high school from which he dropped out of in order to make a living as a farmer in Canada. This was up until he made a name for himself as an artist in New York’s cultural scene.
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.
The Dannenröder Forest in central Germany, is known, affectionately, by those who are trying to protect it, as “Danni”. Danni is an old growth forest – whole sections of it have grown and evolved without direct human influence – but for the last four decades it has been threatened by the building of a new motorway which, if built, would cut this showpiece of sustainable forestry in half.
Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson has extracted 30 blocks of glacial ice from the waters surrounding Greenland and placed them in public spaces across London, where they will be left to melt.
Called Ice Watch, the temporary installation is meant to serve as a visual reminder of the impact of climate change on the environment.
The video shows an actor as "your drunk neighbor" lipsyncing to real soundbites from Donald Trump.
The artists who made the video claim, "If you close your eyes while listening to presidential hopeful Donald Trump, you can see and smell that neighbor you have with too many dogs and a drinking problem."
The "no nos vamos, nos echan" campaign speaks to making the invisible visible through pictures, videos and global mass demonstrations. Hopefully the Spanish government and other political players in Spain and Europe will see the faces of the population forced in exile.
Sophie Calle's works discuss the issue of "privacy", the composition of an individual's identity at the social level, and the relationship between "private" and "public/group/society", including personal information, personal records, public surveillance, and other topics. An obvious feature of her works is the unique and extremely subjective criteria of judgment and reference for measurement.
Black Cinema House hosts screenings and discussions of films by and about people of the African diaspora, and offers video classes to neighborhood youth, teaching the next generation to make their own films and tell their own stories.