For some, International Women’s Day is a day for the celebration of the social, cultural, and professional achievements of women. Many others, on the other hand, believe that we are not yet at the point of celebration, arguing that with gender inequality and gender-based violence rampant worldwide, celebrations are not what International Women’s Day should be about.
In Borrando la Frontera (Erasing the Border)", Ana Teresa confronted the fence between the United States and Mexico by putting on her black dress and heels and painting the fence sky blue.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.
“Mapping skin deep” is an audiovisual public installation consisting of portraits with testimonies from refugee/undocumented immigrants currently residing in Montreal and elsewhere. Their bodies have been scarred in post-production tracing the route they took from their homeland to Montreal, hence mapping them skin deep.
To raise awareness among the general public about the global clean water crisis, the artist Belo created an image composed of 66,000 cups of colored rainwater simulating levels of impurities found in water all over the planet. This major work of 3,600 square feet, representing a fetus in the maternal womb, emphasizes the necessity of water, even before birth, for each living person.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei covered a Berlin landmark with thousands of refugee life jackets for his latest installation. The striking display was the activist's attempt to highlight the scale of migrants taking to the seas every day.
“The Garment Worker” an interactive installation piece that focuses on the daily life of a garment worker and the hardships she/he encounters working in a sweatshop. The installation in Kang Wei Laundromat simulated the sounds, motions and experiences of a garment factory while providing testimonials and information from immigrant workers on their sweatshop conditions.
The elimination of Net Neutrality is a much bigger issue than most people would like to admit. This issue stems far from just an issue dealing with an open internet, free from biased control of the internet service providers, whom which we rely on.
Forest activist and environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill spent two years (Dec. 10, 1997-Dec. 18, 1999) living 180 feet high, on two six-by-six-foot platforms, in the canopy of a thousand-year-old redwood tree named Luna to help make the world aware of the plight of the redwood forest.
Artist Luke Jerram created a genderless sleeping figure made of glass lying on a piece of cardboard and exhibited in the streets of London. The artist said in an interview "For every person you see sleeping on the streets, there are many others sleeping in hostels, squats and other forms of unsatisfactory and insecure accommodation.
We built a conversation space where members of the public were invited to enjoy a free cup of tea. We used a vertical garden which spelled out the word 'TEA' in easily available plants and herbs that can be used to make tea.
Artist and activist Niki Lopez is a survivor. From age 11 to 25, she was trapped in a religious cult in Georgia, where she was separated from the rest of her family. The cult's leader sexually abused her. But in 2000, Lopez escaped and worked with the FBI to put him in prison. She was later given a humanitarian award from the FBI for her help in putting her abuser behind bars.
The average crow takes less than two hours to travel from Sing Sing maximum-security prison to the Whitney Museum of American Art, institutions separated by just 32 miles of land along New York’s Hudson river. Yet few humans journey between them – museums and prison are at opposite ends of our society’s self-imaginings, and their populations tend not to intersect.
For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.
"Las Carpetas looks at the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program that aimed to destroy the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Through still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera provides a counter-history to the way many understand this period of time and its aftermath.
Grangeon's long-running traveling exhibit, Pandas on Tour, features 1600 papier-mâché pandas. That's approximately one for as many as there are left in the world (recent estimates actually place the number slightly below that, at 1596).
A major exhibition by Ai Weiwei this autumn features a new series of monumental sculptural works in iron, cast from giant tree roots sourced in Brazil during research and production for last year’s survey exhibition, ‘Raiz’, at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed OCA Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo.
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
As part of an international workshop (10-11 October 2015) with the Center for Artistic Activism, 17 trans activists and artists from 13 European countries developed a creative campaign to mark some of the spaces in Berlin which have symbolic significance for trans people.
Wafaa Bilal's childhood in Iraq was defined by the horrific rule of Saddam Hussein, two wars, a bloody uprising, and time spent interned in chaotic refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bilal eventually made it to the U.S. to become a professor and a successful artist, but when his brother was killed at a U.S. checkpoint in 2005, he decided to use his art to confront those in the comfort zone with the realities of life in a conflict zone.
This year, Bethlehem is sombre and quiet. There is no Christmas tree and there are no holiday lights or tourists to see them.
Instead, the city of Jesus’s birth – which is in the middle of a war zone – is marking Christmas with a powerful and poignant message: solidarity with Palestine.