Main Gallery

Diagram of the "Brookes" Slave Ship
Practitioner:
18th century abolitionists
Date:
Jan 1 1787
This diagram of the 'Brookes' slave ship is probably the most widely copied and powerful image used by the abolitionist campaigners. It depicts the ship loaded to its full capacity - 454 people crammed into the hold.The 'Brookes' sailed the passage from Liverpool via the Gold Coast in Africa to Jamaica in the West Indies.
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Unhappily Ever
Practitioner:
Jeff Hong
Date:
Dec 6 2018
Jeff is an animation storyboard artist from Los Angeles, previously working as an animation artist on several famous Disney movies. He uses his talent to produce work highlighting environmental and social issues worldwide with Disney characters, called Unhappily Ever After. His work includes images of Elsa from Frozen on melting ice caps and Alice from Alice & Wonderland taking drugs down a dark alley.
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Unland
Practitioner:
Doris Salcedo
Date:
Mar 19 1998
Doris Salcedo talked extensively with victims of the violence in Colombia. For the project titled Unland she spoke specifically with children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. This piece was a poetic response and representation of their testimony. Salcedo combined halves of tables together to make a whole. In the seam where the tables joined Salcedo meticulously sewed the tables together using white silk thread, dark hair and bone.
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BUFFALO BLOOD
Practitioner:
lila roo
Date:
May 15 2013
A series of performances orchestrated by Lila Roo, to bring awareness to the past, present and future issue of the physical and energetic violence against the First Nation of the native buffalo and peoples of the United Sates of America in the past few hundred years. Lila worked alongside activists, the buffalo and First Nation musicians and spiritual leaders to create multi-sensory blessings for the blood spilt.
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Ringgold's art - a visual symphony that harmonizes activism
Practitioner:
Faith Ringgold
Date:
Jan 1 1997
Faith Ringgold is a successful painter, sculptor, mixed-media artist, author, feminist, and political activist. She is particularly known for her narrative quilts, as she explores identity, race, family ties, as well as cultural and political topics through her many different forms of storytelling. “I have always wanted to tell my story or, more to the point, my side of the story” - Faith Ringgold
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Artist Rufina Bazlova uses embroidery as a form of ‘gentle protest’
Practitioner:
Rufina Bazlova
Date:
Jan 1 2020
Rufina Bazlova is not afraid to surrender her art to activism. Born in Belarus, a former Soviet republic ruled by the authoritarian leader Aleksandr Lukashenko for 29 years now, Bazlova knows all too well that being apolitical is a privilege many Eastern Europeans cannot afford. 2020 was a pivotal year for Belarus, not only because of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the presidential elections, which declared Lukashenko president for the sixth time.
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Big street barbecue for the distinct people
Practitioner:
Date:
May 14 2011
In São Paulo, just like in many other metropolitan regions, public transport is not as effective as it could be. Buses and trains usually run overcrowded, late and on limited hours, so that owning a car increases a lot one’s comfort. But not everybody can afford to have one, so a clear and recurrent class distinction occurs: public transport is mostly used by poor people.
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Transparency and translation of scientific data to mitigate climate change
Practitioner:
Martin Gropius Bau
Date:
Jul 1 2020
Amongst the European network of cultural institutions there has been widespread recognition that the climate crisis is a cultural crisis. In 2019 members of the European Theatre Forum convened and adopted the Dresden Convention, a revolutionary text that aimed to lower the carbon footprint and better the sustainable practices of the theatre and cultural sector at large.
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Depression Quest
Practitioner:
Zoe Quinn
Date:
Aug 11 2014
Earlier this month, an anonymous message was posted to the discussion-board Web site 4chan. In it, the author threatened to hurt the video-game developer Zoe Quinn: “Next time she shows up at a conference we … give her a crippling injury that’s never going to fully heal … a good solid injury to the knees. I’d say a brain damage, but we don’t want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us.”
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Tech and Bodies
Practitioner:
Filip Custic
Date:
Jan 1 2024
Filip Custic (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain 1993) works across photography, performance and video to address themes around identity, body and our relationship with technology. Mirrors and screens are a recurring features, a reference to our age of image-obsession and selfies, and Custic also uses symbols, references to science, and art-historical borrowings in his art.
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Grandmas resignifying public space
Practitioner:
Corpovisionarios por Colombia, Health Ministry of Colombia, OIM
Date:
May 6 2014
This project consisted of an articulation between research, public policy and art. Corpovisionarios por Colombia was implementing a social change initiative in one of the poorest and most violents neighborhoods in Cali, Colombia. The demographic information showed that the most implicated population in the violence and murder cases were young men. They informed their masculinity through ideas of territory and its violent protection.
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The Reality of Small Differences
Practitioner:
Gill Crawshaw; disabled artists in Yorkshire
Date:
Aug 23 2014
An exhibition of textile-based work by disabled artists, organised in protest at the inaccessibility of an exhibition by a popular artist, when it came to Leeds.
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Water Is Life
Practitioner:
Overpass Light Brigade
Date:
Feb 16 2013
The Overpass Light Brigade (Milwaukee, WI), has been working with Idle No More (WI) in order to give visibility to the cultural and environmental costs of opening up Northern Wisconsin to iron mining. The proposal will soon be voted on and likely passed by the conservative Wisconsin legislature which has been purchased by the Gogebic Mining Company.
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Nihilist subway performances
Practitioner:
Kalan Sherrard
Date:
Apr 30 2014
The latest episode in Nicolas Heller's documentary web series "No Your City," as published by Gothamist, features the arguably pretentious, inarguably earnest street performer Kalan Sherrard, who was recently arrested during his peaceful anarchist puppet show. Functioning as a video manifesto for his peculiar ways, the clip is at least compelling.
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Shmoogle
Practitioner:
Missdata
Date:
Jan 1 2005
Shmoogle is a Google randomiser. When you type your query into Shmoogle, you get Google's results but in random order. In one click Shmoogle instantly neutralizes the PageRank hierarchy and the whole SEO industry induced by it. Missdata, questions the implications and significance of the digital paradigm in which we live. She proposes different alternatives to daily digital tools.
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Game of Floods
Practitioner:
Marin County Government
Date:
Apr 26 2017
Marin County’s “Game of Floods” teaches citizens how to make tough decisions for the future.
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Photos: Ukrainians celebrate their Independence Day by running in vyshyvankas
Practitioner:
Lilly Quiroz
Date:
Aug 27 2024
Whether your family’s traditional dress is a Mexican huipil, an Indian saree, or a Scottish kilt, where do you usually wear these clothes? In Ukraine, the traditional attire is a vyshyvanka. Typically made of cotton or linen, these shirts feature embroidered patterns along the front, collar and sleeves.
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On Abortion
Practitioner:
Laia Abril
Date:
Apr 28 2017
On Abortion documents and conceptualises the dangers and damages caused by women’s lack of legal, safe and free access to abortion
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Es-Cultura Lesbiana
Practitioner:
Lesbianas Sin Duda (LSD)
Date:
Jun 1 1995
As a result of the social stigma of homosexuality, lesbian feminists were rejected and silenced as a radical minority within the mainstream Movimiento Feminista (MF). Lesbianas Sin Duda (LSD) is a queer activist group based in Madrid that arose in the early 1990s as a response to this erasure.
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“up yours” share trading
Practitioner:
James Gubb
Date:
Nov 9 2017
JAMES GUBB was finishing off the knuckles when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) shut him down. Trading single shares between two accounts, Mr Gubb had managed to “draw” the image of a fist with an upright middle finger onto the share-price chart for Oakbay Resources and Energy Limited, a company controlled by the Gupta brothers, cronies of President Jacob Zuma, that is at the centre of allegations of “state capture” in South Africa.
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