MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years.
At Souvenir Stands, Selling Tourists on Ending Stop-and-Search
By COREY KILGANNON
New York Times, City Blog, August 27, 2012
Last week, a 37-year-old artist from Oakland, Calif., named Aaron Gach joined the crowds of tourists swarming the sidewalk souvenir stands set up around the perimeter of Battery Park in Lower Manhattan.
Croatian artist Sanja Iveković started Women’s House (Sunglasses) in 1998 in collaboration with a women’s shelter in Zagreb and later with women’s shelters elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Iveković organised workshops with women in these shelters to produce plaster casts of their faces, as well as to give them the space to write their life stories.
The Kodaikanal Won't video by Chennai artist Sofia Ashraf, asking Unilver to 'clean up their mess' in connection with the Kodaikanal mercury dumping, has gone viral with over 783,533 views at the time of writing this, in just over two days. It has been shared on social media by prominent personalities such as Nandita Das, Varun Grover, Vishal Dadlani and was even praised by Nicki Minaj, on whose song Anaconda, the rap is based on.
Former colleagues of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja from Front Line Defenders today held a silent vigil at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Dublin to urge the King of Saudi Arabia to use his influence with Bahrain to enable Abdulhadi to travel to Denmark for medical treatment.
Just the other day, we were hearing about Samsung getting in legal trouble over patent violations with Apple. A federal court decision ruled that Samsung owes Apple more than $1 billion in restitution.
A CALL TO ARTISTS:
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has created a new, nationally touring poster exhibit called All of Us or None: Responses and Resistance to Militarism. The exhibit will launch in June and is already scheduled to travel to Chicago, Greensboro, Providence, and San Francisco with many other stops anticipated. We are looking for some additional work to include in this show.
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) by Ai Weiwei is a highly provocative work of art. This series of three black and white photographs portray the artist holding a 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn that, frame by frame, he drops, it falls, and shatters. As much a work of photography as a work of performance art, in each still an unaffected Ai looks directly at the camera aware of his destructiveness.
The following description is taken from the website of Aljazeera America (find link below):
In early December, Ju Hyun-u, a student at South Korea’s elite Korea University, taped up two white sheets filled with his handwriting on a campus bulletin board. His message began with a question, “Are you doing all right?”.
Vermin Supreme is an American performance artist, anarchist and activist who is known for running as an alternative candidate in various local, state, and national elections in the United States since 1988. Supreme is known for wearing a boot shaped hat and carrying a large toothbrush. Vermin Supreme's four-plank platform is simple, yet elegant:
1) Mandatory tooth-brushing laws.
2) Zombie preparedness.
Sari Red (1988), by Pratibha Parmar, is a visual poem. Made in memory of Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in 1985 in a racist attack in England, Sari Red eloquently examines the effect of the ever-present threat of violence upon the lives of Asian women in both private and public spheres.
At a gallery within a shopping complex in the South Korean capital, a couple saw paint cans and brushes at their reach and use next to what was actually a finished portrait worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thinking the available paint and brushes was a signal to be a part of the art, they ended up technically vandalizing the artists' work.
In 2009, conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi demoted the publicly-funded Italian Theatre Insitute (or ETI) to "disposable" status, hacking funding for the arts considerably. ETI promoted Italian companies abroad, managed the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, the Duse theatre in Bologna, and Rome's Teatro Valle--the oldest theatre in Rome, located between the Pantheon and Piazza Navona, Campo dei Fiori and the Senate.
This is the sixth piece of the series Tatlin’s Whisper which examines the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media. This series intends to activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualized from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution.
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations.
So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
Louise Bourgeois is a well known French-American artist born in Paris in 1911. Much of her artwork is geared towards female empowerment as she puts focus on the trials and tribulations of what it is like being a woman in a patriarchal society. As a result, many people associate her with the feminist movement. This idea of feminism can be seen in some of Bourgeois’ artwork, which resembles women empowerment.
In the four years since launching his eponymous label, Kozaburo Akasaka has established himself as a leader of New York’s new guard of fashion designers. In 2017, just months after graduating from Parsons’ prestigious Fashion MFA programme, his tailored silhouettes -- knife-sharp and steeped in retrofuturistic grunge -- earned him the LVMH Special Prize.
Palas por Pistolas initiated in the city of Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with a high rate of deaths by gunshot. The botanical garden of Culiacán has been comissioning artist to do interventions in the park and my proposal was to work in the larger scale of the city and organize a campaign for voluntary donation of weapons.