On the 6th February 2013, 40 activists across 6 states plastered 110 ANZ ATMs with 'Out of Order' notices, sharing them on social media the following day. The objective was to use a hoax style action to exploit mainstream media sensitivity around ANZ Bank's unethical funding of fossil fuel projects that had been generated by Jonathan Moylan's Whitehaven Hoax a week earlier.
Jo’Artis Ratti is sure he looked intimidating to the police officers who were suddenly confronted by his agitated dancing at a California protest Sunday.
“I’m 210 pounds,” said Ratti, 35. “I have tattoos on my neck. I don’t have a passive energy; I’m very enthusiastic. And I know this looks unfamiliar.”
For third world artists who are forced into exile, the creativity process could be greatly challenged due to displacement in language, community and history. Many filmmakers in exile tend to look at their connection to the homeland in strictly political terms, or give up making films overall.
"Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation containing the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. Each narrative has been carefully constructed with the friends and family members of the deceased to retell their stories as they themselves may have recounted it. They are compiled with found audio that evidences their final moments.
Brandalism, an organization out of the UK that aims to reclaim public spaces from advertisers, used Black Friday to protest "partner" brands to the COP21 Climate Conference.
Anonymous artists contributed subvertisements that criticized these brand for their hypocrisy in saying they are advocates for the environment when more often than not they are the worst contributors to the problem.
Najah al-Bukai cannot forget.
As an accomplished artist in Syria before the war, Mr. Bukai had long thought his photographic memory was his greatest asset, allowing him to recreate scenes on his sketch pads and canvases days, months and even years after he witnessed them. But now, after he has survived two stretches in the Syrian government’s notorious detention centers, his sharp memories only serve to haunt him.
In Tunisia, a country gripped by economic uncertainty and still in the midst of rebuilding its identity after the Arab Spring, hip-hop culture is viewed as part of an ongoing dissident movement. Just a few events, such as the recent Mafia Wallitili Festival in the heart of downtown Tunis, offer the local hip-hop community an opportunity to share their values with the broader population.
A small group of gay rights activists gathered outside the Russian Embassy in Beijing on Valentine’s Day to protest Russia’s antigay laws.
Behind a rainbow banner that read “To Russia with Love,” a dozen activists cheered as three couples puckered up and kissed in front of a countdown clock for the Sochi Winter Olympics outside the embassy’s tall walls.
Students at the March for Our Lives rallies across the country and world today, March 24, are wearing a “price tag” of $1.05. The reason? March organizers have argued that $1.05 is the amount each student is worth to Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio.
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.
The San Francisco Mine Troupe has been staging radical political theater for over fifty years. In 1967, the Troupe toured campuses across the midwest, performing L'amant Militaire - a satirized adaptation of an old anti-war play, updated to critique US involvement in the Vietnam War.
The son of an exiled political dissident, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s work is inherently political. Since 1995 Ai Weiwei has been traveling the world, photographing himself flipping off iconic monuments of power in his Study of Perspective series.
Strap into your scuba gear — this museum is worth it.
Installation began on Museo Atlantico — the latest project of underwater sculptor James deCaires Taylor — this week, 14 meters underwater in Lanzarote, one of the Spain’s Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. Taylor, whose creations have spanned the waters from the Bahamas to London, calls it the first underwater contemporary art museum in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean.
As the crowd surged indoors shortly before 6.30pm, Luke Wassell and Lewis Jones found themselves in the vegetable aisle, wedged between the sweet potatoes and the bags of spinach. Though both are gay, they are friends rather than partners, and so “I guess I’ll have to kiss a vegetable,” said Wassell, glancing around him for a suitable candidate. “We’re definitely supposed to kiss something.”
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.
Collective Creativity in the Beginning
Project Row Houses (PRH) is, and has always been, a unique experiment in activating the intersections between art, cultural and historic preservation, affordable and innovative housing, community engagement and development, neighborhood revitalization, and human empowerment.
Urban Landscape as Canvas
Close to 100 artists and activists staged a protest at the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon in response to displacement — both in Brooklyn and Palestine.
Haeryun Kang reported the following for NPR on February 24, 2016:
"On the eve of South Korean President Park Geun-hye's third anniversary in office, protesters gathered in Seoul... to condemn the administration's increasing crackdown on free speech. These protesters were unlike any others Seoul has seen. They were holograms"