The 9,000 bottles of water on display at an art gallery in Beijing last month appeared identical to those of Nongfu Spring, one of China’s most popular spring water brands, with one jarring difference. Inside each bottle was brown, murky groundwater collected from a Chinese village.
Creative activism and the remaking of Palestine
While policy wonks and media pundits wallow in endless debates about Jewish settlements and the threat of terror, Palestinian groups are creatively exploring alternative ways to realise their national aspirations.
"WILD: Act I" is a film demonstrating the power of creativity in constraint. Using moving choreography performed by Elijah Lancaster and vivid imagery displayed on three walls in a mock cell, Jeremy McQueen gives voice to young Black and Brown men caught in the criminal 'justice' system.
Early Sunday morning, the Dallas Police Department's Twitter account tweeted for followers to download its iWatch Dallas app and share videos "of illegal activity from the protests." The police are looking to arrest lawbreakers at weekend demonstrations decrying police violence against black people. The benefit of the app, according to the tweet, was the ability for informants to stay anonymous.
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.
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 walls of the streets of downtown Santiago are covered with stickers, art, words and posters.
The messages are varied and range from "Feminist power" to "All cops are bastards". They have taken over the walls of Zona Cero (Ground Zero), the name given to the area around Plaza de la Dignidad, where anti-government protests have been held - and at times brutally repressed by police - since 18 October.
From The NationBy Laura FlandersA new campaign calling itself Caring Across Generations has in mind
nothing less than a 180-degree turn in the way that Americans think
about themselves, one another, the economy and workers. This group aims
to create 2 million quality jobs in the process and put us all on track
for a happy, healthy old age too. But first we need to talk, out loud,
about care.
The artist has assembled a set of 300 installations around New York City, based around the concept of fences and borders, to showcase the ‘narrow-minded’ attempts used to ‘create some kind of hatred between people’
Visual artist Alexandre Orion removes soot in an artful manner to produce skulls in the tunnels of the polluted city of Sao Paulo. Orion does so in an attempt to create intervention, raise awarenes, and decrease pollution. "From the ocular cavities of so many dead, his work looks out on the living and interrogates people passing by; it quietly criticizes our omission, our comfortable acceptance of pollution." ( Jose De Souza Martins)
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.
hot pink see-saws installed along the US-Mexico border where one person on each side can sit and see-saw with the other. installed at Sunland Park, nine miles northwest of El Paso, on the 18 feet slats border wall between Mexico and the United States. It is at this site where the US Border Patrol detained about 300 migrants from Mexico. (Public Delivery) the installation lasted only 1 day and was done without permission.
Unveiling the Unseen
BlindWiki is a location-based audio network where citizens who are blind or partially sighted use smartphones to share their findings by posting sound recordings. The platform does not just contain information about difficulties and barriers but is also a repository for experiences, opinions and stories, generating a creative and collaborative cartography of the unseen.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
'Learning To Love You More' is a digital and physical presentation of artistic responses from the general public. These "assignments" were facilitated under the creative direction of Harrell Fletcher and Miranda July, managed on a website by designed and curated by Yuri Ono. In 2010, the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art acquired the website to persevere it as an archive.
In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
Liao Guohe’s solo exhibition ----“Satisfaction Guaranteed”, the first-time all-round summary of his paintings in last 10 years, is held from November 14, 2014 to March 14, 2015 at Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, China.
"The mandate for great and difficult achievement is manifest in the message coming from the science of sustainability and climate change. Yet information alone will not take us where we need to go; science needs the arts to compel a response. It is the synergy of these two great human enterprises that creates both intellectual and emotional clarity.