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.
On September 5th, 1991, I put a giant condom over Jesse Helms’ house. Why? Because, as the condom said, “Helms is deadlier than a virus.” Senator Jesse Helms was one of the chief architects of AIDS-related stigma in the U.S. He fought against any federal spending on HIV research, treatment or prevention.
Drag Out The Vote™ is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works with drag performers to promote participation in democracy. We educate and register voters at drag events online and offline, by organizing local and national voter activations. Led by fierce drag kings and queens across the nation, we advocate for increased voter access and engagement in 2020 and beyond.
Flower power was a slogan used during the late 1960s and early 1970s as a symbol of passive resistance and nonviolence. It is rooted in the opposition movement to the Vietnam War. The expression was coined by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in 1965 as a means to transform war protests into peaceful affirmative spectacles.
"Under the Same Sky" bearing the name and the first part of my project completed. I collected the letters written to 40 Armenian young people from 40 random Turkish young people. The mutual translations of all letters and video subtitles were made. Letters and photographs are handed out to young people, friendships are being established.
‘Since Plotinus’, writes Joseph Tanke (2019, p. 486), ‘Western art has been consecrated to beauty, and beautiful art has been understood as the achievement of good form’. But alongside this interest in beauty and form, art has been committed to politics and perspectives, equity and rights. Consequently, and particularly since the start of the modern era, artists frequently initiate or participate in ‘difficult conversations’.
Judy Chicago, the pioneering feminist artist who made the iconic 1970s work The Dinner Party, has enjoyed a long and illustrious career rife with critical approval. Now, in anticipation of Earth Day 2020, Chicago is launching a new project called Create Art For Earth, wherein people from all over the world can submit their own creations to the campaign via a corresponding hashtag. “This is no time for abstractions,” the call for art reads.
ISLAMABAD —
A prominent female rights activist in Afghanistan lambasted the global community Saturday for failing to come up with a plan or agreement on how to help her crisis-ridden country since the Taliban took control of it 18 months ago.
Mahbouba Seraj, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, spoke virtually from the Afghan capital, Kabul, to a town hall at the Munich Security Conference on prospects for her country under Taliban rule.
Caleidoscópica Violeta, is a creative space for reflection, dialogue, critique, and praxis of pop contemporary feminism. It is also an initiative that seeks to reflect on the role of women in the history of modern art. Historically, the role of women in art has been stolen by the patriarchy. Recognizing this as a feminist artist, I propose this festival as a way to open new spaces for women protagonists in the arts.
The Ice Bucket Challenge, sometimes called the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, was an activity involving the pouring of a bucket of ice water over a person's head, either by another person or self-administered, to promote awareness of the disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as motor neuron disease and in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease) and encourage donations to research.
"May you live in interesting times" is the familiar Chinese saying, usually spat out as a curse. You can see why in "A Touch of Sin," a film by renowned director Jia Zhang-ke. That kind of time is now, in the history of his country. With four vignettes inspired by real-life "ripped from the headline" events, he shows what the great economic expansion of China is doing to the majority of its people.
This week's Swede of the Week is Tomas Gunnarsson, whose quest to find Sweden's "Sexist of the Year" has found a viral following across the country. He says Swedes who buy into the 'most equal country in the world' label are delusional.
Who was the most sexist person in Sweden in 2013?
“Gravity of Equilibrium” revolves around Mass Shootings in USA. Mass shootings and guns are an incredibly divisive topics, one that is nearly impossible to engage opposing viewpoints in a discussion about. The majority of gun related debates devolve into charged arguments with parties feeling threatened. This effectively creates an environment where new perspectives and inputs are unable to be processed.
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.
When we think about the protectors of our oceans, our mind is instantly drawn to the image of the lifeguard. Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff in bright red swimsuits, their enviable bodies on show, as they run along the coastline. As a result our concept of the role has an elitism about it.
What if we gave our teenagers the opportunity to imagine themselves as the heroes that they have grown up watching, rather than treating their precious minds as nothing more than a way to line the pockets of some CEO?
Eugene Lee Yang is an actor, filmmaker, producer, author, dancer, and digital content creator from Pflugerville, Texas. He received his education at the University of Southern California, and is most known for his contribution to the popular Youtube group, The Try Guys.
A social experiment testing the public’s reaction to gay people in China has gone viral.
The blindfolded activists stood in public wearing T-shirts that said “I’m gay would you hug me?” and video of the protest then spread rapidly on Weibo, a hugely popular social media platform in China.
The social experiment follows a recent announcement by Weibo to ban gay content on its platform of 400 million active users.
Demonstrators aligned with the Occupy Wall Street movement sang their way into handcuffs during a Bronx foreclosure auction Monday to protest the housing crisis that continues to plague the borough.
They serenaded a courtroom of real estate investors with the lyrics, "Y'all are speculating off people's pain. With all due respect, you should be ashamed."
After winning the TED Prize on March 2, 2011, the French-artist JR launched the Inside Out Project, in his first TED Talk. Using his own artistic practice as inspiration, this participatory platform helps individuals and communities to make a statement by displaying large-scale black and white portraits in public spaces. Through their “Actions,” communities around the world have sparked collaborations and conversations.
The ZAD (zone à défendre, or “zone to defend”) in Western France is 4000 acres of wetland, farmland and forest that was originally intended to be built into an airport in 1965 but is now an autonomous territory occupied by 40 different collectives looking to reclaim the land. There are around 200 people living permanently on the zone, in addition to some 2,000 people coming and going.
The internet has reshaped the ways we learn and communicate. Information becomes heuristic, concomitantly - knowledge becomes protean. If you dedicate enough time to any particular platform, you are likely to acquire a community with congenial individuals. Social media’s proliferation has obfuscated the lines between reality and fiction. Embraced as a tool for many, these digital spaces typically have no monitoring process.
Replete with an unmistakable look, intense silence, and mime-like moves, the Red Rebels are, quite intentionally, riveting. In the words of artist and activist Doug Francisco, founder of the Red Rebels Brigade: "We divert, distract, delight, and inspire the people who watch us."
To honor their battle, Lebanese women's rights organization ABAAD launched a powerful song and music video titled Not Your Honor. The clip was launched on the occasion of the "16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence" initiative which took off on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.