In 1972, something unheard of happened on national television. An Asian American singer-songwriter duo was invited to perform on the widely-watched The Mike Douglas Show by guest hosts John Lennon and Yoko Ono. “They’re beautiful singers,” Lennon said in his introduction. “And they have a story to tell.”
For his latest project, Mark Manzi found himself outside of his comfort zone. For the Amsterdam-based photographer and designer, People of Japan was an attempt to break from his photography-first portfolio. “In the past, my work was very image-focused, whereas with this book I wanted to scan objects, collect receipts, record noises, add copy, and really create something visually striking,” he says.
In her curatorial project Making Way, Ruth Simbao brought together works that complicated the idea of globalization’s effect on African nations, especially the idea that the new phase would usher in an almost frictionless movement of labor and capital across borders. Works by artists like Athi-Patra Ruga reflected on questions of how bodies moved through settler colonialist spaces.
In 2006, art historian Claire Bishop lit a fire under the collective seat of the art world with her Artforum piece “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents.” It set off — as much as any essay in the hermetic and staid world of contemporary art theory can — an uproar. The article inspired Grant Kester, an art historian also specializing in relational art practices, to respond:
This weekend marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump's inauguration. It also marks the one-year anniversary of the Women's March his election inspired, the largest single-day protest in the nation's history.
It can be important to reflect on the artistic recounts of activists experiences under state imprisonment. In a revealing interview with Artspace, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei reflects on his 81-day secret detention in 2011 and the psychological strategies used to dismantle identity and autonomy.
As local rapper Naty says, a group of young people are intent on making their mark in Madagascar's cultural history. From gifted slam poet Caylah to inventive visual artist Temandrota and a crew of entrepreneurial skateboarders, a generation of young Madagascans are making space for creative projects.They are inspiring in their enthusiasm and hopeful for the future despite the poverty in their country and its colonial past.
The veteran Malian master puppeteer Yaya Coulibali, born in 1959 in the village of Koula, around 100 kilometres north-east of Bamako, has more than half a century of experience in puppetry and has toured the world to perform his art.
This month marks ten years since the start of the Syrian Civil War, an ongoing conflict that has cruelly cut the lives of hundreds of thousands short, and irrevocably changed the course of millions more. An estimated 5.6 million have fled the country over the past decade, mostly to the neighbouring countries of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, with many settling in camps they’ve since to come to call their permanent homes.
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.
The artist I chose to focus on personally is the photographer Cristina Garcia Rodero. I used photos from her photography essay España Oculta, in which Rodero traveled to small villages in Spain to document the resident’s lives. Our group's main focus is on gender issues, and I personally wanted to focus on activism involving women and representation. Rodero uses photos of rituals and activities among those outside of the majority population.
In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently.
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.”
The user muchachafanzine on instagram is an activist who writes a "decolonial native xicana feminist fanzine". They are an online activist and they spread their message through their page, the zine, and through merchandise. Daisy Salinas began Muchacha Fanzine as a feminist punk zine in 2011. Over the years, Muchacha has grown into a larger, submission-based compilation of work by marginalized voices from around the world.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening to the public on April 26, 2018, will become the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.
The American rapper’s performance of 'Stand Up for Something' with singer Andra Day has gone down as one of the highlights of this year’s Academy Awards.
Common used his Oscars performance to condemn Donald Trump’s “hate” and the National Rifle Association.
The American rapper’s performance of “Stand Up for Something” with singer Andra Day has been held up by many as one of the highlights of this year’s Academy Awards.
“Discovering Columbus,” by the Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi.
Nishi built a living room around the sculpture in Columbus Circle in New York City. The living room is mounted on scaffolding and turns the sculpture into a domestic center-piece.
Afrika ARTS Kollective is a group of artists that decided to face Uganda's demographic growth and the garbage problem of the capital, Kamala, with art. 30,000 tons of residues come out of this monthly and the Administration is being working on healthy and good environmental behaviors among citizens.
A site-specific art intervention intended as a call to action in response to Brazil's water crisis. Strategically planned to coincide with UN World Water Day, Gota D'Agua gathered onlookers around an abandoned Olympic size swimming pool at the foot of Edificio Raposo Lopes, a towering luxury condominium building situated on a steep incline overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has drawn on the stool part of that French surrealist's pioneer work for his latest exhibition, the largest ever devoted to Ai, which opens in Berlin this Thursday. The show, entitled Evidence, is at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall, and consists of either entirely new works, or pieces never seen in Germany before. The exhibition is huge, taking up 3,000 square metres in total and running across 18 rooms.
The "Real Time" series by Maarten Baas is an avant-garde collection of art installations and functional timepieces that question the very basics of how to measure and experience time. It has, therefore, been a unique mix of performance art with functional design since 2009. Baas reimagines how time may be seen in his various installations in a provoking, innovative, engaging, and reflective manner for all audiences.