The kidnapping and enslavement of African people was the life-blood of transnational corporations like the "Royal African Company." In law, these human resource corporations were called "artificial people." Their human cargo was called "cargo."
Over the past twenty-five years or so, ever since her spectacular New York début at the Drawing Center, in 1994, the now forty-four-year-old artist Kara Walker’s visual production—sculptures, cutouts, drawings, films—has been diaristic in tone.
The People’s Bank of Govanhill uses social and activist art practices to involve people in re-imagining the local economy, looking at how we can put feminist economics into practice in the local community.
From March 29 to April 28, 2012, artist Angel Chen transformed Toronto's Whippersnapper Gallery into a pop-up call centre to field questions on the financial crisis. Phone lines were manned by passers-by, volunteers and guest operators, all of whom solicited callers for discussion about the current economic climate.
The Insurrection-Resurrection Service Circus is this summer’s [started in 2020 and is ongoing] contribution to the iconic Bread and Puppet Circus tradition beloved by audiences worldwide for nearly 2 generations — a bright, raucous melee of short acts governed by a brass band, addressing the heart of the current moment using diverse puppetry styles and spanning many moods, from slapstick to the sublime.
During the economic crisis of 2008, bankers in Spain took advantage of the economically disadvantaged, and the artwork La Fiera en Sevilla, or the Wild Animal in Sevilla in English, brings attention to this money-centric act from the bankers. La Fiera refers to the bankers at the time that used predatory methods in their actions to forcibly evict poor people from their houses.
Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been living in tents at sprawling camps pitched on highways outside the capital New Delhi.
Large barricades erected by the police and topped with barbed wire stand a few hundred meters from the camp, preventing the farmers from encroaching any closer to the center of Delhi. At times, violence has broken out during demonstrations.
Shift Change Dress is a community fashion & art project that utilizes a shift dress sewing pattern as a medium for communication and action. Participants are encouraged to use the pattern as a blank canvas for their art or message and to share their work with the community.
Khalil Bandib is a Berkeley-based, award-winning editorial cartoonist with a unique perspective. He critiques a myriad of topics, from racism and homophobia to foreign policy and the Patriot Act. Bandib was born in North Africa under a French colonist regime; he brings a non-Eurocentric perspective not typically visible in large corporate media.
The US artist Nan Goldin has staged her first public protest since she launched her activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), shaming members of the Sackler family who have profited from the sale of Oxycontin and institutions that have accepted their philanthropy.
ACE Bank was a hoax bank developed as part of a bigger campaign by Netwerk Vlaanderen, a Belgian organization concerned with banks’ responsibilities for what they invest in. ACE bank was an elaborate deception, with a headquarters in central Brussels, parodying other banks. It claimed to be investigating whether there was a market for its special way of doing business.
First Inspired by a doll-sized action in Siberia, #occupysmallstreet staged its first little protest in Melbourne's City Square, as part of #F12, International Art + Occupy Day. Signs are made collectively, by regular Arts x Activism and members of the public (adults and children) who stop by and have something to add.
It was a classic summit protest at the height of the anti-globalization movement. Thirty-four heads of state from across the Americas were gathering in Québec City to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a sweeping trade deal with deeply anti-democratic provisions.
Activists gate-crashed a retirement dinner for outgoing HMRC boss Dave Hartnett in Oxford, presenting him with flowers and a fake award for allowing large companies to avoid paying tax.
A Nasa scientist who went viral over his tearful protest on the climate crisis has told The Independent that his activism comes from a sense of desperation to “find something that actually has an impact and moves the needle”.
Peter Kalmus was among a group of scientists arrested last week after they chained themselves to a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles in protest of the bank’s financing of fossil fuels.
Per os is a research-based art project about the pharmaceutical companies' role in our society, psychiatry and healthcare. Using surveys I have conducted over the past three years and a large amount of anger at how wrong and corrupt the system is, I would like to interpret this research artistically in order to develop material for an exhibition and interventions.
When President Trump announced the US departure from the Paris Climate Accord on 1 June 2017, his enjoyment at walking over the efforts of national delegations and hundreds of pressure groups across the world who fought for that deal was palpable. I was in Paris in December 2015 during the negotiations, when the possibility of a global agreement was merely that, a fragile potential.
"Thai artists and art students are on the frontline of their country’s swelling pro-democracy movement, calling for reforms of Thailand’s military-backed government, and breaking both taboo and national law to criticise the nation’s monarchy.
TEL AVIV
Thousands of people took to the streets in Israeli cities Saturday for a fifth straight week to protest the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning proposed judicial reforms.
Demonstrators from non-governmental organizations, lawyers, and technology sectors staged the protests/
Police closed roads leading to squares in Tel Aviv during the day and took security measures in the surrounding area.
Between 1995 and 2017 the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin brought in $35 billion USD in revenue for Purdue Pharma, most of which went directly into the hands of the Sackler family.
The 15M movement in Spain grew out of a desire for liberation and greater access to social and political rights for marginalized groups. At its core the activists of 15M were visionaries and used voting for a utopian society as a creative act to reimagine the world they created. Reality is socially construed by the forces that determine individual agency.
Between the late 1960s and 1970s numerous alternative printshops were set up across the UK, with the founding objective of producing, providing or facilitating the cheap and safe printing of radical materials. They were started by libertarians, aligned and non-aligned Marxists, anarchists and feminists, and as such were constitutive of the fractured and fractious politics of the post-1968 left.
BBB are a network of militant bakers armed with pies that are ready to change the world. They stand for ecology, bioregionalism, human-scale economies, and proper gastronomics, and their method is inspired by Noël Godin, who has been pieing public figures since the '70s at the head of the International Patisserie Brigade.