Platform ‘Iranian Women of Graphic Design’ share open-access protest posters to amplify #WomenLifeFreedom movement—triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini—in Iran and beyond.
On the 5th of May 2021, the subway's 12-line partially collapsed, killing 24 people and injuring more than 70. Onboard, were children, young women and men, and the elderly. The accident also killed a man and injured a woman who was driving a car, upon which the train fell.
The poorly conditions of the subway structure had been repeatedly reported by neighbors living nearby. No institutional response was given.
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 Harlem Festival of Culture not only pays homage to the past but also envisions a brighter future. It serves as a platform to showcase the rich diversity and dynamism of Harlem's artistic community, while also acting as a catalyst for social change and community empowerment. The festival boasts a lineup of artists from various genres and backgrounds, including jazz, soul, hip-hop, gospel, blues, rock, Latin, and Afrobeat.
After J.Cole posted a song that implies that Noname can get her message across to a wider audience if she changes her tone, she releases another song in response. However, instead of explicitly responding to his critique, she uses the controversy to shed light on the death of Black female activist Oluwatoyin Salau, who was killed by her assaulter.
Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah is a photographic series exploring the complex identities of Muslim women in post-revolutionary Iran. Combining black-and-white portraits, Persian calligraphy, and symbolic elements such as guns and veils, Neshat interrogates themes of martyrdom, violence, femininity, and resistance.
In March 1939, a 23-year-old Billie Holiday walked up to the mic at West 4th's Cafe Society in New York City to sing her final song of the night. Per her request, the waiters stopped serving and the room went completely black, save for a spotlight on her face.
Many may not realize, but legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, her 1939 song about lynching, “Strange Fruit,” made her a target of the FBI.
The pink "pussy hats" in The Women's March were created by a group of activists and knitters, including Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman. The hats were designed as a form of protest and a symbol of resistance to the new administration and its policies.
"Myanmar has been engulfed in protest since February 1, when Burmese army general Min Aung Hlaing seized control of the government in a military coup, refusing to accept to the landslide election victory of the National League for Democracy and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.
Dogs featured in one ruse to ridicule the regime—pictures of dictator Than Shwe were hung around the necks of the stray dogs that roam the streets of Rangoon. The pictures, which rapidly found their way onto the Internet, are the work of an exiled Burmese satirist who goes by the name of Mr Creator. Downloaded copies of his pictures and cartoons are popular items among cyber dissidents.
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
from ahramonlineby Sara ElkamelAn indelible link has materialised between artistic expression and
revolution. Maybe it is the features they share: freedom, deviance and
fluidity, which bring them so close together.
In any case, Egypt’s January 25 Revolution undeniably led to a
surge of creativity across the country; a rebel’s passion merges with an
"The President Sang Amazing Grace" tells the story of the 2015 attack that claimed nine lives at the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC. It first appeared on Zoe's 2017 album "Small Brown Birds" and was widely played on independent folk radio shows across the US. Since then, the song has taken on a larger life, inspiring a variety of artists and finding its way to new audiences.
Counterspace is an independent curatorial platform functioning as the first decolonial thinktank mapping cultural activism worldwide. It shapes collectively decolonial toolkits with common tools and resources, and a global directory browsable by continent, praxis, and social construct, as a Beuys-inspired ‘social sculpture’ revisited, and an alternative map of the universe.
The Mexican Pavilion is an immersive space based on a 1:1 scale fragment of the expanded model of the campesino basketball court, an infrastructure that has become repurposed as a space for poly- and pluri-valent processes of decolonisation in Mexico’s indigenous communities.
"Las Carpetas looks at the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program that aimed to destroy the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Through still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera provides a counter-history to the way many understand this period of time and its aftermath.
Seattle Times:
In 1921, just four years after the Bolshevik Revolution, American journalist Albert Rhys Williams wrote: “The visitor to Russia is struck by the multitude of posters — in factories and barracks, on walls and railway-cars, on telegraph poles — everywhere.”
Protests erupted in cities and on campuses across China this weekend as frustrated and outraged citizens took to the streets in a stunning wave of demonstrations against the government’s “zero covid” policy and the leaders enforcing it.
Several nights of Halloween celebration in Shanghai provided a vivid, if indirect, commentary this week on the malaise gripping the world’s second-largest economy.
I was 24 years old. We were in danger. The Israeli planes were flying raids overhead. And I was designing posters." Hosni Radwan won't easily forget the conditions in the Beirut offices of the PLO Information Department, as an exhibition of the work it produced opens in London.
This is a series of paintings reflecting the struggle and sacrifices made by the Tibetan people for independence. The author is Tenzing Rigdol, who is a Tibetan and influenced a lot by the Dalai Lama and traditional Tibetan culture. The paintings are full of Tibetan cultural elements. For instance, the characters created in the paintings are Tibetan monks, who are the typical representatives of their culture.
The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra is planning to immerse a British flag in blood donated by indigenous peoples from countries colonised by the British Empire.
The resulting artwork, titled Union Flag, is intended to be an “acknowledgement of the pain and destruction colonialism has caused First Nations peoples, devastating entire cultures and civilisations,” the artist said in a statement.