“He describes it as a “family theme park unsuitable for small children” – and with the Grim Reaper whooping it up on the dodgems and Cinderella horribly mangled in a pumpkin carriage crash, it is easy to see why.
Banksy’s new show, Dismaland, which opened on Thursday on the Weston-super-Mare seafront, is sometimes hilarious, sometimes eye-opening and occasionally breathtakingly shocking.
Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale write: Five Chinese feminists have been arrested for planning to protest against sexual harassment. They face five to ten years in jail. This post explains the background to the case, and suggests ways that other activists around the world can show solidarity.
Two climate activists scrawled blue ink across a series of Andy Warhol screen prints at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Australia this week to raise awareness of the country’s fossil fuel subsidies.
Images and video of the protest posted to social media show the two activists also trying to glue their hands to the famous print series titled Campbell’s Soup I, which is framed and under glass.
It was September 1738, and Benjamin Lay had walked 20 miles, subsisting on “acorns and peaches,” to reach the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Beneath his overcoat he wore a military uniform and a sword — both anathema to Quaker teachings. He also carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice.
There have now been ten coordinated 40 Days for Life campaigns since 2007, mobilizing people of faith and conscience in 440 cities across the United States and Canada, plus cities in Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Belize, Denmark, England, Georgia, Germany, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, Puerto Rico and Spain.During these unified efforts, participants witnessed countless blessings from God:
Former colleagues of Abdulhadi Al Khawaja from Front Line Defenders today held a silent vigil at the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Dublin to urge the King of Saudi Arabia to use his influence with Bahrain to enable Abdulhadi to travel to Denmark for medical treatment.
This protest installation was first used in 2016 at Standing Rock when the community banded together to protect the Missouri River from a Dakota Access Pipeline.
If fashion is a reflection of the times it is little wonder that the current round of shows have often felt discombobulating.
Gucci’s show on Sunday night was particularly surreal, opening with a series of models being propelled along a conveyor belt catwalk, staring bleakly ahead, wearing a high fashion take on straitjackets.
Beginning in January 2012, MicCheckWallSt, a subsidiary of Seattle's Occupy Wall Street group, began performing a series of silent vigils and marches throughout shopping areas and in front of banks in various Seattle neighborhoods. Images are from the first silent vigil outside of Westlake shopping center. Participants glued dollar bills to the outside of their mouths. Bills included statements such as:
On November 29th 2011 Proffessor of Philosophy Raymond Geuss relocated a lecture he was scheduled to give to an occupied lecture hall on the campus of cambridge university.
On Tuesday, May 8, in the midst of final exam week, a group of female first-year students performed a public art action at UC Berkeley to call attention to the UC Regents’ privatization of what was once the premier public university in the country.(See photos below)
By Adam Owens
Seventeen people were arrested Monday evening during what the state chapter of the NAACP called a nonviolent "pray in" protest at the General Assembly.
The protest was directed at Republican action on health care, unemployment benefits, education and voting rights.
In August 2015, Weston-Super-Mare - a sleepy seaside town in Somerset, England - suddenly became the top destination for the metropolitan elite, welcoming celebrity guests like Brad Pitt, Jack Black and Mark Ronson. Overnight this quaint town, just 18 miles from Bristol, was transformed by anonymous street artist Banksy when he opened his very own dystopian Disneyland style theme park called ‘Dismaland’.
Real estate agents and investors with plans to visit an open house in San Francisco Tuesday were greeted with a somewhat unexpected scene – a motley crew of Mission activists and neighborhood characters holding signs and singing, “If you buy this house, you will have bad karma.” A small brass band played along.
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.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of this country’s most beloved theater companies. Founded in New York City in 1963, the Bread and Puppet Theater’s first productions ranged from puppet shows for children to pieces opposing poor housing conditions. The group’s processions, involving monstrous puppets, some about 20 feet high, became a fixture of protests against the Vietnam War. "We don’t have playwrights in the theater.
In the Si 8 Do project, Seville activists convened in a neglected barrio during the Euromediterranean Conference on Sustainable Cities, which was taking place in Seville.
Cheril Linett is a female artist from Chile, with a background in performance art and stage performance, who primarily focuses her artwork on feminist issues in Chile, especially ones involving violence, murder, hate crime and different kinds of oppression and assault, but also creates artwork reflecting issues in other parts of Latin America.
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.
In 1900, Montgomery, Alabama had passed a city ordinance to segregate bus passengers by race, and conductors were empowered to assign seats to achieve that goal. The first four rows of seats on each Montgomery bus were reserved for whites, and buses had "colored" sections for black people generally in the rear of the bus, although blacks composed more than 75% of the ridership.
The Kurdish journalist and artist Zehra Doğan was freed yesterday after nearly three years in prison, Hyperallergic reports. Doğan first caught the attention of the Turkish authorities back in 2017 with a watercolor that depicted a Kurdish district after Turkish security forces set it on fire and largely destroyed it.
Criminal barristers in England and Wales have voted to stage mass walkouts and refuse new publicly funded cases in protest against sustained government cuts to the justice system.
In a poll organised by the Criminal Bar Association (CBA), 90% of its members backed direct action from 1 April. They are likely to be supported by solicitors working in the criminal courts and possibly other court staff.
Voina conducted a wake for absurdist poet and Soviet-era dissident Dmitry Prigov, featuring a table with food and vodka, in a Moscow Metro car. Originally, they had planned an action involving Prigov but he died before they were able to implement it. They later carried out a similar action on the Kiev Metro. As an art collective, Voina is testing the boundaries of performance art. As activists, they are testing the patience of Russian authorities.
After the economic crisis of December 20, 2001 in Argentina, there was a growth in the participation in all types of protests and claims of the different sectors affected by the crisis (against banks by savers, roadblocks and mobilizations of picket movements, state employees in municipalities and government houses, neighborhood assemblies, etc). The situation that was experienced led the protesters to seek new and varied reporting strategies.