We all learn art in school. Every kid loves to draw at some point. People get fascinated with the details of their new camera, or spend free time writing poems. But eventually, there’s a not a teacher telling you how great your are, or the camera gets put away, or you just plain get busy and stop. Years could go by before you start again, if you ever do at all.
Nadya Tolokonnikova is a Siberian artist and a creator of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot. Tolokonnikova’s political actions and wide-ranging performance interventions have established her as a leading voice in the fight against authoritarian power. During her residency, she will compose performances that demonstrate her multifaceted approach to resisting systems of oppression and dehumanization.
Shine, written by Stoneman Douglas students Sawyer Garrity and Andrea Peña in response to the tragic shooting at their school on February 14, 2018 to inspire unity, hope, and change. MSD alum Brittani Kagan collaborated with students and faculty to create this music video to honor the victims and the school.
The performance, “Lambrakis LivZ”, concerns the re-enactment of the political speech of Grigoris Lambrakis given in Athens in 1962. Grigoris Lambrakis was a peace-activist, assassinated by a paramilitary plot on June 1963 at Thessaloniki, Greece.
In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher, along with his church group, was protesting outside a Bureau of Land Management oil and gas lease auction of 116 parcels of public land in Utah's red rock country. Tim decided to take his protest inside and disrupt the auction itself. Instead, at the door, he was offered a bidder's paddle — which, after a split second of hesitation, he accepted.
Often in military style video games we kill without much regard for the enemy. They are faceless or stereotypical, the Nazi or evil Cold War–era Russian. They are enemies that were fought on the battlefields of great wars, or they are aliens that have no resemblance to humans save for a general humanoid form.
"I was the mystery of an anatomy, a question asked but not answered," says poet Lee Mokobe, a TED Fellow, in this gripping and poetic exploration of identity and transition. It's a thoughtful reflection on bodies, and the meanings poured into them.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Inspired by the Laughing Farmers of Karnataka, protesters in New York make Carlos Slim's visit to New York uncomfortable while he appears on a "Live From NYPL" program. This excellent video summarizes the action.
The smuggling of illicit cargo and people has played a significant role in shaping the culture as well as the economy of the southernmost american city of Key West since its foundation in 1821.
For over 60 years, Colombia has been facing war between guerrilla groups, the State, paramilitary groups and drug dealers. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, raped, displaced and threaten by this armed conflict. The common trait of this tragedy has been the people being in the middle, the people that still today pay the consequences.
"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?
Students dressed as Israeli soldiers stopped other students, ordered them to the ground, and blindfolded them in a demonstration that drew multiple campus groups to a standoff on College Walk Thursday afternoon.
The Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine set up mock checkpoints—to resemble those manned by the Israeli army in the West Bank—drawing crowds and counter-protests for several hours.
The Sex Workers' Opera is a multidisciplinary show featuring stories of sex workers from 17 countries and produced since 2013. It is written and performed by sex workers and their friends.
La Casa Invisible project was started in 2007 in Malaga, Spain, when a group of socially involved participants squatted in a run-down building, aiming to eventually claim the legal rights to the property (Moor & Smart, 2016). The space was opened to local artists and creators, quickly becoming a hub for free local music, performances, and seminars as well as creating an important meeting space for social groups (Moor & Smart, 2016).
Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, was first performed in Athens in 411 BC. The play, while fictional, can be read as an early example of creative activism. It is about Lysistrata's quest to end the war between Athens and Sparta. She gathers the women of Athens and makes them swear an oath to deny their lovers and husband sex until they end the war.
After weeks of vegan activists protesting in front of his nose-to-tail bistro, chef Michael Hunter decided to make a statement by butchering a freshly-killed deer’s leg in the window of his Toronto restaurant, Antler Kitchen & Bar, right in front of the demonstrators. “I figured, I’ll show them,” Hunter tells writer Corey Mintz. “I’m going to have my own protest.”
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.
K-pop fans and users of TikTok claimed tickets to Donald Trump’s Saturday night rally in Tulsa then did not use them, as part of a coordinated effort which helped to leave hundreds of seats empty in a 19,000-capacity venue.
In 2017 Ge Yulu became a national sensation in China. That year, he submitted his final project as a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, revealing the unnamed road in Beijing that he had claimed in 2014 as his own. Because the Lu character in his name means road, he erected a sign for Geyu Road that blended seamlessly into the setting.
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.
At age twenty-eight, Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, in all uppercase letters, to announce her presence in the Viennese art scene. Eager to counter the male–dominated group of artists known as the Vienna Actionists—including Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—she sought a new identity that was not bound by her father's name (Lehner) or her former husband's name (Hollinger).
CultureStrike, the national arts and activism group, teamed up with undocumented youth and NY-based artist Miguel Luciano to hold a kite-based symbolic public art project in Washington D.C.
MEXICO CITY — Tens of thousands of women vanished from streets, offices and classrooms across Mexico on Monday, part of a nationwide strike to protest the violence they suffer and to demand government action against it.
The women’s absence from public spaces was intended to be a reminder that every day, 10 women in Mexico are killed — and so disappear forever, organizers said.