This week's Swede of the Week is Tomas Gunnarsson, whose quest to find Sweden's "Sexist of the Year" has found a viral following across the country. He says Swedes who buy into the 'most equal country in the world' label are delusional.
Who was the most sexist person in Sweden in 2013?
During the 2020 and 2021 social protests in Chile, Colombia, and Peru, Latin American fans of K-pop, Korean popular music and culture that mixes rhythms, styles, dance routines and has a defined aesthetic, went from using social networks to support their favorite artists to using them to sabotage the hashtags of conservative influencers that discredited the mobilizations.
In 2005, Emad Burnat got a video camera to record the birth of his son. That same year, Israel's security barrier went right through his village of Bil'in in the West Bank. The fence cut off some fields and olive groves on the other side.
When protests broke out against the establishment of the barrier, Burnat became the unofficial cameraman for the weekly anti-wall protests that drew support from around the world.
AN UNPRECEDENTED COALITION of workers from some of America’s largest companies will strike on Friday. Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Whole Foods, Walmart, Target, and FedEx are slated to walk out on work, citing what they say is their employers’ record profits at the expense of workers’ health and safety during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mass media using propaganda to brainwash citizens. Confusion and ignorance causing a divide. People rising up against an oppressive government. Humans being torn between rage and love. These are the themes of Green Day’s widely successful 2004 album, “American Idiot.” These themes still sound familiar. Nearly two decades later, the world, especially the United States, faces these same issues.
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).
The coronavirus outbreak has prompted climate activists to abandon public demonstrations, one of their most powerful tools for raising public awareness, and shift to online protests.
This week, for example, organizers of the Fridays for Future protests are advising people to stay off the streets and post photos and messages on social media in a wave of digital strikes.
Linha Vermelha was created in 2016 by the non-profit organization Academia Cidadã (Citizenship Academy). At that time there were fifteen active contracts for oil and gas drilling and we were inspired by the “Red Line Action” in Paris, during COP21 and decided to create this campaign.
Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, asking the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world.
In 2009, the dissident artist created a work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. He recalls how the project, Remembering, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever
This is an edited extract from The Start podcast
The Dannenröder Forest in central Germany, is known, affectionately, by those who are trying to protect it, as “Danni”. Danni is an old growth forest – whole sections of it have grown and evolved without direct human influence – but for the last four decades it has been threatened by the building of a new motorway which, if built, would cut this showpiece of sustainable forestry in half.
In 1984, a group of women in New York gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art as part of a protest. A group show, An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, was showing 165 artists, 152 male artists exhibited alongside just 13 women.
Outraged, they attended the protest, bringing placards and chanting outside the museum. But a handful of women within the larger crowd learned something.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced meaningful and restrained sculptural forms out of common materials. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) consists of an ideal weight of 175 pounds of shiny, commercially distributed candy. The work’s physical form and scale change with each display, affected by its placement in the gallery as well as audience interactions.
First cut the banks! In 2012 Bankia declared itself bankrupt and, almost immediately, asked the Government of Spain for €23 billion. The Government accepted, yet that very same week ordered €20,000 million worth of cuts in health and education. It was then that we realized that what they called a crisis was actually a scam. You wouldn’t believe how pissed off we were. So we threw a party, because there is nothing like partying to relieve your anger.
A social experiment testing the public’s reaction to gay people in China has gone viral.
The blindfolded activists stood in public wearing T-shirts that said “I’m gay would you hug me?” and video of the protest then spread rapidly on Weibo, a hugely popular social media platform in China.
The social experiment follows a recent announcement by Weibo to ban gay content on its platform of 400 million active users.
In March 2016, Chinese feminist activists had planned to launch a crowdfunding campaign against sexual harassment advertisements, and they worked hard to raise 40,000 yuan in a month and a half. However, after perfunctory, evasive, and rejection by the relevant departments, anti-sexual harassment advertisements finally failed to go online.
TYRE NICHOLS WAS a photographer with an eye for the natural world. He was especially drawn to landscape portraiture, its calm and innocence. It is said that Nichols liked to crane his lens skyward, capturing what sunlight he could before it dissolved into the horizon. As he drove home after taking photos on January 7, he was pulled over by the Memphis police and what happened next was as tragic as it is terribly commonplace. Tyre Nichols is dead at 29.
The Climate Comedy Cohort is an unprecedented network of comedians who are coming together to learn, collaborate, and create hilarious new comedy informed by the hottest climate science. The Climate Comedy Cohort functions as a 9-month fellowship.
For Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist and musician, memory and land are inevitably entwined. The 45-foot letters of Never Forget reference the Hollywood sign, which initially spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND and was erected to promote a whites-only development.
On July 2nd, 2013, after attending the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales departed Russia from Vnukovo Airport in Moscow aboard his presidential plane. However, a "leak" suggested that Edward Snowden was aboard, which led Spain, France, and Portugal to close their airspace to the aircraft, to then be grounded in Austria.
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.
The project involved creating portraits of garbage pickers from the Jardim Gramacho landfill near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, using materials found in the landfill itself.
Muniz worked with the garbage pickers to create the portraits, which were then photographed and exhibited in galleries around the world. The project aimed to raise awareness of the plight of the garbage pickers and the environmental issues associated with landfill waste.
Hundreds of artists, cultural workers and activists gathered on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue in New York on Sunday (24 March), demanding that the most visited museum in the US publicly call for a ceasefire in the war in Gaza and commit to preserving Palestinian cultural heritage.
Shocking images have emerged purporting to be of an emaciated physician on a hunger strike while jailed in Iran for supporting women protesting the hijab law. Swedish-Iranian Dr. Farhad Meysami, 53 — who began his hunger strike on Oct. 7 to protest the killing of demonstrators by the Islamic Republic — was purported to be the man seen in skin-and-bone photos that have gone viral on social media.
In May of 2011, tens of thousands of people crowded Puerta del Sol in the center of Madrid in the most visible manifestation of sit-in protests against austerity and corruption. 15-M was an expression of the devastating effects of the 2008 recession, which harshly affected the middle class and condemned millions of people to poverty because of the crash of the housing bubble (Altares, 2021).