Main Gallery

Shibboleth
Practitioner:
Tate Modern, The Unilever Series
Date:
Oct 9 2007
Text taken from website:
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Drawing the line: meet the Romanian artist-activist tackling world crises one cartoon at a time
Practitioner:
Dan Perjovschi
Date:
Jan 1 2016
Dan Perjovschi is one of Romania’s foremost artistic voices. Although known as a talented multi-disciplinary artist in his home country, particularly for his early performance work, he is most widely known internationally for his massive drawing installations.
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Barbie Liberation Organization
Practitioner:
Barbie Liberation Organization
Date:
Dec 1 2003
New York Times, DAVID FIRESTONE, Published: December 31, 1993 Your son tears the wrapping paper off his fierce new "Talking Duke" G. I. Joe doll and eagerly presses the talk button. Out comes a painfully chirpy voice that sounds astonishingly like Barbie's saying, "Let's go shopping!" Does your son: A) Furiously vaporize the doll with his own phaser rifle? B) Go shopping with Joe?
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Actor Jim Carrey has emerged as an unlikely political artist and activist
Practitioner:
Jim Carrey
Date:
Jan 1 2018
Actor and comedian Jim Carrey has always been known for his slapstick silliness. You know the films — "Dumb and Dumber," "The Mask," "Liar Liar," "Ace Ventura," just to name a few. But he also always managed to peel back the comic goofiness for more serious turns in films like "The Truman Show" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."
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Musicians trade in boycotts for activism to fight North Carolina's 'bathroom bill'
Practitioner:
Animal Collective, Duran Duran, Mumford & Sons, Beyonce
Date:
May 11 2016
Animal Collective, Mumford and Sons and Duran Duran among performers who have turned concerts in state into fundraisers as part of NC Needs You movement Even as North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, refused to comply with federal officials over his state’s so-called “bathroom bill”, experimental pop group Animal Collective went forward with its scheduled show in the state over the weekend.
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Fotokonbit (Putting Cameras in Haitian Hands) - ONGOING working organization
Practitioner:
fotokonbit
Date:
Jun 10 2011
The Haitian Creole word "konbit" denotes the idea of similar talents joining together to work towards a common goal. The founders — a group of photographers, educators, and artists — came up with the idea for Fotokonbit a few years ago to "empower Haitians to tell their own stories and document their community", but it was the 2010 earthquake that gave the group new urgency.
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Tatlin's Whisper #6
Practitioner:
Tania Bruguera
Date:
Mar 1 2009
This is the sixth piece of the series Tatlin’s Whisper which examines the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media. This series intends to activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualized from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution.
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ButActually | The Hashtag Activist Dictionary
Practitioner:
ButActually, NYU Gallatin
Date:
Jan 1 2015
Butactually.com is a new kind of online dictionary created by a team of students at NYU Gallatin who seek to document, organize, and provide a platform for anyone to share new activist hashtags.
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Comusitària
Practitioner:
Comusitària
Date:
Oct 1 2013
Comusitària is a Community Cultural Development agency based in Barcelona run by Noemi Rubio and Laia Serra. They work in the production, management, research and dissemination of artistic projects that build social capital and enable citizens to live more active, critical and creative lives.
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Chicago Gun Share Program
Practitioner:
The Escape Pod, The Brady Center To Prevent Gun Violence
Date:
May 10 2018
'Gun-sharing' stations in Chicago use art to make a point about gun violence. Users can’t actually grab a gun from the stations, but its creators hope the installation will send a message about how disturbingly easy it is for a citizen to acquire an assault weapon—as easy as renting a bike. They can also make a donation to the Brady Center and learn more about the campaign's gun safety efforts.
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Odyssey Works
Practitioner:
Odyssey Works
Date:
Sep 10 2012
IT all looked so normal: a dozen diners chatting over coffee and hash browns at an outdoor cafe near the waterfront here on an August morning. The cook flipped eggs, a dog sniffed for scraps, and the young woman in the black sweater suspected nothing of the spies and confederates sprinkled throughout. They’d been studying her life for four months and were finally preparing to pull it through the looking glass they’d constructed.
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Los Intocables
Practitioner:
Erik Ravelo
Date:
Sep 1 2013
A CUBAN artist's controversial photographs of children being hung from crosses has landed him in hot water. Erik Ravelo took a series of photos of children hung like Jesus from a cross, but in the place of the cross were soldiers, surgeons, priests and Ronald McDonald.
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Art, Advocacy, and Action: Luke Ching's Crusade for Labor Rights in Hong Kong
Practitioner:
Luke Ching Chin Wai
Date:
Jan 1 2024
Luke Ching Chin Wai is a conceptual artist and labour-artivist in Hong Kong. Since 2013, he has worked undercover in different low-paid jobs in the city, including as a security guard, supermarket cashier worker, and metro cleaner to learn about poor people's working conditions. He then uses these experiences to create art and push for improved labour rights.
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Demonstealer Fights For a Better India Through Death Metal
Practitioner:
Demonstealer
Date:
Mar 23 2023
The Propaganda Machine is a battle cry delivered in the language of extreme metal. On Sahil Makhija’s fourth solo album as Demonstealer, he takes aim at the right-wing politicians, racist nationalists, disinformation artists, and religious extremists who manipulate and exploit the masses, in his native India and all over the world. He doesn’t mince his words; just about every lyric on the album could easily be printed on a protest sign.
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Vangardist HIV+ Magazine
Practitioner:
Vangardist
Date:
May 4 2015
HIV is still among the top 10 leading causes of death in the world, ranking sixth with around 1.5 million deaths each year. Around 35 million people are currently infected with HIV, and cases are worryingly on the rise—it is far from old news. Determined to change this, a magazine has embarked on a bold new campaign in which 3,000 copies will be printed using ink mixed with HIV-infected blood.
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The Green Belt Movement
Practitioner:
Wangari Maathai
Date:
Apr 1 1977
The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded by Professor Wangari Maathai in 1977 under the auspices of the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) to respond to the needs of rural Kenyan women who reported that their streams were drying up, their food supply was less secure, and they had to walk further and further to get firewood for fuel and fencing.
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Water Life
Practitioner:
Aïda Muluneh
Date:
Jan 1 2018
“Most people can’t imagine a futurist Africa,” says Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh. She challenges this in her project, Water Life, exploring real-world issues with an otherworldly twist. Muluneh went to Dallol, Afar, Ethiopia, an extreme landscape where it is dry and hot to capture the essence of water to life. Through her work, Muluneh highlights how water scarcity is mainly a burden on women.
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Memorial Hall to the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre
Practitioner:
Nanjing Municipal Government
Date:
Dec 13 1985
Nanjing, a picturesque city lying by the Yangtze River, owes its fame to its favorable geographic position, galaxy of talents and profound historical background. Having served as the capital of ten dynasties in ancient China, its splendour has remained and even enlarged with an extended population up to 600,000 when the government of the Republic of China set up its capital there in 1927.
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Sao Paulo goes completely ad-free with Clean City Law
Practitioner:
Mayor Gilberto Kassab
Date:
Sep 1 2006
Mayor Gilberto Kassab passed a Clean City Law that banned all public advertising in Sao Paulo, one of the world's most populous cities. The mayor gained the support of the city's elites in pressing the law as an anti-pollution measure targeting "visual pollution". The city was quickly stripped of its ubiquitous billboards, signs, graffiti and other public ads.
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‘Calligraffiti’ Artist El Seed Makes Tunisia His Canvas
Practitioner:
eL Seed
Date:
Mar 1 2014
The minaret of the Jara Mosque in Gabes towers over its surroundings. Formed of golden brick, it jolts up from the flat, sand-colored cityscape around it, all the better to broadcast the call to prayer across the coastal city.
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