Independent producer and longtime WWNO collaborator Eve Abrams brings us Unprisoned: Stories From The System. From New Orleans and Louisiana, the world’s incarceration capital, we meet those serving time inside and outside the criminal justice system.
The dramatic demonstration of people power on the streets, called the “Candlelight Revolution,” was sparked off by President Park’s abuse of power and corruption. She had shared classified information on state affairs with her close confidantes, including Ms.
“Everything is art. Everything is politics.” Globally renowned artist Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957) is celebrated as a disruptor of artistic canons and a champion of free expression. In his work—ranging across performance, photography, sculpture, video, and installation—he deploys humor and provocation, calling upon his viewers to examine history, society, and culture.
The signature angst of our time was profoundly expressed in the poems submitted for WOMAWORDS Literary Press June 2020 edition, Imaging Life After COVID-19, offering women poets an opportunity to write about their experience of the pandemic and their vision of or for the future. The universal trauma wrought by this virus, invisible and silent and pouncing with madness and mendacity, brings us to a place we’d like to forget but never will.
The Guerilla Girls are a group of feminist activist artists, who use facts, humor, and outrageous visuals to expose gender and ethnic bias and corruption in politics, art, film, and pop culture in their artworks. In 1989, they designed this billboard for the Public Art Fund (PAF) in New York, aimed to criticize the museum institutions for under-representing female artists and objectifying women.
The global response to COVID-19 has made clear that the fear of contracting disease has an ugly cousin: xenophobia. As the coronavirus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind, manifesting in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.
Since 2020, university students across China have launched a grassroots initiative to combat menstrual stigma by placing “menstrual pad mutual aid boxes” in campus restrooms. These boxes, often accompanied by signs reading “Take one if you need it, donate if you can,” provide free sanitary pads to anyone caught off guard by their period—offering both practical relief and a symbolic challenge to the cultural silence surrounding menstruation.
The problem with feminism is that it’s just too familiar. The attention of a jaded public and neophiliac media may have been aroused by #MeToo, with its connotations of youth, sex and celebrity, but for the most part it has drifted recently towards other forms of prejudice, such as transphobia. Unfortunately for women, though, the hoary old problems of discrimination, violence and unpaid labour are still very much with us.
If Not Now, When? is an ongoing exhibition that showcases the work of 31 female sculptors, employing diverse materials and forms to address social and environmental issues such as gender equality, nuclear disarmament, and electronic waste. The Hepworth Wakefield in England is hosting the exhibition from April 3 to July 4, 2023.
Over the past few years, the public’s understanding of the issues that transgender people face has grown exponentially, but many people have never actually spoken to a transgender person.
El Sistema, also known as The National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestra and Choir, was established in Venezuela in 1975 by José Antonio Abreu, a Venezuelan educator, musician and activist. The music education program operates within the voluntary sector and is funded publicly.
The Scheherazade Project is a Performing Arts Non-profit based in Washington DC. Co-founders Lisa Leibow and Julia Alvarez were inspired by Scheherazade in the Arab classic 1001 Nights and created The Scheherazade Project.
For more information, our website is https://thescheherazadeproject.org/The-Scheherazade-Project
Artists in Rio de Janeiro have staged a pop-up street show to protest against the closure by the new far-right state government of an exhibition because of a performance attacking dictatorship-era torture.
Serene colors and technical set pieces create a surreal ambience as performers delicately hover into the black void above the stage. These performers belong to Kinetic Light, an "internationally-recognized disability arts ensemble". In 2022, the ensemble performed Wired, a "potent contemporary aerial dance performance that explores race, gender, and disability stories of barbed wire in the United States".
A unique piece captured significant attention at the Central Academy of Fine Arts undergraduate graduation exhibition in June. The work featured an "anime-style" girl's skull linked to a human skeleton and internal organs, all encased within a thin film. As visitors entered the exhibit area, her breathing and gaze would alter accordingly.
Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.
The creative fusion of art and activism in urban spaces has propelled the British collective Led by Donkeys into the spotlight, garnering millions of views for their interventions on social media. Their critical visual occupations - whether billboard messages during the day or large-scale projections at night - raise a compelling question: which medium holds the greater persuasive power?
We are sitting at a dhaba – a roadside tea-shop in Pakistan often frequented by lower-to-middle income men. At our table: four women and camera crew. The reporter from ‘one of the most globally viewed’ [read: western], mainstream British outlets looks me in the eye: “So, how safe do you feel at the moment? We were just surrounded by a group of little boys [because of the cameras], do you think the situation can ever turn on you?"
The large crowds and brightly coloured placards of the school climate strikes became some of the defining images of 2019.
“There would be lots of chanting and the energy was always amazing,” says Dominique Palmer, a 20-year-old climate activist from London who has been involved with the strikes for more than a year. “Being there with everyone in that moment is truly an electrifying feeling. It’s very different now.”
Zanele Muholi, the self-proclaimed visual activist and photographer, investigates the fraught relationship between post-apartheid South Africa and its queer community, who, despite being constitutionally protected since 1996, remain a constant target of abuse and discrimination.
Cassils has used clay, fire, photography, urine and the musculature of their own body as mediums to provoke, challenge and excite whoever experiences their singular creations.
From Public Delivery:
For Ice Watch (2014), he extracted 30 blocks of glacial ice from the waters of Greenland and in 2018 strategically placed them in front of Tate Modern in London . The ice was left here to melt. Ice Watch was to inspire public action against climate change, advocating for a rapid public response.
Replete with an unmistakable look, intense silence, and mime-like moves, the Red Rebels are, quite intentionally, riveting. In the words of artist and activist Doug Francisco, founder of the Red Rebels Brigade: "We divert, distract, delight, and inspire the people who watch us."