Projects tagged "Civil Liberties"

"Stand Up, Sisters (《姐姐妹妹站起来》)": The Miserable Past of Chinese Prostitutes
Practitioner:
Xihe Chen (陈西禾)
Date:
Jan 1 1951
"Stand Up, Sisters" tells the story of a rural girl who journeys to Beijing for a family visit, only to be deceived and forced into prostitution, suffering unthinkable hardships. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, these women are rehabilitated. The narrative reaches its peak with her and her younger sisters' victorious achievement of self-reliance.
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Mapping skin deep
Practitioner:
CERRUCHA
Date:
Mar 17 2014
“Mapping skin deep” is an audiovisual public installation consisting of portraits with testimonies from refugee/undocumented immigrants currently residing in Montreal and elsewhere. Their bodies have been scarred in post-production tracing the route they took from their homeland to Montreal, hence mapping them skin deep.
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¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York exhibition
Practitioner:
Bronx Museum, Museo del Barrio, Loisaida INC
Date:
Jul 1 2015
Spread over three institutions — the Bronx Museum of the Arts; El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem; and Loisaida Inc., a cultural center in the East Village — this show departs from straight political history by presenting the Young Lords as a cultural phenomenon as well as an ideological one, with a highly developed instinct for visual self-projection, right down to having an official party photographer, the gifted Hiram Maristany.
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'0 to 1939 in 3 seconds’: Why Anti-Elon Musk Satire Is Flourishing in Britain
Practitioner:
Center for Political Beauty and others
Date:
Apr 5 2025
The mischievous posters began appearing all over London in the past two months. On the side of an East London bus stop, one of them shows Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, emerging from a Tesla’s roof with his hand pointing upward in a straight-armed salute. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the ad reads. “Tesla. The Swasticar.”
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Cop d' ull
Practitioner:
Enmedio, TAF!
Date:
May 1 2002
This project was born a few days after a demonstrator lost an eye after being hit by a rubber bullet shot from police guns in Barcelona. Unfortunately, it was not the first time. "Cop d' ull" means a "a blow to the eye" and also "at a glance”, which is a perfect description of this project.
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Dancing Is The New Protest In Iran
Practitioner:
Iranian Activists
Date:
Mar 14 2023
The Islamic Republic has always frowned upon dance but recently even a simple choreographed or ‘synchronized movement’ – as the regime calls it – has become an act of protest.
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My vagina says, “I want freedom.”
Practitioner:
Beijing Foreign Studies University Students
Date:
Nov 12 2013
In November 2013, a group of 17 female students at Beijing Foreign Studies University sparked national debate when they staged a bold social media campaign in support of an upcoming performance of The Vagina Monologues, a feminist play by Eve Ensler.
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Design For Freedom Summit Shares Strategies For Removing Modern-Day Slavery From Building And Construction Supply Chain
Practitioner:
Grace Farms Foundation
Date:
Mar 29 2024
Shackles. Cotton. The Big House. Americans tend to think of slavery in terms of chattel slavery. Plantation Slavery. Slavery where human beings are bought, sold, and owned. The kind outlawed in the United States by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Slavery as a relic of the 19th Century. “Six of us lived, worked, slept in a 10-by-10 (foot) room without a bed, bathroom, or clean water,” Nasreen Sheikh remembers.
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Polycom Development Project
Practitioner:
Jane Anyango
Date:
Apr 4 2017
In a lively room in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, a group of women have gathered to discuss how to keep the upcoming Kenyan election free from violence. The women are not politicians, election officials or campaigners – they are grassroots activists, working with their communities to keep the peace on August 8.
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Protest against Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
Practitioner:
Sarah Constantin
Date:
Jan 28 2016
A Femen activist, Sarah Constantin, is hanged from a noose-like rope from a Paris bridge to call attention to the large number of executions in Iran as she stages a protest against visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Paris, Thursday, Jan. 28, 2016. A near-naked woman hanging from a noose-like rope from a Paris bridge has sent a message to visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
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The Protest Banner Lending Library
Practitioner:
Aram Han Sifuentes
Date:
Jan 1 2017
The Protest Banner Lending Library is a space for people to gain skills to learn to make their own banners, a communal sewing space where we support each other’s voices, and a place where people can check out handmade banners to use in protests.
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Mayday Space
Practitioner:
Mayday Space
Date:
Jan 1 2016
Mayday is a neighborhood resource and a citywide destination for engaging programming, a home for radical thought and debate, and a welcoming gathering place for people to work, learn, drink, dance and build together.
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ABOLISH ICE
Practitioner:
Patricia Dahlman and Michael Dal Cerro
Date:
Apr 7 2026
The resistance to Trump’s ICE militia is strong and is documented in the online art exhibition, “ABOLISH ICE” https://sites.google.com/view/abolish-ice/home The participating artists-activists are from New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California.
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Prague's Lennon Wall
Practitioner:
public
Date:
Feb 8 2015
Prague's Lennon Wall is a tourist attraction to some, and a participatory street art haven for others. Directly opposite of the French embassy, the wall has been filled with evolving art and graffiti since the 80s. The wall received its first public inscription, a tribute to John Lennon, following Lennon's assassination in September 1980.
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Guantanamo Bay Museum of Art and History
Practitioner:
Ian Alan Paul
Date:
Aug 1 2012
When the last detention facility in Guantanamo Bay was officially decommissioned in 2010, an international team of artists, curators and architects began planning and designing a museum that would take the place of the detention facility - a little less than two years later, their work became reality.
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A Night Of Philosophy And Ideas
Practitioner:
various
Date:
Jan 27 2018
"A Night of Philosophy and Ideas is a thinker’s lollapalooza. The free, 12-hour weekend lyceum at the Brooklyn Public Library includes spirited debate, live music, theater, performance art pieces, and film screenings. At any given hour, five or six different events will be taking place simultaneously. Visitors are encouraged to come and go as the spirit moves them.
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Wheel of Misfortune
Practitioner:
Civic Party
Date:
Jan 27 2017
Hong Kong’s Lunar New Year fairs draw thousands of visitors who stroll past stalls of potted narcissus, snack on fish balls and snap up the latest plush toys. In recent years, the largest of the fairs, at Victoria Park, has also become a prime site for political expression.
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The Protest Mask Project
Practitioner:
Makwa Studio, Maggie Thompson (Fond Du Lac Ojibwe)
Date:
May 28 2020
The Protest Mask Project was co-organized by Maggie Thompson and Jaida Grey Eagle. During the George Floyd protests, the artists' studio, Makwa Studio, created hundreds of masks to give to protestors in the city of Minneapolis where the demonstrations began.
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Tournons le dos ! / Turn our back ! [April 22, 2012 – April 23, 2017]
Practitioner:
Lino Tonelotto, the 22avril2012 collective, the 23avril2017 collective.
Date:
Apr 15 2012
In France, abstention, vote of protest, lassitude or violent reactions rise from all over the crisis of our "representative democracy ». What about thinking the other way round ? What if we reappropriate the iconography of the election?
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Once banned for his work, anti-apartheid activist highlights role of politics in art
Practitioner:
Gavin Jantjes
Date:
Jun 19 2024
In 1978, while studying print-making in Hamburg, Gavin Jantjes was deemed a persona non grata by South Africa. His crime? Creating a series of prints that documented the violence and discrimination in the apartheid state, which he gathered together under the tongue-in-cheek name of a "colouring book".
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"Fuck Tha Police": N.W.A.'s Most Courageous Song is Still Relevant As Ever
Practitioner:
N.W.A.
Date:
Aug 9 1998
Upon its original release on N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton LP in 1988, the song was safely titled “_ _ _ _ Tha Police (Fill in the Blanks),” and the album cover was among the first to feature the infamous “Parental Advisory” label, warning moms and dads about the album’s explicit lyrics. A censored version of the LP even omitted the song entirely.
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Liberation art from the Church
Practitioner:
Sister Corita Kent
Date:
Jan 1 1969
From Black Power to Migrants’ Power BY Robin Cembalest POSTED 01/22/13 As ’60s activist art enters museums, a new generation is creating an iconography of protest for today
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"1984" in Bangkok Streets
Practitioner:
Thailand protesters
Date:
May 30 2014
There are no whistles, no loud speakers, and no placards held up high in this quiet act of subversion. Pimsiri Petchnamrob stands silently in a mass of sharply dressed Bangkok commuters, her hands clutched around a copy of George Orwell's 1984. Next to her a small group of young men and women, their faces sombre and their heads bowed low, also read books about fictional and real totalitarian worlds in silence.
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Dialogue
Practitioner:
Xiao Lu
Date:
Jun 4 1989
The China Project: - An Artist in her Gun in 1989: Xiao Lu's Accidental Revolt:
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untitled (Long Live the Real King)
Practitioner:
Unknown
Date:
Feb 24 2025
An A.I. generated video of Donald Trump sucking Elon Musk's toes was broadcast at the Department of Housing and Development headquarters in DC in February of 2025. As an actual art piece, we can debate if the video itself is art. However, the caption, subject matter of the fake video, and chosen location to broadcast is definitely a strategic work of creative activism. From the New York Times:
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