Projects tagged "Corporate Power"

Hong Kong Apple Store met with protest over supply chain violations on iPhone 6 launch day
Practitioner:
SACOM
Date:
Sep 3 2015
Apple implemented improved reservation procedures and policies for employees dealing with the iPhone 6 launch at retail stores on September 19th, 2014, but the launch at the company’s Hong Kong store hadn't gone quite as smooth as elsewhere. The store was hit by protesters from the Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) and also required police to help disperse customers that had waited in line without reservations.
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Ghillie Suits Occupy UBS
Practitioner:
Seda Erdural
Date:
Feb 22 2012
The Yes Lab collaborated with "Knobotiq" to design an action against UBS, a financial services giant renowned for aiding tax evaders, funding environmental destruction, and getting bailed out by the public.
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Public Option Annie
Practitioner:
Agit-Pop
Date:
Oct 23 2009
The Guerilla Musical heard round the world
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The Panama Papers
Practitioner:
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
Date:
Apr 3 2016
A giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.
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Capitalism Works For Me! True/False
Practitioner:
Steve Lambert
Date:
Jul 1 2012
A 20ft by 9ft scoreboard that reads "Capitalism Works For Me!" and allows visitors to vote on whether Capitalism works in their lives by pressing a button for True or False.
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Clowns Arrested in Near-Successful Attack on Wall Street Bull
Practitioner:
The Yes Men
Date:
Nov 9 2011
The incident began when two clowns, Hannah Morgan and Louis Jargow, scaled the steel barricades protecting the landmark. The clowns began spanking and climbing the beast, traditional ways of coaxing a bull into anger in preparation for a Castilian corrida, or bullfight.
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</3 Less than Three and Up Srei: Art and the Cambodian Worker Struggle
Practitioner:
Kat Eng
Date:
Jan 17 2014
On a freezing Friday in January, Khmer-American artist Kat Eng sits in front of retail giant H&M’s Time Square store working on a manual sewing machine. For eight hours, Eng stitches together U.S. dollar bills while wearing a surgical mask and bloodstained shirt. Her performance “</3 Less Than Three” protests the way fast fashion and consumer culture creates oppressive conditions for Khmer workers.
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Politics, activism and cool cats by artist Meredith Stern at AS220 Project Space
Practitioner:
Meredith Stern
Date:
Feb 1 2020
“I really wanted to highlight the strength of the human condition. When we work together we’re stronger,” Meredith Stern says of her exhibition “Cooperation Cats: 10 years, 20 prints” at AS220’s Project Space, 93 Mathewson St., Providence, from Feb. 1 to 29.
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For Once, Don't Do It
Practitioner:
Nike
Date:
May 29 2020
Text by Seth Cohen - On Friday night, as U.S. television screens burned with images of peaceful protests turning violent, Nike released a new socially conscious ad calling on Americans to do something quite different than the brand’s usual call to “Just Do It.” Instead, one of the nation’s leading athletic apparel companies called on individuals to not turn their back on the painful issue of racism in the United States.
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Dirty Money in Art & Big Pharma
Practitioner:
Nan Goldin & P.A.I.N.
Date:
Jul 20 2018
Between 1995 and 2017 the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin brought in $35 billion USD in revenue for Purdue Pharma, most of which went directly into the hands of the Sackler family.
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'Speaking Pie to Power'
Practitioner:
Biotic Baking Brigade (BBB)
Date:
Jan 1 1999
BBB are a network of militant bakers armed with pies that are ready to change the world. They stand for ecology, bioregionalism, human-scale economies, and proper gastronomics, and their method is inspired by Noël Godin, who has been pieing public figures since the '70s at the head of the International Patisserie Brigade.
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APEX: Ed Bereal
Practitioner:
Portland Art Museum, Ed Bereal
Date:
Apr 16 2021
Legendary activist and artist Ed Bereal will be able to have his work displayed again in the newly reopened Portland Art Museum. He is a complex figure, gaining fame in LA in the 1960s for his abstract works and radical performances. His work also includes critiquing politicians in a satirical way.
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José Bové dismantles a McDonald's
Practitioner:
Andreja Kulunčić, Ahmet Ögüt
Date:
Aug 12 1999
José Bové, a sheep farmer/activist in Aveyron in the Midi-Pyrénées region of France, is a modern day Astérix, a mythical Gaul who drubbed foreign intruders centuries ago. In Bové's case, the intruder was McDonald's, the American fast food chain.
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Illuminating Rana Plaza: NYFW Protest and Projection
Practitioner:
99 Pickets, The Illuminator art collective, Ismail Ferdous
Date:
Feb 6 2014
To protest unethical labor practices in Bangladesh, specifically unsafe working conditions, 99 Pickets, The Illuminator, and Ismail Ferdous took action during New York Fashion Week.
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Oxycontin Protest at the Met
Practitioner:
Nan Goldin and Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN)
Date:
Mar 10 2018
The US artist Nan Goldin has staged her first public protest since she launched her activist group PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), shaming members of the Sackler family who have profited from the sale of Oxycontin and institutions that have accepted their philanthropy.
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DebtFair
Practitioner:
Occupy Museums
Date:
May 7 2013
Occupy Wall Street's art offshoot, Occupy Museum, has a new initiative: deconstructing the commercial art fair model. They are calling this art fair antithesis the DebtFair. Last May at the Frieze Art Fair, Occupy Museum distributed flyers and protest literature for an Un-Frieze event.
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Smithsonian Collection of "Occupy Wall Street" Posters on View at Wesleyan
Practitioner:
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Wesleyan University's Davison Art Center
Date:
Apr 5 2013
After collecting street art and memorabilia from "Occupy Wall Street" since the fall of 2011, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has lent its collection of Occupy Wall Street posters to Wesleyan's Davison Art Center. The posters will make up an exhibition entitled “Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today,” which is on display in the University's gallery from April 5 to May 26.
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The Yes Men - Bhopal Hoax
Practitioner:
The Yes Men
Date:
Dec 3 2004
“I am very, very happy to announce that for the first time, Dow is accepting full responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. We have a $12 billion plan to finally, at long last, fully compensate the victims, including the 120,000 who may need medical care for their entire lives, and to fully and swiftly remediate the Bhopal plant site,” said the supposed Dow Chemical spokesman, Jude Finisterra, on Dec. 3, 2004, during an appearance on BBC World.
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Ai Weiwei, Stools, 2014. Courtesy of Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Practitioner:
Ai Weiwei
Date:
Apr 3 2014
Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has drawn on the stool part of that French surrealist's pioneer work for his latest exhibition, the largest ever devoted to Ai, which opens in Berlin this Thursday. The show, entitled Evidence, is at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall, and consists of either entirely new works, or pieces never seen in Germany before. The exhibition is huge, taking up 3,000 square metres in total and running across 18 rooms.
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Anti-Capitalism Art on the Louvre's Glass Pyramid
Practitioner:
Michelangelo Pistoletto
Date:
Apr 24 2013
For the first time since its controversial installation in 1989, the I.M. Pei-designed Louvre Pyramid has been decorated in a museum-sanctioned act of anti-capitalist activism.
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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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The Point is to Change It
Practitioner:
Liberate Tate
Date:
Apr 20 2011
When President Trump announced the US departure from the Paris Climate Accord on 1 June 2017, his enjoyment at walking over the efforts of national delegations and hundreds of pressure groups across the world who fought for that deal was palpable. I was in Paris in December 2015 during the negotiations, when the possibility of a global agreement was merely that, a fragile potential.
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Walmart Worker Flash Mob
Practitioner:
Walmart Employees
Date:
Sep 5 2013
September 5th, 2013, Raleigh, NC - As Walmart workers petition managers to reinstate employees who have been unfairly treated, a flash mob breaks out. SEE VIDEO.
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