The Red Sand Project is a participatory art installation and social awareness project created by artist and activist Molly Gochman in 2014. The project aims to raise awareness about human trafficking, which is a global issue that affects an estimated 40 million people, including men, women, and children who are subjected to forced labor, sexual exploitation, and other forms of exploitation.
The Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine displays a neon sign that spells the words ‘Foreigners Everywhere’ in Arabic. Since this sign was installed strategically above the gallery’s wall-length window – facing in the street – in the edition of the show I saw, at Parsons in New York, it interacted not only with Parsons’ exhibition site but also with the urban environment beyond it.
order Crossers comprise a series of lightweight robotic sculptures that poetically explore the notion of borders and boundary conditions. The inflatable sculptures rise up to several stories high and extend across a given threshold. Their choreographed performance, originating on both sides of the border, would stage a symbolic connection.
The project was based on the creation of a restaurant in the neighborhood of El Lewa, Cairo – one of the many neighborhoods built illegally, known as Ashguahiyats, a term meaning 'leaving things to chance'.
"One morning, when JR awoke, an image lingered from his dreams: The wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and above it a young kid peering curiously over. A child just 1 year old, who has "no idea that's a wall that divides people — he has no idea of the political context," JR imagined.
The Spanish artist Santiago Sierra is planning to immerse a British flag in blood donated by indigenous peoples from countries colonised by the British Empire.
The resulting artwork, titled Union Flag, is intended to be an “acknowledgement of the pain and destruction colonialism has caused First Nations peoples, devastating entire cultures and civilisations,” the artist said in a statement.
From 1998 to 2004, pro-democracy activist Htein Lin was jailed for challenging the military dictatorship in his home country of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in Southeast Asia. Prior to his imprisonment, Lin acted in films and with a theater troupe. While behind bars, he continued to organize performance artworks with his fellow prisoners.
The city of Douala in Cameroon had a huge problem associated with malfunctioning water drainage systems. This is due the fact that in many illegally constructed areas of the town, the sewers are without cover, and after heavy rainfall, this would generally lead to floods and related threats to public health.
MoMA presents the first comprehensive American survey of the leading contemporary artist Walid Raad (b. 1967, Lebanon), featuring his work in photography, video, sculpture, and performance from the last 25 years.
Artist Michael Landy catalogued, inventoried, and systemically destroyed all of his possessions for the 2001 public installation Break Down, commissioned by British arts organization Artangel. It took him three years just to itemize the 7,227 objects included in the project.
In 1994, the human rights and environmental activist KenSaro-Wiwa was arrested and accused of incitement to murder. Eighteen months later, following a show trial condemned by human rights organisations, he and eight other leaders of the Movement For the Survival of the Ogoni People were executed by hanging, an act that propelled the story on to the front pages of newspapers worldwide.
Time as currency is an interesting economic model related to artistic practice.
According to the creators of Time/Bank, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, the project "is a tool by which people or a group of people can create an alternative economic model where they exchange their time and skills, rather than acquire goods and services through the use of money or any other state-backed value."
The war against London's "anti-homeless" spikes escalated today from sign-waving to radical criminal action In the small hours of the morning, some activists dressed as builders poured concrete over the metal spikes outside a Tesco Metro on Regent Street, before vowing to strike again.
The performance artist James Luna, who died in 2018 at age 68, had a wicked sense of humor, which made his explorations of the way that Indigenous people have long been objectified, especially in museums, painfully piquant.
Ali Ferzat, the daring political cartoonist from Syria, fearlessly wields his pen as a powerful weapon against oppressive regimes. His illustrations pierce through the fabric of authoritarianism, revealing the raw truth that lies beneath. Despite facing unimaginable brutality, Ferzat's indomitable spirit remains unyielding.
The Miss Rockaway Armada is both a collection of
individuals and an idea. At its most basic, the idea is this: we’re
going to float down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New
Orleans on rafts that we built ourselves. The crew can be called many
things: artists, musicians, builders, travelers, organizers, dreamers.
Ask one of the people who help build and move these crafts for the
With a grand total of 0 permanent residents and an average winter temperature of --56.2°F, Antarctica is a bit more than your average “no man’s land.” This didn’t deter artist duo Lucy + Jorge Orta, however, who took an expedition to the territory in 2007 on commission from The End of the World Biennale. Nine years later, the duo’s cumulative work created during the program is finally on display in NYC at Jane Lombard Gallery.
Power Call is a nomadic, interactive energy commons in San Francisco to the Bay Area. Using low-tech systems, Power Call harnesses, stores and dispenses energy for recharging a variety of cell phones. Anyone can contribute to the energy commons by spending a few minutes pumping the machine, creating a charge for yourself or a future person in need.
A couple of weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.
The protagonism of the body in the dramatization of marginalized groups is also central to Emilio García Wehbi's Proyecto Filoctetes, an urban intervention staged November 15, 2002, on the streets of Buenos Aires. The project consisted in placing twenty-five lifelike latex mannequins in central, highly trafficked locations around the city in varying positions of injury, physical distress, and abandonment.
When you design an economy to be based on short term profit to the benefit of giant corporations, the results over the long term will be a country so hostile to human life that the unreasonable and unthinkable becomes an every day reality. Wealth inequality, mass poverty, a crumbling welfare state aside, the prison system perfectly illustrated the madness of the American capitalist system.
In 2001, Peter Gibson, a street artist, began by painting bike additional bike lanes onto the streets in Montreal because he was tired of how cars dominated the road. This transferred into more works criticizing car culture in general. Some of his work includes a crosswalk turned into a large footprint and lines on the road transformed into life lines.
Song Dong's Waste Not consisted of a single installation comprising over 10,000 commonplace, domestic items of daily life that had been used and amassed by the artist’s mother (Zhao Xiangyuan) over fifty years.