On October 16, 1964, the artist collective Hi Red Center, clad in sanitation masks and white uniforms and wielding small brooms and toothbrushes, spent several hours meticulously cleaning the streets of the Tokyo district of Ginza, amid the hustle and bustle of a “normal” day.
The work of a radical theater and puppetry collective, known as Papel Machete, produces and performs throughout Puerto Rico and the United States. Papel Machete was established on May 1, 2006 during protests responding to the government shutdown and political and economic crisis prompted by Puerto Rico’s status as a United States colony.
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.
The smuggling of illicit cargo and people has played a significant role in shaping the culture as well as the economy of the southernmost american city of Key West since its foundation in 1821.
"There is a tragic timeliness to Flyaway Productions' Meet Us Quickly With Your Mercy. As the nation grapples with systemic racism and police brutality, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic, choreographer Jo Kreiter's new aerial work seeks to amplify the call for ending the mass incarceration that disproportionately affects people of color.
Journalist and playwright Xandra Clark began creating Polylogues, a one woman show exploring non-monogamy, in 2017. The show is created from interviews Clark conducts around the world with people of different ages, genders, and races about their relationship with non-monogamy or polyamory (hence the name of the performance Polylogues).
Activists campaigning to change Lebanon's law on rape have staged a macabre protest on Beirut's famous sea front.
What appeared to be more than 30 white wedding dresses were hung from nooses, strung up between the palm trees.
Lebanese law currently allows a rapist to be exonerated if he marries his victim.
The activists are pressing to have the legislation abolished at an upcoming session of parliament.
Anti-government protests in Russia are taking many different forms, from mass rallies and marches to defiant street art and music.
Just recently, members of a feminist punk group were arrested in Moscow's Red Square after they performed a song ridiculing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The group, which calls itself Pussy Riot, says it's planning more stunts before March's presidential elections.
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.
As the New Museum’s 2023–24 Artist-in-Residence, Camilo Godoy will create a performance exploring movement, breathing, and mourning practices. The title of his residency is borrowed from an embroidered work made by the queer Paraguayan artist Feliciano Centurión in 1995, the year before he died of AIDS-related complications.
It can be important to reflect on the artistic recounts of activists experiences under state imprisonment. In a revealing interview with Artspace, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei reflects on his 81-day secret detention in 2011 and the psychological strategies used to dismantle identity and autonomy.
Tamms Year Ten is an all-volunteer grassroots coalition of artists, prisoners, men formerly incarcerated in Tamms, family members and other people of conscience. In 2008, at the ten-year anniversary of the opening of the Tamms supermax prison, the group launched a legislative campaign to call for its reform or closure. Men were originally supposed to be there for one year—but at that point 1/3 of them had been in solitary confinement the entire decade.
Nadya Tolokonnikova is a Siberian artist and a creator of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot. Tolokonnikova’s political actions and wide-ranging performance interventions have established her as a leading voice in the fight against authoritarian power. During her residency, she will compose performances that demonstrate her multifaceted approach to resisting systems of oppression and dehumanization.
At 12:00 noon (New York time) on November 19, 2016, Chinese artist Ning Kong, wearing a wedding dress with hundred dove, appeared at the 911 site in New York. Even though the theme of performance art is calling for peace, the police banned it and showed the handcuffs because doing performance art was not allowed at the 9/11 site. So Kong Ning turned to Times Square, New York, successfully completing her performance art.
"Mimes gesture as they stand in a crosswalk in Caracas, Venezuela, Friday Oct. 7, 2011. The mayor of the city's eastern district of Sucre has launched a unique program aimed to encourage civility among reckless drivers and careless pedestrians, putting 120 mimes at intersections to politely and silently scold violators"
The performance, “Lambrakis LivZ”, concerns the re-enactment of the political speech of Grigoris Lambrakis given in Athens in 1962. Grigoris Lambrakis was a peace-activist, assassinated by a paramilitary plot on June 1963 at Thessaloniki, Greece.
In Tunisia, a country gripped by economic uncertainty and still in the midst of rebuilding its identity after the Arab Spring, hip-hop culture is viewed as part of an ongoing dissident movement. Just a few events, such as the recent Mafia Wallitili Festival in the heart of downtown Tunis, offer the local hip-hop community an opportunity to share their values with the broader population.
In early 2012, a group of artists, activists and assorted other odd balls got together to form People's Tours. The idea was to give walking tours in the Boston area. Standard enough. But instead of the usual history, we would talk about social justice, contested spaces, important protests, and shady corporations.
So far, the group has consisted of Dave Taber, Heather McCann, Kristin Parker, Neil Horsky, and Tim Devin.
It was September 1738, and Benjamin Lay had walked 20 miles, subsisting on “acorns and peaches,” to reach the Quakers’ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Beneath his overcoat he wore a military uniform and a sword — both anathema to Quaker teachings. He also carried a hollowed-out book with a secret compartment, into which he had tucked a tied-off animal bladder filled with bright red pokeberry juice.
Shortly after the close of this year’s International Women’s Day, China’s Twitter-like service Sina Weibo shut down Feminist Voices. With 180,000 followers, the group’s social media account was one of the most important advocacy channels for spreading information about women’s issues in China, but in an instant, it was gone. A few hours later, the private messaging app WeChat also shuttered an account for the group.