Projects tagged "Performance"

The Baltic Way – the longest unbroken human chain in history
Practitioner:
citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania
Date:
Aug 23 1989
At 7:00 PM on 23 August 1989, approximately two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands, forming a human chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius, spanning 675 kilometres, or 420 miles. It was a peaceful protest against the illegal Soviet occupation and also one of the earliest and longest unbroken human chains in history.
Bogota Performance Piece - No Name
Practitioner:
Tania Bruguera
Date:
Nov 5 2009
Renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera surprised a Bogota audience in September when she lined up three people directly involved in the Colombian conflict for a chat. The real performance however, started when a waitress emerged with a tray of neatly organised lines of cocaine, and began offering them to members of the audience.
Carolee Schneemann, Up to and including her limits, 1973-76
Practitioner:
Carolee Schneemann
Date:
Jan 1 1973
Carolee Schneemann is largely associated with her performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, in which she boldly addressed feminist and political issues in ways that shocked and engaged viewers. But she has always maintained that she is a painter, a fact often overlooked in discussions of her larger body of work. At the heart of her approach is her ongoing exploration of the boundaries of painting and drawing, as in Up to and Including Her Limits.
Theresa May gets fired during speech
Practitioner:
Simon Brodkin
Date:
Oct 3 2017
At Theresa May's speech to the Conservative Party conference, comedian Simon Brodkin crept up to the stage and handed the Prime Minister a P45 form (the form that bosses in the UK use to formally fire their employees), telling her "Boris told me to do it."
Resistance to the stereotypes of poetry
Practitioner:
Applied Clinical Sociology and Arts, Department of Sociology at the University of the Aegean, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Fine Arts Florina Greece
Date:
Jan 1 2021
The aim of the action is to create a fractal network of poets, where their poems will be recited, recorded, set to music, will be activistically acted as performance material in order to resist the censorship of art. The field of action is the poets who will be born and the network that will be created by the restless artists.
Shaming criminals in Argentina : "los escraches"
Practitioner:
HIJOS activist group and other argentinian activists
Date:
Jun 1 1995
Faced with a lack of prosecution of those accused of crimes against humanity committed during Argentina’s military dictatorship, family members and descendants of the country’s estimated 30,000 disappeared took action.
Speaking out against air pollution through Smog Art
Practitioner:
Ordinary People in China
Date:
Feb 28 2014
The action art performance themed "War on smog, we are taking action" was held by some environmental activists and volunteers on the commercial center and famous tourist spot Yangren Jie (Foreigners’ Street) in Nanan district, Chongqing municipality in Southwest China on Friday, Febuary 28.
Vaginal Knitting
Practitioner:
Casey Jenkins
Date:
Nov 27 2013
"Vaginal Knitting" Is the New Thing in Activist Performance Art by Adam Weinstein
"Superheros" Occupy the NYC Halloween Parade
Practitioner:
Occupy Wall Street, Occupy
Date:
Oct 31 2011
No matter how nuanced current superhero comics may be, to the general public they are still fairly simple. Superheroes are the good guys, supervillians are the bad guys, and it’s easy to see who is who. That’s why kids like to dress up as superheroes on Halloween — and why should they have all the fun?
Afropunk: Feeling Black Activism’s Joy, and Its Pain
Practitioner:
Afropunk
Date:
Feb 17 2017
As Black History Month commemorations start to wind down, one festival is just gearing up. Afropunk the Takeover — Harlem, running from Tuesday through Feb. 25, will celebrate black culture with music, art, film screenings, discussions and comedy.
Soviet Disco
Practitioner:
Soviet Union
Date:
Jan 1 1977
The origin of the Soviet disco tradition, one that lasts to this day in the DJ-laden nightlife of Moscow and St. Petersburg, lay in the Stalinist era. Western culture – modernism, cubism, rock and roll, all that good stuff – was “decadent,” perhaps even a plot by Trotskyists or the Western intelligentsia to dull the steely nerves of the Soviet people. But dancing – this was a-OK.
Kinshasa Costumes
Practitioner:
Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle
Date:
Aug 20 2021
The collective Ndaku Ya La Vie Est Belle, a group of Kinshasa street performers turn their bodies into living sculptures, and use them to political ends. Among the artists is Jared, who regularly takes to the streets dressed as Robot Annonce. The costume, made from broken radio parts, is designed to raise awareness of fake news. “People receive so much incorrect information and many inaccuracies are spread. I want to fight this,” says Jared.
San Francisco Mime Troupe performs L’amant Militaire
Practitioner:
San Francisco Mime Troupe
Date:
Mar 9 1967
The San Francisco Mine Troupe has been staging radical political theater for over fifty years. In 1967, the Troupe toured campuses across the midwest, performing L'amant Militaire - a satirized adaptation of an old anti-war play, updated to critique US involvement in the Vietnam War.
Queer vernaculars and visual narratives IRANTI
Practitioner:
Iranti
Date:
Jan 3 2012
ONGOING ORGANIZATION: CALLED: Iranti [pronounced írantì] is the Yoruba word for ‘memory’. Largely found in South West Nigeria and parts of Benin Republic, the Yoruba people consider memory a prized form of intelligence which determines how often one remembers what they see and hear.
Mechanized Moments: John Wood and Paul Harrison's 'Device' and the Absurdity of Technology
Practitioner:
John Wood & Paul Harrison
Date:
Jan 1 1997
John Wood and Paul Harrison are renowned British artists whose collaboration has led to the merging of video art with performance and conceptual art. Their works usually reside on the relationship between human beings, objects, and the environment, with humor and wit attached to them. They are well in place to make the artworks thought-provoking and entertaining. One such has to be 'Device'.
You’d Better Watch Your Step In Madrid
Practitioner:
Luzinterruptus
Date:
Feb 20 2015
Luzinterruptus turns their art activism towards the overabundance of dog doo littering the city’s streets. The studio inflated 500 poop-scoopin' plastic bags and placed a lightbulb inside each one. Installation lasted nine hours.
Princess Diana’s 1997 landmine walk: ‘I come with my heart’
Practitioner:
Princess Diana, The American Red Cross
Date:
Jan 15 1997
It's an evocative image — and it was intended to be: Diana, Princess of Wales, wearing a protective visor and flak jacket, walking through a live minefield in Huambo, Angola. The image of the princess, at the time one of most famous women in the world, surrounded by danger, made headlines across the world.
ALV Rooftop protest draws international coverage
Practitioner:
Animal Liberation Victoria
Date:
May 4 2011
QUESTION: Year after year, decade after decade, you alert the legal authorities to cruelty violations and suffering animals in peril, yet nothing ever happens. You know for a fact there are thousands of screaming and suffering hens inside a factory farm and you know the authorities will once again turn a blind eye, so what do you do? 


Ice Watch
Practitioner:
Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing
Date:
Dec 14 2018
Does it vex you, the environmental impact of Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch? Do you hear about the transportation of 30 icebergs from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland to be displayed in London as a memento mori for our inhabitable environment and judge the project a bit of an own-goal, sustainability-wise? You would not be alone – on personal evidence, this seems a popular response.
Bloody Bridal Gown Protest
Practitioner:
Resource Center for Gender Equality
Date:
Dec 6 2016
Women took to the streets of Beirut wearing blood-stained wedding dresses with signs that said "A white dress does not cover up rape. Undress 522," referring to the number of the penal article in question. The demonstration was an act by the Beirut-based Resource Center for Gender Equality (ABAAD) association on December 6.
Rise, Resist & Unite...V-Day & The Vagina Monolouges
Practitioner:
V-Day Sedona/ Organizations Across the Globe
Date:
Feb 17 2018
Back after a five year hiatus, V-Day Sedona joins with hundreds of other productions across the globe in celebrating V-Day’s 20th anniversary with an act of artistic activism. For its 20th anniversary, V-Day is calling on activists around the world to Rise, Resist and Unite.
BLOOD. by Kendrick Lamar
Practitioner:
Kendrick Lamar
Date:
Apr 14 2017
Kendick Lamar is known as one of the most prolific, and socially conscious, rappers of our time. 'BLOOD.' is the second track off of Lamar's iconic album 'DAMN.' from 2017. What makes this song stand out is the sample used at the end of part one of the song.
Zhang Donghui, a young artist, was detained for more than three months and had to pay 3,995 yuan in compensation for writing the words "Three years, I have become numb."
Practitioner:
Zhang Donghui
Date:
Aug 17 2022
Zhang Donghui, born in 1992, is a native of Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China. He graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2017. He has been living and working as a professional artist in Beijing since then.
Valie Export, TAPP und TASTKINO (TAP and TOUCH CINEMA) 1968/1989
Practitioner:
VALIE EXPORT
Date:
Jan 1 1968
At age twenty-eight, Waltraud Hollinger changed her name to VALIE EXPORT, in all uppercase letters, to announce her presence in the Viennese art scene. Eager to counter the male–dominated group of artists known as the Vienna Actionists—including Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Hermann Nitsch, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—she sought a new identity that was not bound by her father's name (Lehner) or her former husband's name (Hollinger).
San Fermin and the Fight for Bulls
Practitioner:
Animanaturalis, PETA
Date:
Jul 5 2019
In 2019 before the annual San Fermin festival 54 protesters from around the world representing AnimaNaturalis and PETA held a demonstration against the cruel sport of bullfighting. The celebration of culture and religion subsequent to the murder and torture of dozens of bulls is the spectacle of San Fermin that draws an army of international tourists to the small city of Pamplona.

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