On September 2nd 2015, a die-in protest to advocate against gender violence was carried out by a group called Women in Black (Olmedilla, 2015). This form of protest was likely inspired by other die-in protests in Spain and represented Spanish women who have died due to domestic violence (DV). A group of women dressed in black clothing gathered on the streets of Madrid. One by one they fell to the ground and lay there, acting dead.
Comusitària is a Community Cultural Development agency based in Barcelona run by Noemi Rubio and Laia Serra. They work in the production, management, research and dissemination of artistic projects that build social capital and enable citizens to live more active, critical and creative lives.
On Sunday April 3rd, Art Not Oil coalition member group BP or not BP? occupied the Great Court of the BP-sponsored British Museum with a 'disobedient exhibition'. Called 'A History of BP in 10 Objects', the exhibition featured artifacts submitted by frontline communities around the world who are fighting back against the impacts of BP's operations.
Stream of Conscience is a site-specific, literary sculpture made out of torn pieces of cover-weight paper upon which people of all ages write their thoughts, feelings, and reflections about water. Prior to writing, participants engage in a dialogue about local water issues within a global context. The conversation is further distilled to include our personal relationship to water. Thousands of people have participated in this traveling exhibition.
Estados de excepción (States of Exception) is series of participatory cultural interventions created for women to freely and joyfully exercise our rights in public and secure environments, currently being produced in Mexico and abroad.
Brandalism, an organization out of the UK that aims to reclaim public spaces from advertisers, used Black Friday to protest "partner" brands to the COP21 Climate Conference.
Anonymous artists contributed subvertisements that criticized these brand for their hypocrisy in saying they are advocates for the environment when more often than not they are the worst contributors to the problem.
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.
From 1993 to 1998, Spanish activist group Lesbianas Se Difunden (LSD) produced and published a collection of texts and visuals called Non-Grata (Snyder 10), using erotic images of the female body and sexual relationships to capture their audiences’ attention. Within these graphic publications would be calls for queer activism, female freedom, anti-capitalist critiques, and the overall necessity for protest (Snyder 10).
"Surround Congress”: as soon as we’d heard this, in our minds we were there. To make the Government resign and demand they start a new constituent process seemed like a great idea. We immediately got to work.
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.
In 1998 Portuguese born artist Paula Rego created a series of work entitled Untitled. The Abortion Pastels. Rego created her work in response to a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, which was very narrowly defeated. Each canvas depicted the image of a woman undergoing an unsafe abortion. When the series was exhibited in the Portuguese capital, Lisbon, Rego recalled the whispered secrets of women in the gallery while looking at her artworks.
A collective resistance movement dedicated to reasserting communal ownership of common spaces, Reclaim the Streets staged its first action on Camden High Street in 1995, when activists closed the road to vehicle traffic to make way for a street party. Combining the tactics of non-violent direct action with 90's UK rave culture, organizers kept the location secret until the last moment to preempt police interception.
This article was published on the guardian website:
-Russia not amused at Red Army statue re-invented as Superman and friends-
Clenched teeth in Moscow over 1950s war memorial in Sofia given makeover by spray-painting street artist
By Tom Parfitt in Moscow
The Guardian, Wednesday 22 June 2011
ŠTO TE NEMA is a public monument created as a response to Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II - the systematic killing of 8,372 Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected safe area of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina in July of 1995.
I was 24 years old. We were in danger. The Israeli planes were flying raids overhead. And I was designing posters." Hosni Radwan won't easily forget the conditions in the Beirut offices of the PLO Information Department, as an exhibition of the work it produced opens in London.
An anti-Nazi organization called Exit-Deutschland targeted a right-wing Rock Festival in a city called Gera. They got in contact to the festival organizers by using a fictitious name, and they distributed 250 trojan t-shirts with a writing “Hardcore Rebels” during the festival. When the recipients of the shirts went back home and washed them.
In September 1943, the Nazis prepared for the deportation of all Danish Jews to the concentration camps and death. But Georg Duckwitz, a German diplomat with a conscience, deliberately leaked the plans for the roundup, which was due to begin on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Armed with the information from Duckwitz, Danes swung into action.
On October 6th, 2007, we beat a new world record. Thousands of people in cities all across Spain simultaneously shouted: “You won’t own a house IN YOUR WHOLE FUCKING LIFE!” The decibels radiating from this collective cry were registered by an interactive meter, baptized “The Fuck-o-meter” for the occasion.
"The Shortest Way with the Dissenters;" Or, "Proposals for the Establishment of the Church" is a pamphlet by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1702. Defoe was prompted to write the pamphlet by the increased hostility towards Dissenters in the wake of the accession of Queen Anne to the throne.
Massimiliano Martigli Jiang was born in Wenzhou, China but moved with his parents to Italy when he was still a child. The 29 year-old grew up in Italy and considers himself as much Italian as Chinese.
Benjamin Von Wong’s latest art-as-activism installation looks like something Photoshopped onto reality. A large brass-looking faucet, suspended in the air, pours a river of plastic out of its spout.
RACC Satellite Space in Garden City
1205 Franklin Avenue, 3rd Floor, Garden City, NY 11530
June 26, 10 am – July 28, 7 pm
Monday – Friday, 10 am – 7 pm, free admission
Please write to racc.ny@mail.ru or call (347) 662 1456
The artist is available for interviews
In September 2003 the news went out nationwide: Karlsplatz, one of Vienna's main squares, is soon to be renamed Nikeplatz. Apart from the new name, it appears that a huge monument in the shape of Nike's famous "Swoosh" logo will be built in Nikeplatz. Needless to say, it is all fake.