Delhi- based graffiti artist who goes by the name Daku went around South Delhi, one of the poshest places in the city, and painted on overflowing garbage cans.
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.
"Thousands of people, some wearing funeral shrouds, staged demonstrations at the site of the Rana Plaza factory complex on Thursday on the one-year anniversary of the Bangladesh disaster that claimed 1,138 lives.
In the country formerly known as Burma, these free thinkers are a force in the struggle for democracy.
By Joshua Hammer
Photographs by Adam Dean
Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011
“Badass Indian Pinups” is a series of paintings by Indo-Canadian artist Nimisha Bhanot, that features paintings of Indian women being confident and sexually liberated.
Members of Greenpeace together with environmental advocates dressed as zombies attend a creative protest against water pollution in Manila on September 27, 2012. The protesters delivered a petition urging the establishment of a “Right-To-Know” system for chemicals and the adoption of a policy to eliminate hazardous chemicals released by factories into freshwater bodies.
With World Comics India, the organization he started, Sharad has pioneered a cheap and easy medium for poor people to communicate meaningfully on issues that are neglected by the conventional media. While the urban elite dominates public media, the grinding day-to-day concerns of millions are rarely heard. Layers of discrimination and abuse heaped on huge numbers of people keep their problems out of sight and out of mind.
T.I.E. is a residential, 24-hour, intensive experience during which participants will be: introduced to aesthetics of Immersive Theatre, guided through a practical exploration of these strategies, and mentored in the creation of an immersive, theatrical experience about a social justice issue -- a piece that can be shared at the end of the workshop with an invited audience of their choice
Alokananda Roy walked into Calcutta's Presidency Jail on International Women's Day, 2007. The Indian classical dancer had been invited to watch female inmates perform, but it was the men who caught her eye.
"They shook me," she says. "Their body language — it was as though they had no future, nothing to look forward to."
On April 24, 2013, more than 1,000 lives were taken in the Rana Plaza Collapse. While history remembers this tragic event as the deadliest garment factory accident, activist and photographer Taslima Akhter reveals a story of dreams crushed by structural murder. Dedicating her career to the lives and struggles of garment workers in Bangladesh, she has continued to foster a community rallying together for safer working conditions.
Brother Gao are two China artists. Their works are aims at reflecting the reality of Chinese society in an artistic and critical view. In 2003, the brothers held an event to invite many strangers for a dinner.
In response to a memo from Afghanistan's education ministry, Ahmad Sarmast, the founder of Afghanistan's Institute of Music, began a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #IAmMySong. In response to the hashtag, Afghan girls have taken to Twitter with videos of themselves singing tagged with Sarmast's hashtag and spreading petitions against the ban. The ministry memo banned girls 12 years old and older from singing at school functions.
On September 16, 1932, in his cell at Yerwada Jail in Pune, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi begins a hunger strike in protest of the British government’s decision to separate India’s electoral system by caste.
Shake Girl is a massive collaborative effort between fifteen students and two instructors over the course of one quarter (Winter 2008). These students comprise the first edition of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project -- a group dedicated to acheiving this monumental task on an annual basis.
The Thai Health Promotion Foundation (THPF) is a non-profit organization that has been continuously holding above-the-line campaigns encouraging people to quit smoking. However, the number of people quitting smoking has not diminished as much as they want.
In 1930, the Indian National Congress adopted satyagraha (essentially, nonviolent protest) as their main tactic in their campaign for independence. Mahatma Gandhi was appointed to develop a plan of action; he proposed marching to the sea to make salt in defiance of the Salt Act of 1882.
There are no whistles, no loud speakers, and no placards held up high in this quiet act of subversion. Pimsiri Petchnamrob stands silently in a mass of sharply dressed Bangkok commuters, her hands clutched around a copy of George Orwell's 1984.
Next to her a small group of young men and women, their faces sombre and their heads bowed low, also read books about fictional and real totalitarian worlds in silence.
For FX Harsono, art is activism. Over the past four decades, performance, sculpture, and painting have become his means of nonviolent protest against government autocracy and ethnic strife in Indonesia.