Film & Video (Film & Video)

By Way of Revolution is a series of works by Helina Metaferia that addresses the inherited histories of protest that inform contemporary social movements. In the project, Metaferia works intrinsically with female descendants of prominent historical black activists to produce video art; with women of color organizations to produce socially engaged work; with “radicalism” archives and performance stills to produce works on paper and tapestries; and with museum, gallery, and public spaces to produce participatory performances. The Call is an ongoing video project of performances by descendants of prominent civil rights activists across the United States.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Palabrarma (obreros palabreando) by Cecilia Vicuña is a series of works in which the artist blends poetry, political commentary and graphic design. The title itself is a portmanteau that unites the words palabra (word) and arma (weapon) that speaks literally of the power of words through their poetic potential. A poet herself, Vicuña developed a long series of palabrarmas on diverse media that were often used as slogans in political demonstrations.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Political artist, painter, writer, performer, photographer, David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992 in New York City, was one of the leading figures of the New York Downtown artistic scene of the 80s. His use of image, language and collage generated a new method of idea communication. The series of five videos Collaborative Film Collection made in collaboration with Marion Scemama in 1989 is emblematic of his artistic practice, it unfolds through performance, films, photographs, texts and paintings.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

The Bolotnaya Battle Park Complex is the future home for the Museum of Russian History (M. I. R.). Located on the grounds of Bolotnaya square in Moscow, this park sits on top of what once was a swamp. Above the main building stand two bio-engineered ‘living sculptures’, which strike various poses to commemorate the brave acts of those defending the federation from foreign intervention during protests of May 6th, 2012.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In a society saturated by images, Eric Baudelaire is interested in political events that have not found their representation. For the film The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years without Images, Baudelaire conducted research on 1970s Japanese cinema and more specifically on Wakamatsu and Masao Adachi’s filmography. In 1971, as the two legendary filmmakers of Japanese Nouvelle Vague were on their way home from a presentation at the Cannes festival, they stopped in Beirut, where their thinking concerning the image took the form of political activism.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Installation (Installation)

KLAU MICH is a TV and performance project by Dora García with Ellen Blumenstein, Samir Kandil, Jan Mech, TheaterChaosium, and Offener Kanal Kassel, during the 100 days of dOCUMENTA (13).

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Photography (Photography)

The series The Memory of Trees is specifically about trees, and what trees have witnessed in South Africa: for example, trees that were used as locations for slave trading, or trees that was during the anti-Apartheid struggle as a kind of identifier for a safe house for activists who were fleeing from security forces. Trees and plants are connected and embedded in history; but not only as witnesses and onlookers; Orlow tries to think about plants as active agents in history. This perspective allows for an oblique view of history especially when it comes to specific loci of violence such as in South Africa.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Painting (Painting)

For Richard Bell, art is not simply a vehicle through which to represent and convey political content. On one hand, art itself has an activist charge—in its very form and presence it can shake up conventional or assumed understandings, opinions, and behaviours. But on the other hand, it is deeply implicated in the actions and attitudes associated with colonialism in Australia and abroad.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Vieques is an island off the mainland of Puerto Rico used by the U. S Navy and NATO forces as military testing ground as from the 1940s. Civil disobedience and active protest movements initiated by local inhabitants and an international support network led to the end of the bombings and progressive demilitarization in 2002.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

22022021, Yawnghwe Office in Exile by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe belongs to a body of work made in response to the Myanmar military coup that began in February 2021. The work employs traditional Burmese textiles, which have been employed by protesters harnessing the power of old Myanmar lore. It is said that women’s bodies and the garments that cover them sap men of their power.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Gikan Sa Ngitngit Nga Kinailadman (From The Dark Depths) by Kiri Dalena is a stylistically collaged film inspired by the true story of a young activist’s drowning. Moving between reality and fantasy, it depicts the story of a dead communist who sinks to the bottom of the ocean into a dreamlike subaquatic utopia. In the film a young woman mourns the death of an activist that took place years ago.

Photography (Photography)

Capture is a photographic series by Paolo Cirio in which the artist sourced 1000 public images of police officers’ faces and processed them with facial recognition technology. The original photographs were taken during protests in France, Cirio collected these images and created an online platform containing a database of the 4000 police faces that the AI program isolated. The artist crowdsourced their identification by name and then publicly exposed the officers by printing their headshots and posting them throughout Paris.

Painting (Painting)

Somewhere Along the Black Sea in the Distant North-East, or in Libya in the Furthest South, The Amazons – The Woman and the Girls Children – Exist Just Outside of the Range of Normal Human Experience

NSA-Tapped Fiber Optic Cable Landing Site, Mastic Beach, New York, United States

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Martinez’s sculpture A meditation on the possibility… of romantic love or where you goin’ with that gun in your hand , Bobby Seale and Huey Newton discuss the relationship between expressionism and social reality in Hitler’s painting depicts the legendary Black Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. By using Carrara marble, a material usually associated with heroic public sculptures, Martinez casts the history of African-American revolutionaries into the artistic tradition of monumentality. Like the artist’s earlier work included in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an interactive piece made up with pins that read, “I CAN’T IMAGINE EVER WANTING TO BE WHITE,” A meditation on the possibility… continues Martinez’s effort to expose cultural contradictions and increase public awareness.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely. Meant to hang from the ceiling, Bowers’ neon is further weighed down by long wind chimes made of aluminum pipes and wooden wind catchers that drip unsteadily from their anchors. Poetic but frantic in its juxtapositions, Bowers’ work captures a certain paradoxical energy that echoes the current political climate—it is hopeful but hindered, cacophonous but well intentioned, uncertain but ominous.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression.

Photography (Photography)

Diversionist is part of the Cosplayers Series from 2004. In Cosplayers Cao Fei depicts the popularity among Asian youths of “cosplay” in which daily life is merged with images of video games and popular films. For many, this virtual reality is an outlet to “transcend” the paradox of a developing society in which the pleasures of consumption and depression of alienation go hand-in-hand.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation. Morales drew inspiration from both his childhood near the United States-Mexico border as well as from photographic documentation on U. S. government websites.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

The series Nightmare Wallpapers represents a shift if Chuen’s practice, allowing the artist to immerse himself in an “artistic pilgrimage of self healing” following the failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement. These drawings were created during the trial of political activists pursued by the government that the artist would regularly attend. During the tribunal, the artist would let his pen slide freely across his notebook, replicating the automatic drawing techniques of the surrealists.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

AIDS Ring by General Idea is a cast metal ring, which takes as its basis Robert Indiana’s iconic “LOVE” design, appropriating its pop aesthetic, and totalizing, simplistic universal messaging to instead emphasize the severity of the AIDS epidemic that occurred in the 1970s. This visual detournement of Indiana’s sculpture into the form of a ring is an indictment of pop art’s apolitical nature, as well as of its increasingly commodified status. General Idea instead proposes that art’s expansive platform for messaging be used to spread awareness and create accountability for political negligence of the AIDS epidemic.

Painting (Painting)

Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911. “Bread for all, and Roses, too’—a slogan of the women in the West,” is Oppenheim’s opening line, alluding to the workers’ goal for wages and conditions that would allow them to do more than simply survive. Thomas’ painting includes several black, white, brown, yellow, and red raised fists—clenched and high in the air in the internationally recognized symbol of solidarity, resistance, and unity.