Projects tagged "Africa"

Above's Blood Diamond
Practitioner:
ABOVE
Date:
Apr 10 2012
Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army's war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted. This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg's largest diamond trader Jewel City.
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Rhodes Must Fall
Practitioner:
UCT Students
Date:
Mar 6 2015
This series of protests began on the UCT campus in an effort to remove the bronze statute of Cecil Rhodes in the center of campus due to the belief that Rhodes represents the oppressive colonization of South Africa that eventually led to apartheid.
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Performance Obscura
Practitioner:
Ruth Simbao
Date:
Sep 1 2014
In her curatorial project Making Way, Ruth Simbao brought together works that complicated the idea of globalization’s effect on African nations, especially the idea that the new phase would usher in an almost frictionless movement of labor and capital across borders. Works by artists like Athi-Patra Ruga reflected on questions of how bodies moved through settler colonialist spaces.
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Garbage Collectors
Practitioner:
Afrika ARTS Kollective
Date:
Jan 17 2015
Afrika ARTS Kollective is a group of artists that decided to face Uganda's demographic growth and the garbage problem of the capital, Kamala, with art. 30,000 tons of residues come out of this monthly and the Administration is being working on healthy and good environmental behaviors among citizens.
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"Hail to the Thief" : political art or creative activism?
Practitioner:
The Goodman Gallery
Date:
May 20 2012
Established Cape Town based artist Brett Murray returns to Goodman Gallery Johannesburg with Hail to the Thief II. This body of satirical work continues his acerbic attacks on abuses of power, corruption and political dumbness seen in his 2010 Cape Town show Hail to the Thief.
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FESPACO
Practitioner:
The Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television
Date:
Dec 2 2017
Fespaco is a meeting place put to good use to promote the development of black cinematography. From 1973, topics of discussion are introduced at each edition.
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Kony 2012
Practitioner:
Invisible Children
Date:
Mar 5 2012
In 2004, the United Nations called the LRA crisis in northern Uganda the “most forgotten, neglected humanitarian emergency in the world.” Invisible Children was founded to change that and to fight against the false notion that our responsibility to each other stops at our own nations’ borders.
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Little Sun
Practitioner:
Olafur Eliasson
Date:
Mar 12 2014
Olafur Eliasson's latest project Little Sun was first debuted at the World Economic Forum on Africa in 2012. The global initiative is bringing tiny, sunburst shaped, plastic solar powered LED lights to the most marginalized regions of the world. Elliasson calls Little Sun, "A work of art that works in life."The lights are also capable of self renewable energy, which makes them practical and portable to those without proper electricity.
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Congo Man Sets Himself Ablaze for Peace
Practitioner:
Unidentified Man
Date:
Nov 8 2023
A video that was first posted on X (formerly Twitter) on November 8, of a Congolese man setting himself on fire has gone viral. The gruesome clip has started a discussion on whether a genocide is occurring in the DRC and is being ignored by both Africa and the rest of the world.
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Afrofuturism: An Interview with Krista Franklin
Practitioner:
Krista Franklin
Date:
Jun 21 2016
The term “Afrofuturism” was coined in the 1990s by the cultural critic Mark Dery, who recognized a preoccupation with the future in the work of a number of black artists. Ever since, it has remained a term that is retrospectively applied to seemingly disparate artists, from Missy Elliot to Toni Morrison. What unites the movement is a shared fascination with the black experience, particularly in America.
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Dramatic Recovery
Practitioner:
Topsy Foundation
Date:
Mar 1 2010
What is it like living with AIDS? This heart-wrenching video for South Africa’s Topsy Foundation brings us through 90 hard days in the life of someone living with it. Be sure to watch it all the way to the end. It’s worth it: Did you catch that? If you didn’t, watch it again. Spoiler after the jump.
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Ghana Wins Election 2016
Practitioner:
Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, Rebecca Ekpe etc.
Date:
Dec 1 2016
An exercise that used drama/and audio visuals to engage with with all election partners, especially the political parties especially the political parties and their candidates/leaders, Electoral Commission, Musicians Association of Ghana, etc to push for a free, fair and peaceful Presidential and Parliamentary election and hand over of power to who ever won the elections peacefully.
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Puppetry is the sum of the collective human imaginary
Practitioner:
Yaya Coulibali
Date:
Jan 1 2024
The veteran Malian master puppeteer Yaya Coulibali, born in 1959 in the village of Koula, around 100 kilometres north-east of Bamako, has more than half a century of experience in puppetry and has toured the world to perform his art.
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“up yours” share trading
Practitioner:
James Gubb
Date:
Nov 9 2017
JAMES GUBB was finishing off the knuckles when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) shut him down. Trading single shares between two accounts, Mr Gubb had managed to “draw” the image of a fist with an upright middle finger onto the share-price chart for Oakbay Resources and Energy Limited, a company controlled by the Gupta brothers, cronies of President Jacob Zuma, that is at the centre of allegations of “state capture” in South Africa.
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Mtendo MweMa Project
Practitioner:
Correne Gichuru
Date:
Oct 17 2013
Mtendo MweMa Project's mission is to provide a safe house and educational opportunities to girls, especially those in danger of female circumcision, early marriage and pregnancy, whom otherwise have no alternative but to return to their villages during the holiday seasons in Kenya, East Africa.
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"Jesus Was The First To Decriminalize Sex Work"
Practitioner:
Asijiki Coalition for the Decriminalisation of Sex Work
Date:
Mar 1 2017
A big yellow banner hangs off the Central Methodist Church in Cape Town, South Africa proclaiming that *"Jesus was the first to decriminalise sex work - John 8:7"*
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Stella Nyanzi's Birthday Poem "Yoweri, they say it was your birthday yesterday."
Practitioner:
Stella Nyanzi
Date:
Sep 15 2018
Dr. Stella Nyanzi, a Ugandan medical anthropologist, activist, and writer, was convicted after writing and posting a poem online, in which she criticized Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his mother. In November 2018, Ugandan authorities charged Dr. Nyanzi with “cyber harassment” and “offensive communication” under Sections 24 and 25 of the 2011 Computer Misuse Act, and detained her in connection with the poem.
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This ‘Plastic Man’ Has a Cape and a Superhero’s Mission: Cleaning Up Senegal
Practitioner:
Modou Fall
Date:
Jan 1 2022
Dressed head to toe in plastic, Modou Fall is a familiar sight in Dakar. But however playful his costume, his goal couldn’t be more serious: ridding the capital of the scourge of plastic bags.
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Commemorating the Marikana Massacre
Practitioner:
Anonymous Artists/Activists
Date:
Aug 14 2014
On August 14th 2014 several prominent statues within the city centre and the southern suburbs of Cape Town got redressed in green blankets, equipped with miner gear or carrying grocery bags. The statues – mainly of which represent colonial figures – were redressed in light of what has come to be known as the Marikana Massacre: the shooting of 34 miners by the local police force of Marikana, South Africa on August 16th, 2012.
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Photographer Stéphan Gladieu Documents the Congolese Street Children Turning Waste into Wonder
Practitioner:
Stéphan Gladieu and the artists in Kinshasa
Date:
Jun 15 2020
“So dramatic, so strong, so visual,” artist Stéphan Gladieu said of his first encounter with the revival of an ancestral folk art movement in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo. Kinshasa is the capital of Congo but also one of the many places American and European countries send their waste.
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Sex at the Specs
Practitioner:
School for Creative Activism
Date:
Apr 2 2015
The “Perceiving Freedom” glasses sculpture on Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade looking towards Robben Island, commemorates late President Nelson Mandela and the values of freedom and equality.
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Is He A Real Man? The “Vrai Djo” SFCG Project
Practitioner:
SFCG
Date:
Sep 1 2011
In the Democratic Republic of Congo or DRC, sexual violence is a community-wide problem. Rape, in the DRC has been used as a weapon of war and sadly continues to increase even after. According to the peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground or SFCG, it is estimated that there are over 400,000 surviving rape victims living in the DRC today. In this environment violence against women has become normative behavior.
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Lion Lights
Practitioner:
Richard Turere
Date:
Feb 26 2013
Richard Turere, 13, has devised an innovative system to protect his family's livestock from the wild beasts. He created "Lion Lights," which keeps the predators away from the family's enclosure. The Kenyan boy will speak about his invention at the TED 2013 conference.
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Zanele Muholi: 'I'm a visual activist'
Practitioner:
Zanele Muholi
Date:
Jan 5 2018
I am a visual activist. Most of what I have done over the years focuses on black LGBTQIA+ and gender-non-conforming individuals from South Africa and other neighbouring countries. It’s about making sure we exist in the visual archive. I call myself a visual activist — or, rather, a cultural activist, because this work is not only about the arts; I’m focusing on education, I’m dealing with culture in a way that confronts a number of issues.
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Once banned for his work, anti-apartheid activist highlights role of politics in art
Practitioner:
Gavin Jantjes
Date:
Jun 19 2024
In 1978, while studying print-making in Hamburg, Gavin Jantjes was deemed a persona non grata by South Africa. His crime? Creating a series of prints that documented the violence and discrimination in the apartheid state, which he gathered together under the tongue-in-cheek name of a "colouring book".
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