Ten couples covered in body paint wearing only their underwear have celebrated their “naked weddings” at Hangzhou Paradise amusement park in Zhejiang province. The couples, some of whom have been married for many years, said they were rejecting modern Chinese values, which place greater value on money than love. In China, a naked wedding involves a couple marrying without owning a house or car.
As we’ve already found out, gender inequality exists in all parts of the world, but besides discriminative attitudes, women also suffer from wage discrimination.
According to statistics, women’s earnings in the US “were 77% of men’s in 2011”, while in Switzerland, women earned “roughly 20% less than equally skilled men in comparable positions”.
Ai Weiwei's installation Sunflower Seeds is a profound commentary on both historical and contemporary issues through the medium of art. First exhibited at Tate Modern in London from October 12, 2010, to May 2, 2011, the work features an astonishing one hundred million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds, spread across the gallery's 1,000 square meter Turbine Hall to a depth of ten centimeters.
Beginning in January 2012, MicCheckWallSt, a subsidiary of Seattle's Occupy Wall Street group, began performing a series of silent vigils and marches throughout shopping areas and in front of banks in various Seattle neighborhoods. Images are from the first silent vigil outside of Westlake shopping center. Participants glued dollar bills to the outside of their mouths. Bills included statements such as:
Bogus building inspection notices with the forged signature of city Building Inspection Director Frank Chiu appeared on buildings in San Francisco's South of Market area, prompting an investigation by exasperated city officials.
Together with a group of homeless New Yorkers, Wodiczko constructed the Homesless Vehicle as an instrument of survival for urban nomads. A modified shopping cart that facilitates refundable bottle and can collection, it also provides temporary shelter. As a house on wheels intended for New York City sidewalks, the Homeless Vehicle embodies Wodicko’s practice of ‘Interrogative Design’.
At noon today, a group of artists and activists including members of the Gulf Ultra Luxury Faction (known as G.U.L.F.) unfurled a large parachute in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum, demanding to meet with a member of the institution’s board of trustees to discuss the labor conditions at its Abu Dhabi site.
On July 4, 2012, several members of MicCheckWallSt, a subsidiary group of Seattle's larger Occupy Wall Street that formed in December, 2011, anonymously checked into a room at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Downtown Seattle.
On Tuesday evening, at the end of an action staged by Occupy Museums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to protest the unveiling of the David H. Koch Plaza, three members of The Illuminator were arrested. Earlier in the evening, police had moved protestors to a cordoned area on the opposite side of the street from the museum; a substantial police presence remained throughout the evening, but no other arrests took place.
It was October 31st, 2012, when a new artist appeared on social media. In a series of video clips, she proposed with a soft and slow speech that Peru hide its poverty. Her project consisted of installing vinyl pieces to avoid what she called "the visual pollution." She titled the project Don't be poor, be fashion(able).
This blogger documents all the cool things that are on their way to extinction in New York. A mix of preserving history and nostalgia through old school photography and new media. This website creates a nostalgic internet record of pre-internet New York.
Puerto Rico doesn’t know what’s going on here, and if they do, they’re ignoring us.” So opens Gabriel Miranda’s documentary Vietnam, Puerto Rico. Focused on the coastal community of Vietnam, which is located in the Guaynabo, the doc tells the story of a disenfranchised population being displaced over the past two decades to make room for a glitzy new waterfront development.
Add Colour (Refugee Boat) begins as an all-white boat in an all-white room. Ono’s instruction for this collective, participatory work reads: ‘Just blue like the ocean.’ You are invited to contribute your hopes and beliefs in blue and white.
This special EDition is a revolutionary chant against the menacing cantankerous demonic , satanic COVID 19. And again doubles as a bold and poetic supplication to the great Almighty God to release us off this pandemic bondage. This Edition is a poetically driven spiritual prayer for freedom of expression and freedom after expression.
El Estudiante Militante is a giant puppet built by the members of Papel Machete and students of the University of Puerto Rico during the first three days of the 2010 student strike at a cultural camp established by the theater group in solidarity with the striking students. The puppet was built with materials inside the campus of the University.
Graffiti art is particularly viewed as a powerful form of social protest, and the (illegal) act of defacing can be as important as the message itself. Artist Void One has been arrested on numerous occasions for his politically-charged interventions.
“I didn’t set out to make political art but art is a platform where I can vent my frustrations” – Void One.
Time as currency is an interesting economic model related to artistic practice.
According to the creators of Time/Bank, Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, the project "is a tool by which people or a group of people can create an alternative economic model where they exchange their time and skills, rather than acquire goods and services through the use of money or any other state-backed value."
We were aiming to raise awareness and empathy around the theme of loneliness and disconnection, by engaging with passers by on a personal level and helping them to think about what they could do to make others feel less disconnected.
"FTSE" is Birmingham-born producer and rapper Sam Manville. As an anti-captialist, he though it would be funny to take the name of the British stock market index (Financial Times and Stock Exchange), but he also jokes the acronym stands for "Fuck The System, Ennit.”
Reversing decades of discrimination set into place when New Deal labor laws intentionally excluded domestic workers, New York State in 2010 passed the very first Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Hawaii and California followed soon after with other states soon to follow.
On a freezing Friday in January, Khmer-American artist Kat Eng sits in front of retail giant H&M’s Time Square store working on a manual sewing machine. For eight hours, Eng stitches together U.S. dollar bills while wearing a surgical mask and bloodstained shirt. Her performance “</3 Less Than Three” protests the way fast fashion and consumer culture creates oppressive conditions for Khmer workers.
The Revolutionary Theatre project co-written, co-directed and acted by writers, artists and poets currently living, surviving and sometimes thriving in Single Room Occupancy Hotels aka poor people housing in the Bay Area.