This page is dedicated to archiving artists, activists and 'artivists'. The aim is to track the growing development of artistic practice that examines political issues and in many cases puts aside the aesthetic gesture replacing it with pointed critique. The descriptions of the artists projects are taken from their websites.
Ricardo Miranda Zuniga
I approach art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactfully engage others through populist metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Over the years, I have established a socially investigative creative practice that utilizes whatever media possible to present content in a manner that may generate interaction and discussion by others. With each project, I approach art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces (both physical and virtual) to broaden the work of art beyond what I may privately conceive. I view the street as an incredibly rich arena for interactive works that employ illustration, animation, sound and interactivity to draw an audience and ideally initiate a fruitful discussion. Title of work (left) Public Broadcast Cart.
Judi Werthein
Working in media that challenge notions of national identity, economic justice and human rights, Werthein's work extends the making of contemporary art to engage constituencies outside the art world. Her project, Brinco ('to jump' in Spanish), captured nation-wide media attention in its compassionate gesture toward illegal immigrants at time of national debate on rights and regulation of new immigrants. After two years of research and preparation, Werthein designed and fabricated sneakers that were embroidered with an American Eagle on the toe and an Aztec Eagle on the heal. “The shoe includes a compass and a flashlight [because people cross at night]. Inside are also some Tylenol painkillers, because many people get injured during crossing,” Werthein says. To underscore her message of global trade and inequity, Werthein has embroidered the shoes with “this product was manufactured in China under a minimum wage of $42 a month working 12-hour days.”
Renzo Martens
The artist Renzo Martens examines the role of the camera in places of severe political unrest, conflict or poverty utilising performance and satire to create pseudo-documentaries that raise questions about the use of journalism, images and media. For his film Episode 1 (2003, 45') Martens travelled to war-ridden Chechnya and, instead of recording women queuing for food, children in refugee camps, or heavily armed soldiers, he turns the camera on himself, asking them what they thought about him. For Episode 3 - Enjoy Poverty (2009, 90’), Martens spent about two years in the Democratic Republic of Congo launching a project that highlights the exploitation of one of Africa's major export products: images of poverty and suffering.
Škart
The experimental design/art group Škart (Dragan Projtic and Djordje Balmazovic) was founded in 1990. The word škart in Serbian means trash; the name is a succinct allusion to this collective's approach to making and distributing their creative endeavors. Using vernacular or intentionally humble media, Škart has infiltrated the most unconventional settings and engendered unorthodox community-based collaborations. Coming of age during the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia their work addressed traumatic social issues in compassionate and often self-deprecating ways. For Front—Activism in Exile (1999), Škart collaborated with several young designers, activists, and theorists (Lisa Boxus, Raquel Alves, David Otero y Alonso, and Emigrative Art) in Brussels to address the complexities of the three-sided conflict during the Kosovo-crisis: NATO’s “humanitarian violence,” as well as Serbian and Kosovo-Albanian nationalistic forces in the former Yugoslavia.
Marty Pottenger
Mary Pottenger's solo and inter-disciplinary performances and installations involve extensive research and oral histories that encourage both the subjects and audiences to ask questions and engage in dialogue. Her project Abundance examined the impact of money on the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds (from the wealthiest Americans to illegal immigrants earning less than minimum wage). Her project called home land security, is a multimedia performance that examines the perspective of refugees, immigrants, and local communities dealing with aftermath of 9/11. Pottenger combined in-depth, one-on-one interviews with Maine’s governor, senate president, and attorney general; Portland’s mayor, Homeland Security chief, and the U.S. Border Patrol’s regional director; and story circles with members of the local Latino, Afghan, Somali, Sudanese, and French-Canadian communities to create a multimedia work focusing on security, safety, and sovereignty.
Nicolás Dumit Estévez
Nicholas Dumit Estevez born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, lives and works in the Bronx, is an interdisciplinary artist who works in performance and mixed media installations. He often satirizes and critiques stereotypes of Latin Americans. Through food, costume, ritual actions, and disarming invitations to the audience, Estévez unpacks the prejudices and behaviors that isolate immigrants as outsiders. Using universal cultural indicators such as clothes and cuisine, Estevez makes light of discriminatory social conventions. His character Super Merengue exchanges the image of a super-hero with that of the Latin American flaneur entertainer. In Help Offered, 2004, Estevez offered his services, free of charge, to small businesses in Jamaica Queens and other cities. The performances became a process of learning and discovery about everyday work, frequently performed by immigrants or the unskilled.
The Floating Lab Collective
The Floating Lab Collective is a group of metropolitan DC-based artists working collectively on performances, media art and research. The main idea is to expand the space of art into public space and discourse about contemporary art. The participating artists are a dynamic and flexible group that expands and contracts in size depending on the piece to be executed. The pieces are labeled as (e)xperiments, and they focus on different aspects of our society (political, economic, social, etc…)
The Rebel Clown Army
CIRCA (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army) is reclaiming the art of Rebel Clowning. It's combatants don't pretend to be clowns, they are clowns, real trained clowns. Clowns that have run away from the anaemic safety of the circus and escaped the banality of kids parties, Fools that have thrown away their sceptres and broken the chains that shackled them to the throne. CIRCA aims to make clowning dangerous again, to bring it back to the street, restore its disobedience and give it back the social function it once had: its ability to disrupt, critique and heal society. Since the beginning of time tricksters (the mythological origin or all clowns) have embraced life's paradoxes, creating coherence through confusion - adding disorder to the world in order to expose its lies and speak the truth. The rebel clowns that make up CIRCA embody life's contradictions, they are both fearsome and innocent, wise and stupid, entertainers and dissenters, healers and laughing stocks, scapegoats and subversives.
The Institute of Infinitely Small Things
The Institute of Infinitely Small Things conducts creative, participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public spaces and instigate dialogue about democracy, spatial justice and everyday life. The Institute’s projects use performance, conversation and unexpected interventions to investigate social and political “tiny things”. Based mostly in Boston, MA, and occasionally under the leadership of artist Kanarinka, the group’s membership is varied and interdisciplinary.
Institute of Infinitely Small Things
Angela Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
Angela Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are interested in the formation of mobile, performative and discursive-based social spaces, along with the re-articulation of radio within such locales. Through various media forms, their current projects investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song.
Rod Dickinson
Rod Dickinson is a visual artist and lecturer in media and cultural studies at University of West England in Bristol. His art work explores ideas of control and mediation and focuses on the way in which our behaviour is moderated by feedback systems. Using detailed research into moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events that represent various mechanisms of social control. His project 'Closed Circuit' simulated a press briefing that uses fragments of political speeches and briefings to make a looping narrative about the declaration of states of emergency and political responses to catastrophes.
NSK
NSKSTATE.COM was created in 2001 in order to present and examine the
work and ideas of the NSK artists and document the activities around the
utopian State of NSK from the perspective of its citizens.
The website soon became the main source of information about the work of
the NSK artists and the activities of the NSK State and its citizens by
publishing news, photos, articles and reviews written by NSK citizens
around the world. In April 2009 the editors of NSK STATE.COM began
working on the NSK Citizens Congress. Currently, NSK STATE maintains one
blog, the NSK TImes, a page about the First NSK Citizens’ Congress, an
account on Twitter and two photo galleries on Flickr (one for the NSK State
and one for Laibach.
The Yes Men
You guys got a bio?
The Yes Men are a group who
use any means necessary to agree their way into the fortified compounds of
commerce, and then smuggle out the stories of their undercover escapades to
provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of big business.
The stories are often both shocking and hilarious. They have been called
"the Jonathan Swift of the Jackass generation" by author Naomi Klein. The
Yes Men have impersonated World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical
Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business
conferences around the world. They do this (a) in order to demonstrate some
of the mechanisms that keep bad people and ideas in power, and (b) because
it's absurdly fun. Their main goal is to focus attention on the dangers of
economic policies that place the rights of capital before the needs of
people and the environment." For more information see
Critical Art Ensemble
(CAE) is a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.
Formed in 1987, CAE's focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The group has exhibited and performed at diverse venues internationally, ranging from the street, to the museum, to the internet. The collective has written 6 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. Its book projects include: The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience & Other Unpopular Ideas (1996),Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness (1998), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2001), Molecular Invasion (2002), and Marching Plague (2006).
Democracia
The decision to work as a group springs from the intention of engaging in an artistic practice centred on discussion and the clash of ideas and forms of action. The fact of working in a group in itself establishes an interest in intervening in the social sphere, by means of ideas of commitment to the real. The projects reflect a concern with the progressive setting of scenes of social life; visible, in the increasing importance of the image, and also in the gradual incorporation of the simulacrum in the different realms of daily life, such as politics, technology, and culture. Also Democracia works in publishing (they are directors of Nolens Volens magazine) and curatorial projects (No Futuro, Madrid Abierto 2008, Creador de Dueños). They were founders and part of El Perro group (1989-2006). For more information see
Janez Jansa
In 2007 three Slovenian artists legally changed their names to Janez Jansa, the name also of the Prime Minister of Slovenia at the time and a right wing politician. The act was that of a critical gesture made towards the state. With the change, their previous artistic identities were dissolved and now their only web presence can be found under Janez Jansa. The exhibition 'NAME Readymade' at Location One gallery in 2009 presented the official act of the name changing displaying documents such as ID cards, passports, bank cards taken from the new reality the artists had created. For more information see
Chto Delat?
The platform Chto delat? (What is to be done?) was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. The group is also involved as activists and their site lists various calls for protest. It originally consisted of the following members: Olga Egorova/Tsaplya (artist, Petersburg), Artiom Magun (philosopher, Petersburg), Nikolai Oleinikov (artist, Moscow), Natalia Pershina/Glucklya (artist, Petersburg), Alexei Penzin (philosopher, Moscow), David Riff (art critic, Moscow), Alexander Skidan (poet, critic, Petersburg), Kirill Shuvalov (artist, Petersburg), Oxana Timofeeva (philosopher, Moscow), and Dmitry Vilensky (artist, Petersburg). For more information see
Northern Lights
Northern Lights is a roving, collaborative, interactive media-oriented, art agency from the Twin Cities for the world. It presents innovative art in the public sphere, both physical and virtual, focusing on artists creatively using technology, both old and new, to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment.
Northern Lights supports global and local artists working particularly at the intersection of disciplines to freely create new work that excites the senses, explores ideas that matter, and re-imagines ways of energetic engagement among artists, institutions, sites, and audiences.
Oliver Ressler
Artist Statement: In my artistic work, I analyze and criticize power relations in our current society, but I seek to go beyond a simple analysis and criticism. Several of my works focus on forms of resistance found in the so-called counter-globalization movement and in the emerging social movements that fight the response (or non-response) of states and corporations to climate change. My projects deal with major issues and include valuable information, but transcend a simplistic delivery of content. Who speaks is of big importance to my work; speakers are often grassroots activists or workers usually not listened to by anybody. These people share a passionate commitment to overcome the current capitalist system.
The Atlas Group
The Atlas Group (a fictional organisation by the artist Walid Raad) is a project established in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of the Lebanon. One of our aims with this project is to locate, preserve, study and produce audio, visual, literary and other artefacts that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon. In this endeavour, we produce and found several document including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs and other objects. Moreover, we organise these works in an archive. The Atlas Group Archive. The projects public forms include mixed-media installations, single channel screenings, visual and literary essays, and lectures/performances.
