Whether they are deployed in artistic performances or used as a tool to broadcast political messages, Kisic Aguirre’s works challenge the boundaries of our common understanding of the city and the spaces we share in it
Category Archive: street
The book maps, critiques, celebrates and historicises cultural activism, from the dual perspective of a commentator (as scholar and writer) and insider (as activist artist)
A street artist’s critique of the privatisation of public space and natural resources
advertising
How do contemporary artists explore Nonuments, the spaces or objects that trigger uneasiness, public debates and polarised opinions
The exhibition shows the work of artists who look for a public in the streets, not within the sterile walls of a museum or art gallery. They use public space as an environment to share, agitate, experiment, debate and trigger the unexpected
In the streets of Istanbul, people improvise repairs, upgrades and improvements with craft, any cheap material available and a lot of ingenuity. It might not looks very sophisticated but it’s fast, smart and efficient
social
These posters might be half a century old, but they have lost nothing of their strength, nor sadly of their relevance. Today we have hashtags and other social media tools but we’re still yearning for equality, freedom and justice
Featuring original essays from prominent media scholars discussing Banksy and Shepard Fairey, foundational texts such as Mark Dery’s culture jamming manifesto, and artwork by and interviews with noteworthy culture jammers including the Guerrilla Girls, The Yes Men, and Reverend Billy, Culture Jamming makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of creative resistance and participatory culture
This exploration of visual protest since 9/11 isn’t constricted by boundaries nor hierarchies. Online interventions rub shoulders with good old posters, murals with performances, court sketches with design objects. The people who rebel, resist and visually express their opposition are famous artists such as Banksy and Ai Weiwei. More often than not, however, they are anonymous or operate behind pseudonyms
With his public intervention Overexposed, artist Paolo Cirio disseminates unauthorized pictures of high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials throughout major cities. Cirio obtained snapshots of NSA, CIA, and FBI officers through social media hacks. Then, using his HD Stencils graffiti technique, he spray-paints high-resolution reproductions of the misappropriated photos onto public walls
Karl Philips is a Belgian (h)activist, performance and conceptual artist who casts a critical but always witty glance at society, paying particular attention to cracks in consumerism, town planning, advertising, and turning upside-down their logic
Upper Space took up the renovated engine room of a former cotton mill in Manchester to organize a series of exhibition, workshops, screenings, talks and public interventions that invited citizens of Greater Manchester to reflect on possible alternative and resistance to ‘consumerism and the disempowerment that it represents’
Friction Atlas addresses the issue of legibility of public space, its programs, and the laws that regulate its uses. Many regulations discretize human behavior, tending to be algorithmic, quantitative and invisible. Friction Atlas aims to make regulations – that are always implicitly present in any public space – explicit and visible, through graphical devices
On display are arts of rebellion from around the world that illuminate the role of making in grassroots movements for social change: finely woven banners; defaced currency; changing designs for barricades and blockades; political video games; an inflatable general assembly to facilitate consensus decision-making; experimental activist-bicycles; and textiles bearing witness to political murders
The art that Berglin masters to perfection is the good old art of appropriation. He picks up an image, modifies it or not, brings it into a new contexts and gives it a new meaning. The result is a portfolio full of humour, poetry, and absurd comments on our absurd society
A couple of weeks ago, i was in Derry/Londonderry. Beautiful landscapes, super friendly people, vegan-approved yummy food at the Legenderry Warehouse, stunning socially-engages exhibitions i’ll tell you about later and a city-wide event called Lumiere. Lumiere is a festival of 17 projections and installations that lit up as the night came onto the city. It is a crowd-magnet, a place to bring your family and marvel at what artists and designers can do with light. Some of the works, however, had depth and bite
Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity
Cultural Hijack explores the role of art and the artist in contemporary society and offers the opportunity to rethink the growing field of intervention in relation to cultural activism and social change
“BAD GRAFFITI is a current photography series focusing on the vulgar, juvenile, poorly scrawled, often misspelled, ignorant, ridiculous, hilarious, bad-ass, so-bad-its-good, under-the-radar, and generally dismissed as shitty graffiti that I love throughout Detroit.
It is also a book”
The exhibition at Somerset House shows 28 projects shortlisted for a competition that invited architects, engineers, students and designers to submit proposals that reclaim overlooked spaces across Greater London. Inspired by success stories such as New York’s High Line, the competition aims to demonstrate how alternative way of thinking about urban space can inject new life and energy into some of London’s most neglected corners.
The selected entries range from underground climbing tunnels to Atlantic salmons in the Thames, firepits in Crystal Palace, bee keeping, rooftops of tower blocks turned into social hubs and artist studios nested inside church spires
War veterans are homeless people too. They might go back to a house after the war, they might have a roof over their head but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. They are traumatized to various degrees and feel like they’ve become strangers to the place where they used to live. They don’t function like they used to. They have been conditioned to be constantly on alert, to react on the spot to any unexpected light, move, noise, etc. They can’t turn off that aggressive instinct when they go back to civilian life
Summer is back in London and dozens of bees have now settled in the middle of Spitalfields. Real bees passersby don’t try to wave away. They are dead and hang on fishing lines as if they were caught in mid-flight inside a giant glass case, surrounded on all sides by office blocks
The Urban Immune System Research, one of the 4 Making Future Work commissions, investigates parallel futures in the emergence of the ‘smart-city’. During their research, the Institute has produced a series of speculative prototypes that combine digital technology and biometrics: one of the devices ‘functions as a social sixth sense’, a second one is a backpack mounted with 4 megaphones that shouts out geo-located tweets as you walk around, a third one attempts to make its wearer get a sense of what might it feel like to walk through a ‘data cloud’ or a ‘data meadow’
Sorry for being so silent over the past few days. A combination of medicine-proof flu and weak wifi at the hotel have thrown me into the arms of Jo Nesbo again and i’ve only emerged from this lethargy now. So here’s a last and light post about the ongoing London Street Photography Festival where i discovered Anahita Avalos’s tableaux of everyday life in Villahermosa, Mexico
Oscar Lhermitte attempts to turn our attention back the stars in the city sky by adding new constellations, narrating contemporary myths about London. Twelve groups of stars have been designed and catapulted guerrilla-style at different locations in the city, and can only be observed by the naked eye at night time. Each of these constellations tells a story that is directly relevant to the Londoner
The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws including Jean Tinguely, Spencer Tunick, Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shepard Fairey, Blu, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls and Banksy, among others. It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks
This perceptive work brings art to the masses and helps us to rediscover our every day surroundings. It challenges us to question if the cities we have are the cities we need while adding a touch of magic to mundane places and situations
No one dons the moustache like Fernando Llanos. He’s a video artist, a musician, a writer, a blogger, a curator, he makes drawings, he’s the über macho-looking Mexican guy who walks around the city with a chihuahua in his bag. He also produces tv shows, a competition of animation movies, and the moto of his own radio programme is “There’s no need to talk about art in order to talk about art”. When he’s not performing Llanos is always impeccably dressed. He’s probably the one and only media artist whose sense of style i admire
Having this dream of painting a whole town, Brazilian street artists Calma traveled to Lençóis (Bahia) and started painting murals onto villagers’ houses. He soon ended up painting the inside of a chapel and even tombstones in the cemetery.
One day, Daniel Eatock left his desk, found the car whose alarm had been interrupting his peace every five minutes, and waited for the siren to switch on. When the siren sounded, he started dancing like a madman. He made videos of several of his car alarm dances, never touching the car, only dancing to the sound pollutants
Eduardo Srur dressed 16 official statue around the city with orange life jacket in order to remind passers-by of monuments they don’t even see anymore
The temporary and modular architecture projects presented in the exhibition use existing structures and buildings to generate new scenarios and redefine the city as a site for play and appropriation. Interestingly, the way they regain control over space is totally at odds with the current ‘no loitering’ trend
Modernist public spaces are in decline in our cities. The privatisation of the analogue commons has been blamed for this process, victim of a form of capitalism in which markets are understood as strategies for seizing and remaining in power by pressure groups. Freire’s brilliant talk sees beyond the current situation and deals with the reinvention of public spaces, the “hyper-realistic” culture of the network society and the re-birth of the notion of the commons
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