STATE OF PALESTINE, BY KHALED JARRAR

Khaled Jarrar, a Palestinian artist, decided to declare the existence of a non-existent state. He created a passport stamp for the State of Palestine, challenging the Israeli border regime. Jarrar undertook his first stamping action at the central bus station in Ramallah for people arriving from the checkpoints. When he goes abroad, he uses any occasion to mark people’s passports (a couple hundred so far) and thereby develops a campaign based on nonviolent resistance. These stamps represent a sovereign independent country and opposition to the violent fragmentation of the Palestinian territory. Those who agree to have the stamp put into their documents sustain claims for Palestinian sovereignty and perform an individual political coming out which defines one’s position.

A community of supporters grows. Official documents become a manifestation of citizen’s disobedience. And if you have a stamp, you might run into trouble: your entrance to Israel might be denied by border control at the Ben Gurion checkpoint, or you might be sent back to your country of origin. We even know of Israeli passports that have been cancelled due to the unauthorized stamp. Together with the 7th Berlin Biennale, Jarrar also produces postage stamps from Deutsche Post, which have a Palestine Sunbird and the inscription "State of Palestine" printed on them. Over 20,000 have been made so far. Used on letters and postcards, they have circulated worldwide.

Jarrar’s passport and postage stamps tell the story of a state-to-be. But reality goes against him and other Palestinians. Instead of continuing again and again the discussion about a one- or two-state solution, using these stamps is a simple gesture that helps to create normality.

20:12 - By Unknown 1

EL SILUETAZO, BY EDUARDO GIL

"The realisation of silhouettes is the most memorable of the artistic-political practices that lent a powerful visuality to the public space of Buenos Aires and many other cities of the country on the demands of the argentinian human rights movements in the early 1980s. This consist of a simple design in the form of the outline of a man-sized body on paper, later pasted on the city walls as a way of representing the 'presence of an absence' of the thousands of prisioners who 'disappeared' during the last military dictatorship" (text by Ana Longoni).

This video by Marcelo Expósito includes interviews with the art historian and researcher Ana Longoni, and Guillermo Kexel (one of the three artists who originally conceived 'El Siluetazo', before this practice was adopted and pushed forward by Madres de Plaza de Mayo in 1983), as well as original photographs by Guillermo Kexel and Eduardo Gil. This video is part of the collective research project: "Images of 'El Siluetazo' and other creative strategies of the human rights movement in Argentina", carried out by Fernanda Carvajal, Marcelo Expósito, Cora Gamarnik, Ana Longoni and Jaime Vindel, within the framework of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur / Southern Conceptualisms Network, produced by Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010-2011).

19:58 - By Unknown 0

LOOKING FOR A HUSBAND WITH EU PASSPORT, BY TANIA OSTOJIĆ

In August 2000 Tanja Ostojić launched her project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport in which she published an online advertisement with the same title. Over the next few months the artist received numerous offers from men from around the world, and exchanged more than 500 letters with them. One of them was Klemens G. from Germany. Ostojić met him in 2001, as part of a publicly staged performance on the lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. One month later the two were wed in Belgrade, and then—with the international marriage certificate and other necessary documents in hand—Ostojić applied for a German visa. With her first three-month visa she moved to Düsseldorf, where she registered officially with the authorities and received additional visa extensions over the next three-and-a-half years. In the spring of 2005 her temporary residence permit expired and, instead of receiving a permanent residence permit, Ostojić was only granted an extension for an additional two years. Subsequently, she and Klemens G. divorced, and on July 1 the installation Integration Project Office was launched in the project room of Galerie 35 in Berlin, with a divorce celebration.

With her project Looking for a Husband with EU Passport Ostojić addresses the political injustices, exclusions, and delimitations that still exist in Europe beyond the global digital realm. Ostojić made use of the World Wide Web to shed light on the plight of immigrants and the limitations imposed on lifestyles, through artistic self-exploration.

Tanja Ostojić's website.

06:55 - By Unknown 1

REMOTEWORDS, BY ACHIM MOHNÉ AND UTA KOPP

The long-term project Remotewords disseminates news that can only be viewed from above and from outer space. The roof of the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn has become the project’s sixteenth station worldwide; it bears a message that cannot be seen from the ground but will be visible and shared around the world through Google Earth and other navigation systems as soon as the satellite images are updated. The artists will create permanent messages in the form of large letters painted on the rooftops. Additional writers, artists, and scholars have been invited to join in developing key messages appropriate to the site and its function. The website of Remotewords embeds the coordinates of each location directly into Google Earth or Google. Photographic and video documentations as well as interviews with the authors and information about the sites deepen the semantic connection between place and message.

Remotewords is about the power and powerlessness of digital observational and communications systems. The project provides a response to the increasing commercialization of the Internet, with messages and news that use Google Earth as an artistic medium. And Google Earth’s suggested promise of real time is unmasked as an illusion, since the messages can only be read in the Internet after the satellite data is updated, and this in turn depends on the relevance of the site within the global network.

Achim Mohné's website.
Uta Kopp's website.

06:48 - By Unknown 0

NIKE GROUND, BY EVA AND FRANCO MATTES

Eva and Franco Mattes, born 1976, are the Brooklyn based artist-provocateurs behind the infamous Web site 0100101110101101.org. Since meeting in Madrid in 1994 they have never separated, living a nomadic life throughout Europe and the United States. Among the pioneers of the Net Art movement, they are renowned for their masterful subversion of public media. Over the last fifteen years, the Mattes’ have manipulated video games, Internet technologies, feature films, and street advertising to reveal truths concealed by contemporary society. Their works create a permanent state of insecurity by blurring borders between reality and fiction, art and offence, intention and action. Their off-the-wall performances—which have involved them in several lawsuits—include stealing dozens of fragments from art masterpieces (Stolen Pieces, 1995), rolling out a media campaign for a non-existent action movie (United We Stand, 2005) and even convincing the people of Vienna that Nike had purchased the city’s historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it Nikeplatz (Nike Ground, 2003).

"We set up a fake Nike advertisement campaign using a website and a huge hi-tech container we installed in a public square in Vienna. The news went out nationwide: “Karlsplatz, one of Vienna’s main squares, is soon to be renamed Nikeplatz, and a huge monument in the shape of Nike’s famous Swoosh logo will be built in Nikeplatz”. The campaign provoked the reactions of Vienna’s citizens, city officials and the Nike group, which started legal action. Against all odds we won against the giant."

06:39 - By Unknown 0

BE CAREFUL WHO SEES YOU WHEN YOU DREAM, BY JENNY MARKETOU

The airborne installation features 18 red balloons inflated with helium, wireless CCTV, four video screens, and live video streaming. The aim of the artist is to shield the deep darkness of surveillance with aesthetic playfulness. The installation lures the visitors in enforceable encounters as they offer themselves as the watched subjects. Movements of visitors through the balloons are recorded as ephemera, traces, forms and patterns are broadcasted live in the four video screens set up on the floor of the gallery.

Jenny Marketou's website.

06:28 - By Unknown 0

REPETITIONR, BY LES LIENS INVISIBLES

Created by the imaginary art group Les Liens Invisibles – already known for others internet spoofs like Subvertr.com, A Fake is A Fake and Seppukoo.com – Repetitionr.com is the ultimate social petition platform that grants the success of every campaign proposed, offering the most advanced internet technologies to make participatory democracy a truely user-centered experience. Just a click and Repetitionr will fill your petitions with millions of self-generated fake signatures indistinguishable from the real ones.

1. Create your petition: just write down your petition title and statement.
2. Choose the number of signatures you want (from 1,000 to 1,000,000) and from which countries they should come. Don’t be afraid, exaggerate the potential.
3. During the following days, Repetitionr’s automatic services will feed your petition with the signatures.
4. Meanwhile, promote your campaign through other media (TV, online / offline newspaper . . . ).
5. Within the next thirty days your campaign will reach its goal.

 This will be the moment to announce to the world that thousands and thousands of people can’t be wrong!

With its simple instructions for generating online petitions, the Net project Repetitionr by the artist group Les Liens Invisibles makes the Internet user or exhibition visitor want to get involved. In their version of “One-Click-Democracy,” political engagement no longer depends on physical action on the street. The days of demonstrations may be over—today, all it takes is a mouse-click from the comfort of one’s sofa at home. Thanks to Repetitionr software, you can gather as many signatures as you need—1,000 or 1,000,000—in no time at all. For this software program, it’s a cinch.

Using humor, the program demonstrates how easily data can be generated and manipulated today. Les Liens Invisibles questions, with a wink, the capacity of new communication media to generate critical reflection and social change. With its participatory potential, the “hands-on Net” or Web 2.0—a new nickname for the Internet, which enables direct user involvement through blogs or other social online platforms and networks—promises more democracy and participation in political developments than ever before. Just when democratic processes are increasingly perceived as ineffective, the artist group carries the hope for more democracy through the Internet to its ironic extreme, ad absurdum. Through the intentional, automatic manipulation of petitions, they warn of the dangers that can come with the superficial and careless treatment of data available through the Internet.

http://www.repetitionr.com

Les Liens Invisibles website.

06:20 - By Unknown 0

SECURITY FIRST, BY MARC LEE

A long storage rack like one finds in an electronic appliances store displays all the products with which one can become part of the world of global surveillance; especially cameras, both real and dummies, visible as a deterrent or camouflaged as smoke detection devices or wall clocks. This hardware can also be used to upgrade one's private sphere so that one lives under the protection of electronic eyes. The following advertising announcement is heard via headphones:
«This is important: Make a clear choice to record and be recorded. Make a change. It’s your own individual right. We are the new generation. It’s a challenge, be virtually everywhere, create communities, network and exchange. Don’t escape and don’t occupy spaces, let them be open and free. And when you publish or talk to an algorithm, never be anonymous. Crime will fall rapidly. Our life will be better. Your choice is our choice.» An alternative to this vision are the shots from live webcams in real-time seen on the monitor. These images present a different truth: unsecured security cameras installed in private contexts upload unencrypted images to the Internet. Users can access these images via websites, but as the websites are not even password-protected, anyone can access the images. The private sphere may be safer, but at the price that it is less private. Text: Sebastian Althoff.

Marc Lee's website.

06:08 - By Unknown 0

LOCATING SOCIAL (UN) AWARENESS, BY ANDREJA KULUNČIĆ

Technology is often just another tool for leaving others behind, and above all in favour for those who are skilled, equipped and able. That is why, when thinking about technology as a symbolic 'gate/passage', I could not avoid the question of social awareness. How to (conceptually, and in somewhat cynical gesture) into the 'discourse of mapping' the reality around us, introduce the reflection of attitudes toward the others, and the issue of social vulnerability? In fact, mapping in itself with its military and invading symbolism denies the 'awareness' towards the society, underlines the cynical, if not absurd idea of monitoring, locating, mapping and using thus in the name of freedom and democracy.
Do we want to know what people currently surrounding us think about the issue of asylum seekers, homosexual relationships, women's rights? Whether the people with whom we are in the same room are racist, sexist, homophobic? Wether our neighbours want equal payment for both sexes, and whether they would agree that all Russians living in Estonia receive Estonian citizenship?
Technology is here used to monitor not our actions, but our thoughts and attitudes. This method of 'thought-policing' is not used to separate the acceptable from unacceptable but first of all to question how important it is for us to share our social (un)awareness with others? Does it even matter?
The work starts from this last question. It should matter, and then with time we might correct our social (un)awareness and tacit acceptance of (un)awareness of our fellow citizens, politicians, and written laws.

Andreja Kulunčić's website.

22:29 - By Unknown 0

REFUGEE REPUBLIC, BY INGO GÜNTHER

Ingo Günther was born in 1957. He lives and works in New York. His early sculptural works with video led him to news media projects, where he played a crucial role in the evaluation, interpretation, and publication of satellite data taken from crises zones. Since 1989 Günther uses illuminated globes as a medium for his artistic and journalistic interests. His project Refugee Republic of 1995 was also the first site dealing with refugees on the internet.

Refugee Republic is a concept based on the ever increasing number of refugees, displaced persons and migrants. Refugee Republic is attempting to address the problem associated with this condition. Refugee Republic maintains that refugees are essentially unrealized capital and that their involuntary fate of an international avantgarde can be turned into productive assets.
Refugee Republic proposes a supranational and supraterritorial refugee state that might become a model for the rest of the world.

Refugee Republic website.

Ingo Günther's website.

22:16 - By Unknown 0

ARE YOU HUMAN, BY ARAM BARTHOLL

CAPTCHA codes are small images we encounter on the internet almost every day. To prove to the server that we are human we have to decode the distorted random letter-number word. CAPTCHA is the acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and was developed in 2000. While at the Turing test humans were to decide if they chat with a program or another human. Today the computer is asking us if we were human. At the same time often it is quite difficult to decode these bend letters and numbers but spammers write specialized software which still is capable to do so. Are you human?

It is also interesting that CAPTCHA codes are generated by a script in the very moment a website is requested. In fact each code is unique but forgotten in digital nirvana very quickly. Once used (or failed) it will never appear as alike again. While many other files on the Internet are being copied and multiplied CAPTCHA codes stay in an ephemeral blind spot. They seem light, sometimes like a micro poem but they ask us the very existential question in an era of digital life.

Aram Bartholl's website.

18:40 - By Unknown 0

TRAPPED, BY ANNA TRAPENCIERE

The piece trapped was inspired by Rob van Kranenburg’s and Bruce Sterling’s ideas about “The Internet of Things.” The concept of the Internet of Things refers to one of the theories about the future of the Internet, where all everyday physical objects are interconnected and communicate among themselves in a virtual world of Internet.
One of the ways to link the physical entities to an online world is with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology, which is already widely used in agriculture and trade. By equipping over forty objects in her home with a small RFID tag and carrying around a RFID reader, Anna Trapenciere has created her own little Internet of Things. The RFID tags and the reader communicate with each other and provide data about the actions taking place in the network comprised of the artist, the RFID tags, and the reader. The information gained from the actions is visible to and traceable for everyone over the Internet.
The artist presents us with one form of life logging, recording her everyday actions by wearing a technological apparatus. The physical data, bodily movements, are transformed into readable electronic data. The information is displayed on the computer screen along with the date, time, and name of the activity.
Anna Trapenciere's website.

18:32 - By Unknown 0

SHORT STORIES ABOUT TROUBLED SOCIETIES, BY ZIYAH GAFIĆ

Ziyah Gafić was born in 1980 in Sarajevo, in former Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina. He lives and works in Sarajevo.

Gafić is considered one of the most talented, prolific, and engaged of the younger generation photojournalists. Although he was too young to have taken an active part in the Balkan war, the Bosnian documentary photographer Ziyah Gafić personally experienced the impact of the conflict. His aunt died in her burning house, his grandfather committed suicide and a niece was a victim of rape. Out of frustration at his enforced passivity, Gafić was determined to photograph the aftermath of the war in Bosnia. Very quickly he expanded his field to include countries that have been involved in similar sorts of conflicts, such as Palestine, Afghanistan and Chechnya, travelling extensively to document social and political conflict. Here too Muslim communities are seeking restoration after the violence of war, and must continue to live in a divided society.

Ziyah Gafić's website.

18:18 - By Unknown 0

AFRICAN REFUGEES PROJECT, BY GHANA THINKTANK

Ghana ThinkTank is an international collective that “develops the first world” by flipping traditional power dynamics, allowing the “third world” to intervene into the lives of the people living in the so-called “developed” world.

They collect problems from communities throughout the USA and Europe, and send them to think tanks we created in “developing” communities. The think tanks – which include a group of bike mechanics in Ghana, a rural radio station in El Salvador, Sudanese refugees seeking asylum in Israel, an artist collective in Iran, and a group of incarcerated girls in the Boston penal system, among others – propose solutions, which are then implemented in the “first world”.

Ghana ThinkTank’s innovative approach to public art reveals blind spots between otherwise disconnected cultures, challenges assumptions about who is “needy,” and turns the idea of expertise on its head by asking people in the “third world” to solve problems of people in the “first world.” This process helps people overcome their own stereotypes while being exposed to the stereotypes that other cultures have about them.

Ghana ThinkTank was founded in 2006 by Christopher Robbins, John Ewing and Matey Odonkor. Maria Del Carmen Montoya joined in 2009. The project began with think tanks in Ghana, Cuba, and El Salvador, and has since expanded to include Mexico, Iran, Serbia, Indonesia, Sudan and Morocco.

The African Refugee is one of the Ghana ThinkTank projects. It focuses on facilitating contact between groups that are historically or politically polarized in the Middle East.

In 2014, Ghana ThinkTank was invited by ArtPort Gallery in Tel Aviv to create an interchange between African refugees seeking asylum in Israel, and local residents who resented their presence.

Working with Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers along with local Israelis, they organized think tanks that collected problems from residents of the neglected neighborhood of South Tel Aviv as well as African refugees living in that same neighborhood. They asked each group to solve the problems of the other. Community members, the organized think tanks, and local organizations created plans to implement the proposed solutions. Solutions included an all female civilian patrol outfitted in uniforms of African cloth (image).

This effort to create constructive contact between groups was featured as part of a Tel Aviv-based art show “The Infiltrators.”

Ghana Thinktank's website.

22:10 - By Unknown 0

DON'T LET THE MEDIA HAVE THE MONOPOLY ON THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH, BY FREEE

Don’t Let The Media Have The Monopoly On The Freedom Of Speech, poster, 2007; for solo exhibition Protest is Beautiful, 1000,000 mph Gallery, London. Also shown, How to Make a Difference, IPS, Birmingham, 2007, Terms of Use: Art and Informational Economy, Montehermoso, Vitoria, Spain 2008.

Freee art collective, composed of Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt, and Mel Jordan, questions the way in which public opinion is shaped, as well as the role of art in the public sphere. Working together since 2004, the artists have created publicly staged interventions using posters, screens, publications, journal articles, t-shirts, and slogans. The titles of their projects are typically very literal: The Economic Function of Public Art Is to Increase the Value of Private Property (2004) or Advertising Wants to Convert Our Desire for a Better Life into a Desire to Buy Something (2008).

Even though Freee’s visual and language-based interventions criticize the commercial and bureaucratic use of the urban environment, they occupy billboards, gallery spaces, and public sites. The group’s artistic strategy is dialectical: on the one hand, it draws from the avant-garde tradition by adopting the visual language of political dissents (for example, handwritten, handheld signs); on the other hand, it borrows mainstream media strategies, such as the use of big screens, and employ commercial-like aesthetics. Heavily influenced by Marxist theory, Freee aims at imagining a new social order by activating a collective and participatory space.

Freee's website

22:42 - By Unknown 0

TUTOIA OPERATION, BY FERNANDO PIOLA

In a previous art project, Red Square Project (2005/2013), Piola wanted to turn a public square within the city red by adjusting its urban vegetation. The artist initiated the Red Square Project in a recently gentrified neighbourhood in São Paolo, overhauled by the local government in order to reduce crime, drug trafficking, and prostitution. The goal behind Piola’s projects was, on the one hand, to remember the now-whitewashed former scene of drugs and violence and, on the other hand, to look back at a more contested part of Brazilian history: the repression that existed under the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985).

The site that Piola chose for his red square was in front of a building that once housed the Department of Social and Political Order, the government institution responsible for the persecution of ‘enemies of the state’. When Piola requested permission for his project, the authorities denied it.

The artist’s response was to initiate another public art project, Tutoia Operation, to revive a concealed memory of dictatorial state oppression, this time adopting a slightly different strategy. Instead of introducing it as art, Piola presented himself as a gardener with a plan to upgrade the neighbourhood. Plant by plant he exchanged the green vegetation with red foliage. Through this slow and disguised gesture the artist subtly attributed the location with a new and disquieting semantic meaning.

Fernando Piola's website

21:56 - By Unknown 0

fbFACES, BY JOERN ROEDER AND JONATHAN PIRNAY

"fbFaces" is a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay, who study "New Media" at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany. The project deals with the issue of data accessibility on the Internet, a topic that is gaining more and more importance and actuality -especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks.
"On the one hand "Internet giants" like Google, etc. are coming under criticism for unsolicitedly collecting any information accessible, on the other hand it is surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like facebook. What is normal, what is exaggerated? How are we dealing with that flood of information and in which ways is it changing us? How important is image cultivation on the Internet and how important becomes my "facebook-me"?
"fbFaces" is a fecabook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any fb-user, saving profile image, facebook-ID and name, and afterwards continuing its way to the public profiles of the user's friends. And so on...
An unimaginable flood of images with self-projection as its only purpose, 100.000 of these profile images were used (via Processing) to print a wallpaper for an entire room. In our living space, a wallpaper is omnipresent, it surrounds us day and night until after a while it is no longer noticed.
fbFaces is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived.
The wallpaper transforms the room itself into a flood of information. It surrounds us, cannot be estimated from distance; details can only be caught through determined selection. But then they vanish again -in a cloud of information." (Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay).

00:17 - By Unknown 0

MEMOPOL-II, BY TIMO TOOTS

Memopol-II is a social machine that maps the visitor’s information field. By inserting an identification document such as a national ID card or EU passport into the machine, it starts collecting information about the visitor from (inter)national databases and the Internet. The data is then visualized on a large‐scale custom display. The collection panel also shows the portraits of the visitors from their ID card.

The Cyrillic spelling of the installation’s name refers to George Orwell's concept of Big Brother from his 1949 dystopian novel 1984. Over the past decades, technological means have transformed the surveillance of society. When surfing on the Internet, paying with an ATM card, or using an ID card, people leave their digital traces everywhere. Internet and social networks gather and provide a great deal of personal information, and a person’s profile is no longer constituted by his or her physical being alone, but also by the person’s digital information, over which he or she sometimes has little control. Background checks through Internet search engines and social network sites have become routine when we meet somebody new or apply for a job. Memopol-II enables us to make a thorough background check of ourselves, mirroring back to us all the data about us that is accessible via the Internet.

Estonia is well ahead of other countries in governmental data collecting, storing citizen information online and making it accessible to different degrees to an individual person and to government agencies. It is a convenient means for electronic identification and for making various transactions by inserting it in to the different ID‐card readers. The harmless looking electronic card readers seldom bring to mind thoughts about malevolent third parties who might have unauthorized access to the protected information. By means of Memopol-II, Timo Toots tests either our trust or paranoia toward the machines that read the information.
Timo Toots's website

23:54 - By Unknown 0

MY LITTLE PIECE OF PRIVACY, BY NIKLAS ROY

"My workshop is located in an old storefront with a big window facing towards the street. In an attempt to create more privacy inside, I’ve decided to install a small but smart curtain in that window. The curtain is smaller than the window, but an additional surveillance camera and an old laptop provide it with intelligence: The computer sees the pedestrians and locates them. With a motor attached, it positions the curtain exactly where the pedestrians are.

The whole setup works really well. But in the end, it doesn’t protect my privacy at all. It seems that the existence of my little curtain is leading itself ad absurdum, simply by doing its job very well. My moving curtain attracts the looks of people which usually would never care about my window. It is even the star of the street, now! My curtain is just engaged. And because of that, it fails."

Niklas Roy's website

23:42 - By Unknown 0

A CHARGE FOR PRIVACY, BY BRANGER BRIZ

Although already a few years old, this humorous project feels more timely than ever with Google’s new consolidated Privacy Policy. When you install Fat Lab’s add-on into your browser, it will sound an alarm every time information is being sent to Google. It’s actually kind of scary how often the alarm goes off even on sites that you wouldn’t expect, such as Vimeo. It shows how truly all-pervasive Google has become. 

This installation by Branger_Briz literally makes your data into currency and “charges” users for it when they decide to charge their phone at their custom charging booth. The charging booth first premiered at Art Basel this past December, capitalizing on the increased phone usage we all experience at conferences and festivals. Users pay for the service by not only uploading all of their photos to the installation, but legally relinquishing them to Branger_Briz to do whatever they want with them. It’s interesting to note that the artists use Facebook’s own Terms of Service, word for word, to establish the legal ground that enables them to do this. (From The Creators Project).

More information on Vimeo

23:40 - By Unknown 0

SAFEGUARD EMERGENCY LIGHT, BY BERTILLE BAK

Bertille Bak’s (*1983) works often come about in collaboration with individuals or with communities. The French artist’s videos, but also her drawings, objects and installations are particularly concerned with minorities and with their reality in society. As a rule, she spends several months with the respective groups, in the course of which she involves them in her films. She is not so much interested in observing or documenting the reality of their lives specifically, but initiates group-dynamic communicative processes and social changes through the collaborative way she creates art.
Safeguard Emergency Light System (2010), a seven-minute film shot in documentary style, tells a story of protest by residents living in an apartment complex of about 2,000 households in the Din Daeng neighbourhood of Bangkok, Thailand. In 2008 the city-housing authorities announced that, due to the poor conditions of these decadesold apartment blocks, the occupants would be evicted and the buildings demolished to make way for a commercial centre. In response to a lack of compensation or housing offered by the government, the members of the Din Daeng community launched a years-long neighbourhood resistance, which was seldom covered by Thai media.

22:12 - By Unknown 0

WELCOME TO THE LAND OF LOST, BY HALİL ALTINDERE

Series of postage stamps depicting the protraits and names of men, who "dissapeared" while in police custody during the Turkish-Kurdish confllict between 1984 and 1999. Since the 1990s, 17000 people are considered "dissapeared", among them, students, businessmen, and workers.

Halil Altındere (born in 1971 in Mardin, lives in Istanbul) explores political, social and cultural codes, and focuses largely depicting marginalization and resistance to oppressive systems.

Altındere has been a central figure in the Turkish contemporary art world since the mid-1990s, not only as an artist but also as the publisher of art-ist Magazine and as aprominent curator. The artist who reversed the conceptions of nation-state and authority through works on everyday objects like identity cards, banknotes, stamps in his early productions, started to focus on subcultures, gender and odd-but-ordinary situations of everyday life after the 2000s. His ironic and political approach can grasp the audience easily.

22:50 - By Unknown 0

FACE 2 FACE, BY JR AND MARCO

In 2007, during the Face 2 Face project, JR and Marco organize the largest illegal photography exhibition ever.

For this project, portraits of Israelis and Palestinians are pasted face to face, in monumental formats on both sides of the wall and in several Palestinian and Israeli cities.

The Face 2 Face project:

"When we met in 2005, we decided to go together to the Middle‐East to figure out why Palestinians and Israelis couldn't find a way to get along together.

We then travelled through the Israeli and Palestinian cities without speaking much. Just looking to this world with amazement. This holy place for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This tiny area where you can see mountains, sea, deserts and lakes, love and hate, hope and despair embedded together.

ter a week, we had the exact same conclusion: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him.

And he is endlessly fighting with him. It's obvious, but they don't see that. We must put them face to face. They will realize.

The Face2Face project consists of taking portraits of Palestinians and Israelis doing the same job and posting them face to face, in huge formats, in unavoidable places, on both Israeli and Palestinian sides. We want, at last, everyone to laugh and to think by seeing the portrait of the other and his own portrait.

In a very sensitive context, we have to be clear. We are in favour of a solution in which two countries, Israel and Palestine would live peacefully within safe and internationally recognized borders. All the bilateral peace projects (Clinton/Taba, Ayalon/Nusseibeh, Geneva Agreements) are converging into the same direction. We can be optimistic."

JR's website
JR on Artsy.net

21:59 - By Unknown 0

#JAN 25, BY NORMA JEANE

Norma Jeane created an interactive installation, which was filled with a block of coloured tri-tone plastecine. The piece of work was named #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17… (2011). This was taken from popular twitter hash tags, which was used in relation to the mutinies going on in the area at that certain time of disagreements. The work was made to reference the recent Egyptian political unrest, and to remind people that sometimes they have the power to cooperatively form and guide their governmental surroundings. Norma Jeane’s work was the most interactive and captivating the publics’ attention.

Jeane is an anonymous artist or group of artists engrossed in dissolving the authority of the individual artist. The piece began as a tri-tone representing the Egyptian flag 3D block of plasticine positioned in the centre of a plain white box room in the Central Pavilion. Throughout the course of the Biennale, visitors were allowed to take apart the block and create something far from what it started out to be, they were also allowed to take some of the plastecine from the exhibition, which is not usually a regular occurrence. It was very lively and playful work that brought together all generations and creeds. Four months after the public opening, the 3D flag had been reduced to heaps of distorted clumps, with every inch of the walls covered in graffiti.

22:22 - By Unknown 0

ALWAYS SHAMELESS, BY EUGENIO MERINO

“Always Shameless” is the culmination of a project Merino began in 2011 with Always Franco, a life sized sculpture of uniformed Spanish dictator Francisco Franco preserved in a Coca Cola refrigerator. The Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco, an organization dedicated to preserving Franco’s legacy, quickly sued the artist over the sculpture as well as for a second sculpture the artist created of the dictator. Merino went to trial twice to defend his freedom of speech and won both cases.

Despite the legal setbacks, the artist has continued his series of sculptures of political figures for the exhibition. The title of the show “Always Shameless” is a play on the 1993 Coca Cola slogan “Always”. Merging the political nature of the artist’s sculptures with the branding of a universally recognized product brings these ultimately dark and poignant works into the more accessible forum of popular culture.

Merino’s work undoubtably reflects his struggle as a politically active and controversial artist. Speaking directly to the issues of manipulation and control throughout the 21st century, his works challenge the artistic and social limits his subjects have set upon their respective societies. Their legacies have been preserved simply through our participation in keeping their reigns alive;“it seams incredible that General Franco is still oppressing artists in Spain from beyond the grave”(Jonathan Jones, The Guardian).

Eugenio Merino's website

18:09 - By Unknown 0

OUR SILENCES, BY JOSÉ RIVELINO

Our Silences, created by Mexican sculptor Rivelino, is composed of a row of ten massive bronze figures, whose mouths are shut and silenced with a metal plate. The object of the art is to provoke thought, feeling and discussion about freedom of speech. One wonders if the small prison-like black box nearby contains a political prisoner, or someone’s trembling, innermost thoughts.
José Rivelino's website

17:50 - By Unknown 0

DO WOMEN HAVE TO BE NAKED..., BY GUERRILLA GIRLS

Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality in the fine arts into focus within the greater community. Members are known for the gorilla masks they wear to remain anonymous. They wear the masks to conceal their identity because they believed that their identity is not what matters as GG1 explains in an interview "...mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work.". Also, their identity is hidden to protect themselves from the backlash of prominent individuals within the art community.

21:22 - By Unknown 0

RAISE UP, BY HANK WILLIS THOMAS

Provocative conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas uses photo-based imagery to address issues of race and identity through the vernacular of advertising and popular culture. He will discuss the impact of photography on his work and ways the medium has influenced his most recent projects.
Artist's website

22:55 - By Unknown 0