HI GENTLEMAN, BY ROZHGAR MUSTAFA

A Kurdish artist who lives in Sulaimani where she graduated from the university of fine arts in 2004, she teaches art in secondary school.

In her own words, Rozhgar Mustafa describes this artwork: "I used to produce my own bra when I was a teenager, because I couldn’t deal with my adulthood, my relatives told me that it is impossible to go out and play with my friends as because I passed my age twelve. Therefore I was thinking of hiding my breast to appear like a boy, and I usually had my hair cut by my brother as exactly as a boy for next four years. Since I had passed that period I always found myself under an extremely difficult social and political condition, which takes a decision based on my gender, from then I have been demanding the position of being a girl or a boy."

Rozhgar Mustafa's website.

13:25 - By Unknown 0

REFUGEE STREET STUDIO PROJECT, BY ALEXIA WEBSTER

The ‘Refugee Street Studio’ project involves creating photographic portrait studios on the streets of refugee and IDP camps around the world. We invite anyone to come have their family and individual portraits taken. The portraits are then printed on site for free with a portable photo printer for people to take home for their family album.

In March 2014 I began the first ‘Refugee Street Studio’ in the Bulengo IDP camp just outside of the city of Goma in the D.R. Congo. The camp has over 50 000 residents who have fled fighting and violence in the north eastern regions of the country.

Refugee camps are spaces of uncertainty and transience. Many people arrive in the camps, deeply traumatized, having lost not only their homes but also most of their possessions, including family photographs, when they escaped the violence. Exiled from ones home, facing an uncertain future and a lost past, a family photo can be a powerful and precious object which can help support a sense of connectedness and belonging. Over 700 people took part in the Bulengo Studios and received their own printed photograph to take way with them. Many arrived dressed up for the occasion with their children or loved ones and patiently waited for their portraits.

Alexia's Webster's website

19:07 - By Unknown 0

FOLLOW HIM, BY WANG QINGSONG

Follow Him (2010) and Follow You (2013) take their title from the popular English-language-teaching program introduced by China State Television (CCTV) in 1982. These were the early days of economic reconstruction, and many Chinese citizens glimpsed the Western lifestyle through the program— how Westerners ate, dressed, and lived. During the 1980s, Qingsong explains, ‘The English teaching TV program’s significance went far beyond learning English. It helped Chinese people learn about the West and the world, just after China emerged from its closed-door policy.’ Mischievously critiquing China’s development and perhaps the Western discourse of development itself, Qingsong constructed a huge blackboard on which he scribbled Chinese and English slogans with words mainly taken from China-based English-training textbooks and manuals.

Follow Him speaks of the issue of education in China. Things are taught but not learnt, according to Qingsong. Facts are transferred by teachers and regurgitated by pupils and many people fail to understand the real meaning of things. Qingsong’s work depicts a vast amount of discarded textbooks, placing a lonely figure in the middle overcome by the material.

Wang Qingsong's website

14:11 - By Unknown 0

SPOTS OF TIME, BY ROB JOHANNESMA

2013 / Refugees, Spots Of Time

The tension between the desire for radical change and the seeming intransigence of certain institutions that led artist Johannesma to create Spots of Time (2013). The work is a multichannel digital slide show that presents a compilation of newspaper pages and photographs from 2008 to the present that capture this phenomenon. As re-photographed by the artist multiple times and transferred to a different medium, each image guides our view beyond its immediate take as news to a more abstract reading of information. Although the language of the archive might seem incompatible with the spectacular nature of revolutions, Johannesma uses his role as an artist who understands and appreciates the complexities of image-making to create a compendium of the architecture, the objects, and the issues of freedom and citizenship embroiled in such occurrences. His conservation of moments of these ongoing struggles stands as an example of what playwright Bertolt Brecht called ermattungstaktik (‘tactics of attrition’), and the creative efforts of imagination and dedication, through which, however short the duration, the challenges of this world will eventually give way.

Clare Butcher

Rob Johannesma's website

10:00 - By Unknown 0

LIKE EVERY DAY LIFE, BY SHADI GHADIRIAN

Challenging the international preconceptions of women’s roles within an Islamic state, Tehran-based artist Shadi Ghadirian’s photographs draw from her own experiences as a modern woman living within the ancient codes of Shariah law. Her images describe a positive and holistic female identity, humorously taking issue with the traditional roles by which women – both in the Middle East and universally – have been defined.

The title of Ghadirian’s Like Everyday Series refers both to the materials she uses in her photos and the derogatory social perceptions that women regularly face. Her cast of crudely rendered women cleverly reinvents the sources of negative stereotyping as attributes of empowerment. A grater-faced wife, the dreaded prototype of mother-in-law jokes everywhere, radiates a steely and abrasive determination.

Replacing the expected monotone of the black chador with vibrantly patterned fabrics, each portrait suggests a vivacious individuality and character, belying the limitations of stereotype. Similarly, the mundane objects, when transformed into faces, become highly poised and charismatic caricatures, embodying individual personalities.

(Saatchi Gallery, London)

Shadi Ghadirian's website

09:00 - By Enrique Veganzones 0

THE TWO FRIDAS, BY LAS YEGUAS DEL APOCALIPSIS

In 1987, Pedro Lemebel co-founded with Francisco Casas the collective Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse), an arts performance group. The group performed in exhibitions and cultural events reaching its intended audience through actions that ranged from performance arts, video, installation, transvestism and photography. Many of their performances challenged the heteronormative social paradigms of gender and sex and invited individuals to reflect on the plight of minorities repressed under Pinochet and then further stigmatized with by the advent by AIDS.

The Two Fridas is the transvestite scenography of the painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo "The Two Fridas" (1939). In this reenactment, the setting of the members of the art group is reversed compared to the original painting. The artist on the right wears a typical Mexican dress and his heart is closed, whereas the one on the left wears a Victorian dress and has an open heart. They have bare torsos and oil paint on the skin, holding hands and connected through a blood catheter, just the way it is depicted in Frida Kahlo's painting.

Website

19:08 - 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

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

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

HUMANAE, BY ANGÉLICA DASS

Humanæ is a work in progress, who intends to deploy a chromatic range of the different human skin colors. There is no previous selection of participants and there are no classifications relating to nationality, gender, social class or religion. This taxonomy adopts the format of the PANTONE® Guide. The presentation of the range of color shades induce the viewer to reflect on one of the dual meanings containing the word identity: that associated with equality. Humanae is a color catalog in which the “primary” colors have exactly the same importance as “mixed”.

humanae.tumblr.com

11:56 - By Unknown 0

WHOLE IN THE WALL, BY HALED JARRAR

Inspired by everyday events and experiences, Jarrar’s practice incorporates performance, video, photography and sculpture to document his observations on life in an occupied Palestine. The restrictions imposed on him and his fellow citizens have become the catalyst and subject of his occasionally satirical artistic output.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is an installation which will see Jarrar construct an imposing concrete wall extending along the length of the gallery; confronting the viewer immediately upon entering the space. In order to pass through the wall visitors will have to clamber through a hole shaped like Palestine - an allegory for the process endured by people crossing the apartheid wall in the West Bank in order to reach their homes in Palestine.

Alongside this installation, Jarrar will show a series of video works and new and recent concrete sculptures based on sporting paraphernalia: footballs, volleyballs, basketballs and ping pong rackets. These are formed from materials secretly chiseled by the artist from the separation wall. By making reference to the footballs left by the wall by children who use the area as a site for their games, and by repurposing this found material, Jarrar seeks to provoke a dialogue about possession and reclamation.

22:36 - By Unknown 0

SHIRIN NESHAT

"People should be free to choose what they want to do with their lives, what they want to wear, what religion they want to believe in; this is not something a government or a community should impose" (Shirin Neshat).

Shirin Neshat's TED talk "Art in Exile".

18:09 - By Unknown 0

COLOUR ME, BY BERNI SEARLE

The series 'Colour Me' is a play on the racial classification 'coloured' under apartheid legislation, a contentious term which is heavily debated in post-apartheid politics, particularly in the Western Cape. In the work, I chose to cover myself with various colors - red, yellow, white, brown, in an attempt to resist any definition of identity which is static, or can be placed into neat categories. Placing myself or my body in the work, exposes other aspects of my identity, for example, gender. Exposing myself therefore involves a process of claiming and points to the idea that there are a range of axis that inform identity which are inter-connected, determining relationships of dependency and domination in any given context.
Berni Searle's website

17:51 - By Unknown 3