In 2015, artist 2Fik organized a demonstration of over a dozen men in Corpus Christi, Texas, who donned high heels and marched around an public square. To cross-dress safely in public is a luxury few can afford, and here 2Fik makes use of the privilege held by outwardly masculine men. This was a societal transgression…

As many immigrants and refugees flee from the violence, poverty, or oppressive governments of their home countries, they run into barriers that make gaining entry into other countries very difficult. Strict border security and xenophobia block immigrants from entry and make them feel unwelcome. The NSK acts as a different kind of nation by being…

First appearing on cheaply-printed pieces of paper around Manhattan, Jenny Holzer’s Truisms offered small one-liners to whoever would read them. Quotes like “CATEGORIZING FEAR IS CALMING,” and “BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS,” the type of general world observations, thought provokers, and life recommendations that  Holzer wrote. This piece had no grand intention other than…

What place does full-throated disagreement have in our everyday lives? Or, rather, how much space should we create for it? We are, of course, allowed to find and build supportive communities of like-minded individuals, but consensus does not sharpen political opinions. Tania Bruguera realized this when she planted actors at a liberal political panel for…

In 2016, Black Lives Matter expanded the democratic potential of occupation as a protest strategy by making it an active exercise in democratic world-building. Operating within the legacy of 2011’s Occupy Wall Street, BLM activists held a park in downtown Manhattan for two weeks with a list of demands that ultimately called for the abolition…

Conflict Kitchen uses the comforting power of food to catalyze productive conversation between community members about topics they may find uncomfortable. When diners have a meal at Conflict Kitchen they are not only enjoying food from a particular cultural heritage, but also entering a discursive space of geopolitical debate. Conflict Kitchen is a mobile restaurant,…

By relocating the biennial from the first-world to the third-world, the Ghetto Biennale deployed the productive force of antagonism to confront the one-sided flow of art from the third- to the first-world. In 2009, Artist André Eugène and curator Leah Gordon founded a biennale in the Grand Rue neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti that revealed the…

By making interventions directly into public space, public sculpture can be used strategically to call into question the very nature of that space. More specifically, how that space might fail its public. Oscar Tuazon’s contribution to Skulptur Projekte Munster in 2017 considers this question by drawing attention to the stark absence of a basic human…

Over the course of a 41-day occupation, a group of Chicago residents built a world where freedom was not managed, negotiated, nor defined by the police. Rather, their world was governed entirely by those unqualified to rule–the people themselves. Freedom Square was born when the #LetUsBreathe Collective occupied a vacant lot across from Homan Square,…

From 1970-1973, Adrian Piper performed seven pieces that constituted her Catalysis Series. Piper would go about her daily life and break into these public performances where she would display appalling or repulsive behavior in order to disrupt the social norms of whatever location she was in. Her goal was to shock the unsuspecting audience and…