Art and Democracy

The Silence=Death Project was started at the height of the AIDS crisis as a consciousness – raising group. This group was the work of a six person collective in New York City, who collectively felt that the stigma surrounding the disease was causing even more deaths, and that the government was not doing enough to…

On February 11th, 1978, 2,000 people departed on foot from San Francisco to traverse the United States in order to arrive in Washington D.C. Organized by the American Indian Movement (AIM), this protest march, called the Longest Walk, opposed bills presented to Congress that would stifle Native American rights. The marchers aimed not only to…

On October 21, 1967, thousands of antiwar activists gathered in Washington DC to storm the pentagon as a way to protest the war in Vietnam. Among these protestors was Jan Rose Kasmir, a high school student who had spontaneously joined the march. In the face of many soldiers armed with shiny weapons, Kasmir reached out…

Photographer Danial Shah is reconstructing Pakistan’s narrative by choosing to photograph scenes of the country that shed light on its beauty and richness. No country should ever be reduced to one narrative, but when a place like Pakistan is faced with so much violence and controversy, it can be difficult to illuminate the layers beneath…

Artist Sujatro Ghosh is using his camera to question the protection of women in India. In a country that provides greater protection for its cows than for its women, Ghosh starkly draws attention to these lopsided policies through his unnerving photographs. After obtaining a cow mask during a trip to New York and returning to…

On August 28th, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in Washington D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where protestors called for equal civil and economic rights for African Americans. Among the leaders and speakers of the march were many talented musicians, including Joan Baez. Once at the Lincoln Memorial, Baez led…

Nowadays, it seems like everything is commodified – from the products we buy to the omnipresent commercial media we consume. In Thomas Hirschhorn’s Too Too-Much Much, the impact of this constant consumption is visualized. Thomas Hirschhorn filled a space in the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens to the brim with material products. Soda cans, computers, couches, mannequins –…

Finding a plastic water bottle or soda can littered about has somehow become part of the beach-going experience. The trash seems normal to us – just another example of human disregard for the planet. So, what happens when these pieces of trash are taken from the beach, and put into an art-world setting? With his…

Gillian Wearing is sick of facades. In her piece Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say, Wearing exposes divides between outer appearance and inner thought, rebuking public performance of the idealized self. In her piece, Wearing asked strangers on the streets…

Liam Gillick’s A Game of War (Terrain) calls attention to the impersonal brutality of war, and disrupting its seemingly normal presence in our brutalist culture. According to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Serralves, A Game of War is based on a commercialized war game inspired by “military theory and the European campaigns of Napoleon.”…