Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention

Wish we could attend this CONTRAvention in London this week:  (from their website)

Cultural Hijack, London

Exhibition – Live-programme – CONTRAvention

Image Archive – Reading Room

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Rethinking Intervention

Cultural Hijack presents a survey of provocative interventions which have inserted themselves into the world, demanding our attention, interrupting everyday life, hijacking, trespassing, agitating and teasing. Often unannounced and usually anonymous, these works have appropriated media channels, hacked into live TV and radio broadcasts, detourned billboards, re-appropriated street furniture, subverted signs, monuments and civic architectures, exposed corporations and tax loopholes, and revealed the absurdities of bureaucratic behaviours.

Zevs (FR), Ztohoven (CZ), Krzysztof Wodiczko (PL), Matthias Wermke & Mischa Leinkauf (DE), Voina (RU), Upper Space (UK), Gregory Sholette (US), Michael Rakowitz (US), Platform (UK), Ben Parry (UK) & Peter McCaughey (IE), Tatzu Nishi (JP), Renzo Martens (NL), Knit the City (UK), Peter Kennard (UK), Laura Keeble (UK), Allan Kaprow (US), John Jordan (UK), Tushar Joag (IN), International Peripatetic Sculptors Society (UK+), Space Hijackers (UK), Paul Harfleet (UK), EPOS 257 (CZ), Electronic Disturbance Theater (US), Nina Edge (UK), Alan Dunn (UK), Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (UK+), Paolo Cirio (IT), Leah Borromeo & Dr. D (UK), BGL (CA) 

The exhibition positions itself at the intersection between art, politics and social justice in an historical moment, as we witness a rising tide of global resistance to neoliberal capitalism through an expanding ‘movement of movements’, from Zapatismo to the Arab Spring, from alternative G8 summits to Occupy Wall Street. In the shadows of this moment, artists are joining in the writing of alternative histories, the reclamation of our rights to the city and the unfinished project of the revolution of everyday life.

In attempting to house these ideas together in an institution, we are mindful of the Architectural Association as an influential zone, where the physical future of Architecture and Urbanism is significantly shaped. We propose that the dissemination of the ideas and practices gathered for Cultural Hijack, might similarly shape the possibilities for us to occupy as yet unimagined futures, where user-generated cities and systems, that support individual and collective empowerment, become more prevalent.

Do small acts of resistance and creative disruption, build muscle that encourages an appetite for real alternatives to neoliberal capitalism or do they end point and sate such an appetite? And what of ‘commissioned resistance’, is it implicitly flawed, sponsored by the system it seeks to critique, or can it, despite its origins, have impact?

These questions & more, as well as yours, will be picked over in the CONTRAvention: 24^th - 26^th April 2013.

Police crackdown on toy doll “protestors” in Russia

Via The Guardian

"In our opinion, this is still an unsanctioned public event," says the deputy Chief of Police. (Photo: Sergey Teplyakov/vkontakte)

Perhaps Obama’s buddy Rahm should send an attaché to Siberia to take notes:

Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: “I’m for clean elections” and “A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin”.

Police refer to the dolls as the opposition’s “new technologies,” examining their details and writing down the text of each placard . . .  Read more about creative measures adopted by activists in Russia.

UPDATE 1/28/12

Photos and more backstory on boingboing.net (Photo: RFE-RL)

Photos and more backstory on boingboing.net, from RIA Novosti.

More: MSNBC News, Radio Free Europe, Independent (UK).

The Art of Demonstration: Exhibit Explores Emergence of Online Protests

Via Spiegel Online:

Spiegel Online: "A new art exhibition in Frankfurt draws connections between demonstrations past and present. In the case of Egyptian artist Aalam Wassef, it studies how online activism has transformed protesting and become a work of art in itself -- but one that can cost people their lives."

One of the exhibition’s premises is that humanity is in the midst of a new, global protest movement similar to those of the late 1960s. Nothing will be the way it was before, it posits, because too many things are happening and in too many places, including Spain, Greece, London, New York and Russia. And then, of course, there are also the uprisings in the Arab world, the so-called Arab Spring that has cost thousands their lives.

The article in Spiegel Online speaks with artist Aalam Wassef, and looks at the role of online protest:

• Studying How Protests Usher in New Orders
• No Longer about Left or Right
• Virtual Protests, Real-World Dangers
• Online Protest as Art
• Persevering Despite the Perils

It also mentions the work of Russian radical art collective Voina, who set fire to an armored paddy wagon on New Year’s Eve, an action titled Fuck Prometheus that the group declared was “not art,” but rather “beyond art.”

"In this 2007, action, a Voina artist tossed a cat across the counter of a Moscow McDonald's outlet. Voina founder Oleg Vorotnikov said at the time that the cat-tossing performance had been designed to shake up service staff stuck in their work routine." Spiegel Online (Photo: Reuters)

More Voina:

• Overturning a police car:  photos and story, which involves a toddler as well
• Russian establishment tries to co-opt Voina (is it working?)
• Russian Protesters Use Art as Act of War: “Can they truly call their protests art?”