Everybody stops what they are doing and keep on reading, this will be worthwhile.
I would like to draw your attention to some amazing educational projects that focus on using the performing arts as a tool to teach literacy and also provide children and young adults with expressive confidence. GETheatre is behind this initiative that has now been running for a few years worldwide.
But there is a catch, for these workshops to happen, they need your support. The one that requires an injection of cash as soon as possible is the project that will be based in Zanzibar later this year.
Go to the Rocket Hub website to generously fund this project or use the panel below. Any donations would be appreciated.
GETheatre has been working in Zanzibar since 2006, providing secondary school students with intensive English literacy training workshops using devised theatre techniques.
Typically programs run for two weeks at each school and involve facilitating a group of 20 – 25 students through dramatic activities towards devising a performance. Read more about what GETheatre is doing across the globe.
We have also included below a video where Jennifer Holmes and John Socas talk about the Zanzibar project
Creativity is something to promote whenever you can, quirkiness is always something that will please the eye and mind of someone looking for something different. Takeshi Mazdakes is certainly one of these artists pushing the boundaries and being after something unique. He might just be achieving this with his exhibition ‘This is England 2010’. Continue reading This is England 2010: quirkiness on Bayswater road→
We are always happy to see people dedicated to bringing art into communities that typically remain miles away from it for various reasons, such as poverty.
So when we heard about this project, called “Pachuca Paints Itself”, in central Mexico by an artists’ collective known as the German Crew, we had to feature it on Art-Pie.
Click on the pictures to enlarge
Hundreds of houses painted
The collective spent 14 months turning the steep hillside area of Las Palmitas into something a colossal and very much alive mural. It was an incredible effort to change people’s perception of a neighbourhood previously seen as rather gloomy and rough – art at its best, art to its best use.
“We have painted 209 houses. Every color represents the soul of the neighborhood. It has been a community effort as each household has participated in some way,” said project director Enrique Gomez, who goes by MYBE.
MYBE is a reformed and tattooed gang member who is now focusing all his attention on graffiti art and muralism.
The project in numbers –
– 209 house painted
– 5,000 gallons (20,000 litres) of paint used
– More than 16,000 square feet (1,500 square meters) of murals covered
Even better, we hear that thanks to the huge success of this project, another impoverished area called Cubitos, is next to be painted happy.
Untitled Nude, (c)2011 Shireen Qureshi, oil and charcoal on canvas
I recently interviewed London artist Shireen Qureshi for This ‘Me’ of Mine. Her ‘Untitled Nude’ is a compelling expression of the struggle in the violence of existence; of being flesh and bone. We discussed an interesting point of the Deleuzian ‘event’…
Jane Boyer: Deleuze suggests we are an event; meaning that out of a chaos in which conditions have come together to form a ‘one’ or have passed through ‘a screen’ which allows something rather than nothing to happen.[1] There is a sense of ‘event’ in your tableaus and the figures are that ‘event’, as if we are witnessing the coalescing of a self, how do you see this? Do you feel the passage of time is relevant to the self?
Shireen Qureshi: It is interesting that you suggest that we are witnessing the coalescing of a self in my work because in my mind I am more interested in breaking down the body, of rupturing boundaries. I often initiate a painting by making it look real and then trying to break it down, by overlapping bodies or breaking apart skin and bone, I suppose in that sense the aim for me is towards chaos rather than from it. But I think that this is a very interesting idea, especially the sense of an ‘event’ you describe in my work, forcing my viewers into the role of witness. I think that if the paintings have created any sense of inescapable drama pinning both my figures and viewers in place, then this is an achievement in itself. From my point of view, the passage of time is interesting because it is within a space of time that metamorphosis and transformation can occur. I would like to create a sense of movement, an undulation within each of my paintings as if they were bubbles of captured space and time. I think that time is inescapably relevant to the self because it is within time that a self is built or deconstructed, subjected to the violence of existence, and within which the self moves, inevitably, towards death.
Fall, (c)2010 Shireen Qureshi, oil on canvas
Whether we think much about it or not, we live every moment of our existence with the thought of our extinction – every one of us could cease to exist at any moment. This latent threat is one aspect of the ‘violence of existence’ mentioned by Shireen. From her point of view the violence exists in the visceral reality of living in flesh and bone, a violence we understand first hand. Often through serious illness or accident, the loss of loved ones or violent personal threat we realize the fragility of our existence and the latent threat of our extinction become a conscious reality. Once aware of this imminence our sense of self undoubtedly alters; we become a self with limited time.
The visual breakdown of bodies, flesh and bone is an interesting interpretation of this psychological awareness of our mortality. The ambiguity of whether the bodies in Shireen’s paintings are coalescing or breaking down is indicative of the struggle in the moment of ‘difference’ described by Deleuze, and as such, is also the ‘violence of existence’ Shireen speaks of. Deleuze said, “Indifference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate…in which everything is dissolved – but also the white nothingness, the…calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows. The indeterminate is completely indifferent, but such floating determinations are no less indifferent to each other. Is difference intermediate between these two extremes [the undifferentiated and the determinate]? Or is it not rather the only extreme, the only moment of presence and precision?”
Hand in Hair, (c)2010 Shireen Qureshi, oil on canvas
He continued, “There is cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of the struggle against an elusive adversary, in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot distinguish itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it.”[2]
Living is difference; it is the precision of presence. Living with the imminence of our extinction is the violent struggle of divorcing that which continues to espouse us; a struggle “within which the self moves, inevitably, towards death,” as Shireen says.
Read more of our interview, ‘Straight from the Nerves’ on the This ‘Me’ of Mine blogsite.
John Stezaker once said of Collage that it “is a yearning for a lost world and reflects a universal sense of loss”. Those sentiments are certainly reflected in the work of artist and radical feminist Linder Sterling (also known as Linder).
In her series Pretty Girls, Linder reacted to visual world she occupied, a society of inequality and the gender specific rhetoric. Linder used the magazines of the late 70’s and 80’s as her painters brush. Splicing images of naked women from pornography, and kitchen appliances from those awful home improvement catalogues, she created a curious and slightly disturbing, yet telling depiction on the representation of women of the time.
Looking back at these images from the 70’s and the post punk era it’s amazing how contemporary they feel. Is this due to the inherent nature of collage and it’s yearning for a lost world (as Stezaker put it). Or is it that in a time when we are bombarded with imagery on a daily basis that more and more contemporary artists and looking back in time in an attempt to decipher it all?
This show looks closer at some of the magazine’s most iconic art coverage over the years
We all know what the Dazed and Confused folks are all about so expect heads turning and debates flowing in
Matters of controversy have never been an issue at Dazed, choosing rather to dare to divide than conform to the masses. This is nowhere as obvious than in our art coverage over the years. says Felicity Shaw
‘Make It Up As We Go Along’ is at the Somerset House until January 29, 2012.
Voina, a russian art collective, is making people to talk about them again. They have done crazy things in the past such as hurling live cats at McDonalds workers, engaging in a full-on orgy in a state museum, and shoplifting a raw chicken from a store by hiding it in one member’s vagina!
Their members got in all sort of problems of course with some being put in jail but they are now recognized by the establishment, VOINA has indeed just received one of the highest honors for contemporary art in their country Russia.
Dick in FSB Captivity is why they got this award. The artwork is a 210-foot outline of a penis on a drawbridge facing the the headquarters of the state security services, yes the KGB. When the drawbridge raises, the penis appeared to become erect – genius.
Bansky takes a keen interest in VOINA and gave a large amount of cash earlier this year to get two members of the collective out of custody.
PimpArtworks cutting edge Acrylic artworks come complete with backlit neon Lighting.
The customised LED lighting has 8 changeable neon lighting effects via a RGB controller, including a rainbow effect which gradually cycles through all the electrifying colours.
Set it to your preference or let it cycle. Whatever option it will back light your artwork & wall in style.
These are limited. Once they are gone, they are gone…
Animated GIFs have been around for ages, they really have. Who has not seen those crazy ones of animals or people where a short action is captured and play in loop… forever. This was before.
Today there are many artists that are taking animated GIFs to the next level. There are even contests and awards for it. One of those is the 2014 Saatchi Art’s Motion Photography Prize.
