Dedicated to critical cultural production at the intersection of art and activism.

As the College Art Association conference descends on Los Angeles, our friends at the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest have teamed up with The Public School and Telic to provide a roster full of luminaries you won’t find on the CAA bill. If you’re in LA this weekend, it’s an event not to be missed!

FRIDAY 5:00pm-?
5-6* Michael Gerald Bauer (from Los Angeles) – Vagabondism
5-7 Scott Rigby (from Basekamp Philadelphia) – Plausible Artworlds
6-8 Olga Kopenkina (from Belorusia by way of New York City)- Reading Lenin with
Corporations
7-9 Dara Greenwald (from New York State)- Love It or Leave It
8:00* Screening of Short Films (45 mins)
9:00* Screening of Tarnation (90 mins)
10-? Q&A with Jonathan Caouette, Director

according to schedule.
SATURDAY 11:00-6:00
11-12 Sarah Lewison (from rural Illinois)- Rural China and Land Laws
12-1 Angie Waller (from LA?)- The most Boring Place in the World
12-2 Making Something out of Something
1-3 Al Larsen & Charles Roderick (from Buffalo and Denver) – DIY
3-5 Abigail Satinsky (from Chicago) – InCUBATE
4-6 Alan Moore (from New York City)- Alternative Spaces and Social Centers
*The starred events are not as flexible regarding times. We will try to start these

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Copenhagen-based Learning Site is a platform for exchange and dialogue between people from different disciplines, practices and backgrounds who have a common interest in learning. Their projects pay attention to local conditions, environment, resources and economies, emphasizing the act, process, and activity of learning.

Above is their Poster Dwelling; Land, Market and Economy (2008), an installation for the 48°C Public.Art.Ecology festival in Delhi, India, this past December.

Poster Dwelling sits atop the state-owned Palika Bazar public underground market, a site scheduled for renovation for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. Apropos of the site selection, the installation raises issues of labor, access to land and knowledge, ecology, politics and power in all their complexity.

[The Dwelling] has been developed in relation to issues suggested by the spaces and social activity related to the Palika Bazaar market, the economic zoning system and the green city plan for Delhi, 2008.

Juxtaposing orthodox economics with cultural interpretations of markets to expose their messy implementation, Learning Site highlights the distance between “real markets” and the “ideology of the Market” and explores its relevance for the environment.

The Dwelling is constructed from recycled paper from Delhi’s “office zone,” and its surface is covered with images and texts concerning the tension between work, land and economy, and the role of markets in social and cultural organization.

More pictures are available from the Learning Site.

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Is culture jamming, the new Jihad?  Princess Hijab answers a resounding “Yes!” with her self-described visual terrorism: hijabizing advertisements in her resident Paris.

Princess Hijab knows that L’Oréal and Dark&Lovely have been killing her little by little.

Since 2006, the Princess has modified commercial visual language with spray paint and black marker pen, clothing Western, scantily-clad and underfed female models in the hijab.  The French reaction to the wearing of headscarves has stirred controversy, and has been at the center of much human rights debate in recent years.  Such xenophobia inspires her work, and is the source of her desire to reclaim the garment:

Princess Hijab will go on, veiled and alone, forever asserting her physical and mental integrity. By day, she wears a white veil, symbol of purity. By night, her black veil is the expression of her vengeful fight for a cause (custom ad).

Culture jamming has its critics, but never one like Princess Hijab, who accuses the practice of being ignorant of non-Western perspectives:

When she was a teen, she heard about movements such as Adbuster; but since 9/11, things have changed. She does not subvert images in an American way.

Her website, found at princesshijab.org contains her complete manifesto and samples of her work.

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Update: The press conference will be held on Sunday, 12:ooPM at Union Square South, not on Thursday, as indicated below.

This Thursday, Reverend Billy will announce his NYC mayoral candidacy.  The press conference is set for noontime, in Union Square, a site at the center of his Union Square Not For Sale campaign.  Details are forthcoming, but first mention of the possible run occurs in the above video – the January 18 edition of the weekly Hour of Power – at about 41:00.

Via Twitter, thanks Beka!

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Ongoing through April 30, 2009, Prison Nation: Posters on the Prison Industrial Complex is a production of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics that addresses many critical issues: the prison-industrial complex, the death penalty, Three Strikes, racism, privatization, torture, and re-entry into the community.

The exhibit is on display at California State University’s Kellogg Library, and is free and open to the public during library hours. Additionally, a Prison Nation panel presentation and discussion is scheduled for March 26, 2009.  Further details are available here.

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