This essay was originally published in the journal (Un)usual Business vol.1.  View/Download the issue. Resisting Enclosure through Creative Commoning in Kanaleneiland Lively District: With the development of the renewal area Kanaleneiland aims to transform the currently rundown outdoor area into a high-quality, vibrant metropolitan area. Additionally, a substantial and varied program will be...

Recently the US Congress passed a healthcare bill to repeal and replace Obamacare with one of the most disturbingly elitist, barbarian and almost Palaeozoic pieces of legislation I’ve ever heard of. Americans in New York are horrified and the average person isn’t sure what else to do these days but...

After fleeing Syria, a nation badly bloodied by civil war, refugees are finding themselves trapped in migratory limbo for long stretches of time as they await placement in foreign, and often unwelcoming, lands. Of the staggering 4.9 million displaced Syrians currently residing in refugee camps, nearly half are children. Syrian...

During his performance for a group of students in New York in April, Saudi musician Diya Azzony prompted the audience to ask him questions about anything from his musical technique to his life story to his politics. This open exchange was exactly what Azzony hoped to facilitate during his four-day...

Berry Berry. Sometimes fictions function to produce memory. And the genius and beauty of Barry Jenkins’s 2016 film Moonlight is not in its being presumably a universal story to which we all can relate. It is in this: that attention to the depth of emotion in the film can prompt in viewers our own search for such histories, such emotions, such...

A review of  Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience by Ezra Berkeley Nepon. 2014. ISBN-13: 9780692595350. E. Nepon. 154 pages. Buy the book.  Dazzle Camouflage: Spectacular Theatrical Strategies for Resistance and Resilience is the type of book you want to buy multiple copies of and give to your friends so you all can talk about it. It’s funny, accessible,...

A review of Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Generation I came out to my friends as an impulsive, drain-chain-wearing sixteen-year-old. I knew little about the Gay Liberation movement or the queer community. Instead, I met a cute punk on a Toronto streetcar and felt a familiar stab of desire in my gut. When he casually...

A review of  The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Co-creation (Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice) by Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz. 2014. ISBN: 0822354780. Duke University Press Books. 328 pages. Buy the book.  The Fierce Urgency of Now has a unique structure: a long prelude followed by an introduction, six chapters, and a coda....

Suzy Lake is among the first female artists in Canada to adopt performance, video, and photography to explore the politics of gender, the body, and identity. In her artistic practice, which spans nearly 50 years, Lake addresses the individual’s relationship to societal forces that break and reveal constructions or restraints built into our culture. As part of the 2017 ArtsEverywhere...

Tomson Highway (Cree/Dene) enjoys an international career as playwright, novelist, and pianist/songwriter, widely known for his plays The Rez Sisters, Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing, Rose, Ernestine Sushwap Gets Her Trout, and the best-selling novel Kiss of the Fur Queen. In this performance lecture at the Free Home University in Lecce, Italy, Tomson demonstrates how language shapes us and our...

Durban, South Africa, July 16, 2016 This year, London-based artist, archivist, and curator Ajamu and New York and Los Angeles-based artist, educator, and organizer Pato Hebert collaborated on a series of activities at the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. On 16 July, 2016 they gave an illustrated plenary at the MSMGF’s “Action + Access” Pre-Conference for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with...

The Guelph Lecture—On Being Canadian continues to broaden the scope and number of voices that promote and foster public dialogue on, and greater understanding of, ideas and issues of concern to Canadians. Each year the Guelph Lecture brings together a cast of some the most innovative, imaginative, and inspiring thinkers and performers who engage audience members with an array of...

“I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice. Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.” —Gloria Anzaldúa[1] In her essay “The Mask: Colonialism, Memory, Trauma...

This article originally appeared in Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10.3 (2012): 51-81. It is reprinted by permission of the author and the Journal for Critical Animal Studies. A Queer Vegan Manifesto  [Sexual object choice] is more like vegetarianism than homosexuality. —David Halperin In his article “History of Male Homosexuality,”...

This graphic novella was commissioned by ArtsEverywhere and Lanchonete.org to document the Queer City Project during the International Queer Film Festival in November 2016 in São Paulo, Brazil. While taking part in the Queer City events and finding a lack of Lesbians involved, a humorous idea emerged of the complexity...

In a capitalist world, a homeless person is a paradigm of the pariah, an individual seen as an outcast of the system. In a capitalist world, the pariah is a dissonant existence. In all senses and for good. At the margins of everyone and everything. His indigence degrades the idea...

Controversy engulfed the Whitney Biennial recently over the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket”, an abstract painting that depicts the violently mutilated body of Emmett Till who was murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955 after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. On April 10,...

Today, more than thirty cultural institutions and human rights organizations around the world, including international arts, curators’ and critics’ associations, organizations protecting free speech rights, as well as U.S. based performance, arts and creative freedom organizations and alliances, issued a joint statement opposing United States President Donald J. Trump’s immigration...

the dove’s collar a star abandoned on the roof and a winding alley leading to the port This sea is mine This sea air is mine —Mahmoud Darwish1   In Palestine, the impossibility of artistic freedom and the denial of freedom to move within one’s own country conspire as an...

Even as the relationship between the fields of arts, culture and human rights becomes more defined, the global community of organizations, networks and civil society initiatives working at that intersection, advocating for artists and defending free expression remains a relatively small, tight-knit group. However, despite existing connectivity, there is a...