Meet the Author:
Sidd Joag,  New York City, United States

On the morning of February 21, 2012, I woke up around 3AM, hands and feet shackled to a gurney at Bellevue Hospital in NYC. Blood was pounding in my brain, my vision blurred. I was surrounded by the nurses who had stitched me up while I was in and out of consciousness—six stitches across my forehead—and by two men wearing...

There’s fear in the air, pulsing through the fiberoptic veins of cyberspace. Uncertainty clings to every interaction, as restaurants, bars, cinemas and schools are shuttered in cities around the world and commerce comes to a grinding halt. On one hand, there are legitimate concerns about how families will feed their children and pay their rent. On the other, people are...

Halloween in Derry is no small affair and is considered by some to be the best in the world. What started as a local tradition—free punch for getting dressed up—was commodified into a carnivalesque crowd-pleaser. Inside the city center, cat faces and zombies flash by. A ragtag cover band of costumed misfits belts out “Boys of Summer.” A South Asian...

Chapter 1 – Holes in the Sky MYITKYINA, KACHIN STATE, NORTHERN MYANMAR The half-dozen works of art hanging on the bare wooden walls depict family scenes—they are painted in bold primary colors with rudimentary strokes. Human figures hover ghostlike above the ground. They have no faces, nor do they reveal any emotion. Outlined on canvas, they are cold, detached, lingering...

Recent conversations at ArtsEverywhere with artists and journalists evoke perceptions of an imminent future marked by a further eradication of spaces for constructive civil discourse and disagreement. As social media perpetuates cults of personality, viral hatreds escalate to violent targeting of marginalized or oppositional groups. As populism becomes the norm and dominant figures of influence flagrantly abuse their power with...

Text: Sidd Joag Video editing and camera: Karla Claudio-Betancourt Producer and director of video: Esteban Figueroa Additional footage: Saul Betancourt, Julio Fernandez A massive colonial figure made of steel and concrete lies twisted on its side, on a traffic island in the middle of a roundabout in Caguas. “It looks like a work of paper, not a work of metal,”...

http://curseofgeography.artseverywhere.ca The Curse of Geography is an on-going series of investigative reports focused on the relationship of geographic isolation or proximity on social justice, human rights and public policy in selected locations around the world. Our reports are produced in multi-media format and in partnership with artists, journalists, NGOs, academic and cultural institutions, and news outlets. In this fourth installment...

A week after the opening of Dispatches from the Ghost Ship at the Queens Museum in July, artist Jacob Cohen was approached by his employers who relayed a threat levied by the Department of Corrections (DOC). The exhibition included over 650 drawings made by Cohen in his over four years working on Rikers Island. Beyond the implicit threat to his...

In this time of blurred lines, several organisations around the world do wonderful work to combat censorship, enhance artistic freedom, and support artists in danger. Discover some of the extraordinary stories on the topic in this publication on art and freedom of expression. The text combines the voices of courageous artists and experienced human rights defenders with short, selected testimonies...

(Banner image: Chto Delat, Monument to the Century of Revolutions, 2017, installation at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. Photo credit: Dmitry Vilensky.) Over the past couple weeks (months… years…) I have found it impossible to escape a constant barrage of images. Children in cages, violent civil unrest, collapsing economies and societies, and the metastasizing of brash and unchecked fundamentalist thoughts and actions. From...