Proud to be featured as one of “12 Women Breaking New Ground in the Arts”

Photo: Bret Hartman

Proud to be featured as one of “12 women breaking new ground in the arts”, together with a bunch of brave and inspirational artists we are happy to call friends.

Meet 12 women breaking new ground in the arts on the TEDFellows blog -- photographed by Bret Hartman during TEDSummit in Banff, Canada; with words by Karen Eng. Thank you, two insanely talented people.

From the article:

"I believe it is time for an empathy revolution. A global movement calling for respect, equality, dignity, and justice, with art as a catalyst,” says Buhrer Tavanier. “Many human rights workers today struggle to translate formidable issues into a language that makes people care, and compels them to act. Mere facts and statistics don’t do the trick, neither do reports or statements on their own. Art, however, can create a visceral response. Art can make the distant feel personal."

- Yana

Photo: Bret Hartman

The deadly legacy of cluster bombs - Laura Boushnak’s new TED talk

We are so proud: Fine Acts collaborator Laura Boushnak's powerful talk about the horrid aftermath of cluster bombs is live on TED.com.

In this talk, Laura shares haunting photos of cluster bomb survivors and asks those who still produce and condone the use of these weapons, including the United States, to abandon them.

One photo from Laura’s featured Survivor series is part of Fine Acts' first collection, PEACE: Mohammed’s prosthetic legs lay on the sofa at his home in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rashidiyeh, in Tyre, southern Lebanon.

Survivor is a photographic exhibition that focuses on cluster bombs a world problem, as these munitions keep destroying and hurting whole communities for generations to come. Laura Boushnak has been photographing Mohammed for 10 years, following his transition from a child to a young man, his life increasingly becoming harder. 

Mohammed lost both legs when he was sitting behind his father on a motorbike and drove over a cluster bomb near Tyre in the last week of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war. Handicap International says children make up 24% of casualties, and Mohammed is one of many cluster bomb survivor children across the world.

Yana

Helping those seeking safety

We are committed to taking action to help those seeking safety. Our Fine Acts projects are still in development, but in the meantime here are some links to action and charity groups working to provide aid. You can support their work through donations, fundraising and volunteering. And do let us know if you have links we can add. 

• CalAid
  The CalAid group collects donations for those living in the Calais refugee camps.
• STAR
  STAR (Student Action for Refugees) is a national charity of 12,000 students welcoming refugees to the UK through volunteering, campaigning, fundraising and education.
• Refugee Action
  Refugee Action runs various fundraising events to support their activities including providing legal advice to migrants forced into homelessness, finding accommodation for asylum seekers living on the streets and giving advice on the possibilities for returning home.
• Refugee Council
  The Refugee Council offers practical support and advice to refugees and asylum seekers throughout their journey in the UK.
• Oxfam
  Oxfam has launched an appeal to help the millions of people fleeing their homes around the world.
• Save the Children
  Save the Children has a dedicated Syria appeal to help the many children affected there and across the Middle East by the war in Syria.
• Migrant Offshore Aid Station
  MOAS (the Migrant Offshore Aid Station) is a registered foundation dedicated to preventing loss of life at sea by providing professional search and rescue assistance to people who find themselves in distress on high sea or trapped on unsafe vessels.
• #HelpCalais Amazon wish list
  The #HelpCalais campaign is a trans-European project seeking to provide temporary shelter, clothing and support to refugees making the journey to western Europe. The Amazon wishlist provides an opportunity for supporters to buy the goods that refugees and charities need.

Tech Insider features Fine Acts: “This Bulgarian human rights activist gave one of the most chilling TED Talks of all time”

Yana recently gave a talk at the 2016 TED Fellows Retreat in California. Photo: TED

Tech Insider just published a great article about Yana, her story and what we at Fine Acts are trying to do.

From the article:

"I believe we are only alive through others," Tavanier says. [...] "We have a voice only if we help others speak, [...] and our power is measured not by how many people you crush, but by how many we are able to lift and carry on our shoulders."

- Julie

Stories of The Future from the Cartagena Data Festival

The Future is an artwork by Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem which is part of our PEACE collection. For three days in April 2015 we displayed it in Salon Fray Tomas del Toro in the beautiful Casa 1537 in Cartagena, Columbia, as part of the Cartagena Data Festival.

The Cartagena Data Festival is a meeting of around 400 International actors in the development sector who have convened to discuss how to continue to activate the "data revolution" for good.

Everyone in the development community needs to comprehend what data do exist and what do not. It is evident that effective representation and visualisation of data will play a key role in helping to solve some of our global issues. Whether it is through direct statistic-driven provocation or more subtle techniques, the use of data in engaging people can be very powerful.

The Future comprises 206 lightbulbs, each of which represents a sovereign state. If the lightbulb is on, the country is at peace. he artists decided which countries were at peace based on data from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) and warsintheworld.com. 

Showing The Future at Cartagena Data Festival (for international development folks) highlighted that data is disputable (surprised?). A number of people questioned why their country was not lit up, they were sure that they were at peace - one in particular, a government advisor was certain her country was not in conflict.

So, what does 'at peace' mean in this context? Many internally peaceful countries have soldiers in other countries; it turns out that Luxembourg has troops in Afghanistan.

What also became clear from the audience was that some data was not up-to-date, or was supplied by an uninformed or biased source. Our online reputations are as good as the last thing posted about us, whether we are a country or a person.

We wish to thank the Overseas Development Initiative and the Open Data Institute for enabling us to host The Future in Cartegena.

Julie

S wins the most used letter prize - Installing The Future

During the construction of The Future we laid out all the bulbs in alphabetical order, inadvertently creating our own country name data visualisation!

The only letter missing is W (we think the Web should be a country of it's own to fill this gap), and by far the most popular first letter for a country name is S. Who knew?

Julie

The Future heads to Cartagena, Columbia

We are delighted to announce that one of our first commissions The Future by Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem is being shown at the opening of the Cartagena Data Festival in Columbia.

The work is being shown as part of the Open Data Institute's Data as Culture program which commissioned and exhibits art that *uses data as an art material and/or subject for artistic*research.

Supported by the Overseas Development Initiative, Alicia and I will attend the event and show her work alongside my recent work We Need Us (requires Chrome or Firefox).

We're both excited to be heading to the Carribean sea-side to talk data and art with an amazingly diverse international crowd. We've even spotted a fellow TED fellow in the mix - Jon Gosier.

Julie

Stop. Think. Write. Postcards from Ferguson

Our first collection is called Peace. We wanted to pick a subject that resonates with all of us in many ways. We've curated existing works and new works, Postcards from Ferguson is a mix of the two.

Jon Lowenstein is a photographer that has been taking photographs to document the extreme racial inequality in Ferguson, Missouri, USA. His work depicts the frustration and anger of the community. A community not only unprotected by the police force but actively under attack.

These postcards are a call to action - a request for everyone to take a minute to think about racial issues, to write something down, and to send it to someone that matters.

Here, a memory from long ago reminds the writer that despite on-going and frequent protests over the years, we are still in the same place.

Something needs to change.

More on Postcards from Ferguson on Medium

Julie

The Future

One of the first Fine Acts commissions debuts at TED 2015 in Vancouver! It looks great, Yana and I are delighted, although the future isn't as bright as we may think...

Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem's work examines our perception of global peace. Starting with the question "how many countries are not on conflict right now?" the artists discovered that we can't agree on the number of countries on our planet, let alone objectively determine which are at peace.

Read an interview with Alicia on the TED Fellows blog.

Read more about both artists and the work.

Many thanks the the TED Fellows team for helping to make this happen.

Julie 

Fine Acts launches at TED 2015

Tom Rielly, TED Fellows Director, talks about the initiative on stage.

Beginning as a series of inspired conversations at TED 2014, Fine Acts launched at TED 2015.

One year later we have brought together over 20 TED Fellow artists and activists to collaborate on thought-provoking works. We have two commissioned pieces here at TED: The Future (by Alicia Eggert and Safwat Saleem), and Postcards from Ferguson (by Jon Lowenstein). Seven more works are displayed on the designated Fine Acts digital screen. All this would not have been possible without the generosity and passion of the incredible TEDFellows community.

Yana