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It's Friday and many vernissages tonight. Check out Seismopolite Art Map! to see what is happening on your art scene this weekend!

Here are the cities represented in our growing Art Map!

Bangkok Art Map

Bergen Art Map

Hong Kong Art Map

Istanbul Art Map

Sao Paulo Art Map

Oslo Art Map

Mexico City Art Map

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Nov. 15, 2011

Last night NYPD evicted OccupyWallStreet protesters from Zuccotti Park

– Why is the international media only mentioning these protests once in a while to tell us that “the police has taken care of it”?

– Why did today’s eviction happen at 4 am in the morning? While the rest of the society where sleeping and could not see what Bloomberg and his men were doing...?

- And why were press members not allowed in and arrested...?!?

Here is an example of what happened when the press tried to cover the eviction: 

Occupy Wall Street 'Media Blackout': Journalists Arrested, Roughed Up, Blocked From Covering Clearing

Check out the ever growing movement on Twitter: OccupyWallStreet

We all deserve better than nations run like businesses to serve personal and corporate profit!

Fight over Zuccotti Park moves to NY Supreme Court - hearing at 11:30 Today November 15.

Seismopolite supports the Occupy Movement!

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November 15, 2011

Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair

Open November 24- 27

Video Cube program have been shortlisted and curated by Irmak and Ceren Arkman from the Kurye Video Organization team to form three separate screenings.

Contemporary Istanbul 

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  Nov 15, 2011

Solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

AND AND AND / Event 10 

New York

AND AND AND is an artist run initiative, which will use the time between now and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 to consider with individuals and groups across the world the role art and culture can play today and the constituent publics or communities which could be addressed. The series of interventions, situations, and occurrences entitled AND AND AND are part of dOCUMENTA (13) and will compose a map of emergent positions, concerns, and possible points of solidarity.

For the tenth event, AND AND AND returns to the United States in solidarity with the Occupation of Wall Street.

As a part of their effort to interrogate and diversify the mode of communication of the dOCUMENTA (13) press office, AND AND AND has asked d(13) to send the following letter written October 4, 2011 and addressed to the General Assembly and Affinity Groups of Occupy Wall Street.

October 4, 2011

To the General Assembly and Affinity Groups of Occupy Wall Street,
14 months ago, a group based in New York, on Beaver Street, a few
blocks south of your occupation sought inspiration and new cultural
forms by visiting the US Social Forum. This trip into one of the
nodes of contemporary social movements was not just symbolic.
Pulsing through this journey to Detroit, a site which encapsulates
the apocalypse and abandonment awaiting anyone who believes
capitalism and our planet can both survive this crisis, was a
question which asked where does and how can art reside within
social movements.
2011 has brought us into a new era and we have tried to look around
us. Those who believed that change will only come from without have
been shown that even those working inside this machine are ready to
revolt. How better to understand phenomena such as Wikileaks and
all of those who have risked their lives to reveal that at many
scales, the systems we inhabit are corrupt. Then the revolutions in
Tunisia and Egypt were a call that we have truly entered another
epoch. And those who stand against the emancipatory struggles
resisting a global mafia, that has sought to privatize and
financialize everything from our homes to the wheat in our bread,
stand against history.
Left to a previous era are the suicides of 'martyrdom' operations
which revealed their impotency (in confronting racism, poverty,
inequality and new enclosures) by only emboldening a worldwide
security state, armed and ready to build new walls and designate
any resistance to its rule as terrorism. This era has brought us
the convergence of bodies that fight not in the name of any
afterlife, but for life here and now. What else could one expect
when the basic subsistence of millions is daily exposed to the fate
of a senseless pseudo-market, which has become the playpen of
bloated vampires who go by names like 'hedge fund manager'
'billionaire investor' or 'chief executive officer.’
Those same vampires have held up an untenable equation to us:
Privatize gains yet socialize losses.
A revolutionary wild fire has spread from Libya, Syria, Bahrain,
Yemen, Jordan, Occupied Palestine, even to Israel. The sparks have
spread to Portugal, Greece, Spain, back to Greece again and to the
streets of London. Now they have landed in yet another one of the
capitals of capital, maybe THE symbolic capital of this financial
mafia, Wall Street. In all of these sites, we have heard different
variations of ENOUGH.
And you have put a number to this: ‘the 1%.’
You have used every means available to find a language to utter
these words in a process that gives potential meaning to democracy.
As opposed to the false oppositions between parties who vie for the
power to govern how the ship should sink or the train should crash:
you are asking to stop the train or bring the ship to shore. We
need to change our coordinates: the numbers don’t add up, and the
equations seem to always miss the most elemental of things.
Your lack of demands acknowledges the multiplicity of demands and
commands that our imaginaries yield to daily. Your lack of demands
leaves space for a discussion to emerge and for ideas to grow
through a common time. Your lack of demands refuse to recognize
that there is anyone manning the ship other than abstract
algorithms and economic laws which miraculously always seem to
benefit only the 1%.
Thus your hand-made placards, your communiqués, and pamphlets are
not simply a call to a sovereign pleading for new privileges,
rights or protections. They are beacons of hope, of love, of
refusal, of solidarity, poetry for a multitude to construct a
common space in one of the centers of Empire and to rethink what a
common horizon could become. Our forests, our water, our air, our
soil, our seas are our commons. Our labor, our ideas, our words,
our relations are our commons. These cannot belong either to a
state or to private enterprise, as they cannot be contained by any
border nor controlled by any single entity; they are the basic
components of life. Yet, what we have been asked to accept as our
common destiny has been toxic debt and toxic waste.
Joseph Beuys once claimed that everyone is an artist. And Robert
Filliou once asserted that art is that which makes life more
interesting than art. In these and many other terms, we can
understand you as artists. But we would like to add another
proposition to these statements: art can also be that burst of
creation which does not properly belong inside the domain in which
it first emerges. And though we are clear that, what you and the
millions behind you and with you, from Tunis to Cairo from Athens
to Madrid, are doing is politics; we also see these actions as a
deterritorialization of the politics we knew over these last
decades.
We have heard of efforts to bring artists to Wall Street in the
name of an Occupenial. While we support all efforts to bring
attention and legitimate your undertaking, we believe that we must
not miss this opportunity to recognize the artists and artistry
within this emergent movement. Art is not outside or separate from
this movement, it is taking place each day you persist to build
this common space/time.
We should not abandon or overlook what this moment of history calls
from us. We don't need recognizable artistic names to add
legitimacy to this movement, we need the multitudes, the whatever
singularities, the dark matter, the hackers, the day laborers, the
'service providers', the precariat, the cognitariat, the
caretakers, the general intelligence that is and has been
cultivated across multiple virtual, material and invisible
networks- to translate their specific know-how and know-what into
political action.
How to translate this massive collective and common intelligence
into political action? This has been a critical question of this
young century. The nascent processes taking shape globally, which
you are a part of, are an attempt at an answer. The art that
aspires to become political, especially in moments of upheaval,
must have the capacity, awareness and grace to become
imperceptible, become part of a movement.
In a lecture on February 22, 1969 Michel Foucault, concluded his
remarks on the ‘Author Function’ by speculating that at the very
moment when our society would be in the process of changing, the
author function would disappear, and invoking Samuel Beckett,
concluded by asking “What difference does it make who is speaking?”
Today anonymity calls us out of a tyranny of naming, which runs the
risk of subsuming every political action or statement into
someone’s property or a spectacular game for attention. And all of
you, who have anonymously and collectively plastered with texts and
occupied the streets of Tunis, Athens, Madrid, Cairo, London, New
York and beyond have introduced a new game to politics. No authors
for this movement and no leaders. And whatever new rules belong to
this game remain to be explored. Certainly, the old tricks of
trying to subsume or reduce molecular processes to individuals or
parties will have no place here.
This is not solely a game of appearances, but also of consequences.
And the most significant political actors as well as artists of
this new century recognize this fact. The fate of a planet and all
forms of life and culture which inhabit it, hang in the balance.
We remain inspired by your ability to spread across continents and
build up the consistency of a new socio-cultural-political
movement. And if politics has an aesthetics then you are the
aestheticians of an emergent politics. And thus, a potent
contributor to an emergent force not only in the politics, but also
the political art of this new century.
In solidarity and singularity and multiplicity,
and … and … and …

Date: Occupation Began September 17, 2011 – ongoing
Country: U.S.A.
City: New York

AND AND AND