As the Tate Modern celebrated its 10th Anniversary, art activists from the group Liberate Tate released balloons carrying oil-soaked fake birds and dead fish in protest of the museums ties to British Petroleum. With the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico reaching its 1 month point today and still gushing, this action couldn’t have more appropriate timing.

Liberate Tate distributed a communiqué throughout the museum during the opening promising addition actions to ‘free art from oil’ until the Tate ends its ties with BP. The group stated, “Every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade. We call on Tate to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies. As a public institution the Tate’s Trustees, chaired as they are by an ex-CEO of BP, must abandon its association with BP. All visitors to the Tate must be able to enjoy great art with a clear conscience about the impact of the museum on society and the environment.”

According to Indymedia UK, “the Tate staff [had] burst some of the oil bubble-like black balloons by climbing onto a high gantry, but many remained out of reach and the rotting fish and sea birds hovered above the evening’s celebrations headlined by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. Rumours circulated that Tate would commission a marksman to shoot the remaining balloons down from the top of the former power station.”

For more information on Liberate Tate, visit Art Not Oil, follow them here, or contact them to get involved.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)

Last week giant plastic six-pack rings strangled public sculptures around Vancouver. Initiated by the Plastic Pollution Coalition and developed by Vancouver-based ad agency Rethink, this stunt presented downtown commuters with visual protests against the mass consumption of single-use plastic.

“Nearly every plastic item ever created still exists, and has harmful effects on the environment, wildlife, and humans,” says Manuel Maqueda of the PPC. “Patches of plastic pollution currently cover millions of square miles of ocean in the North Pacific and North Atlantic. In the environment, plastic breaks down into smaller and smaller particles that are ingested by wildlife and contaminate our food chain.”

According to Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, “…every second of every day in the United States, thousand people buy and open up a plastic bottle of commercially produced water, and every second of every day in the United States, a thousand plastic bottles are thrown away. Eighty-five million bottles a day. More than thirty billion bottles a year at a cost to consumers of tens of billions of dollars.” To put this into a more visual perspective, enough plastic bottles are discarded in the US alone every week to go around the planet 5 times.

Gasping at these atrocious numbers and digesting the Environmental Working Group’s discovery that we are all becoming full of the toxic chemicals from plastic we discard everyday, I’m hoping demonstrations like this and others continue littering the urban landscape. It should become common sense that there is no “away” in “throwaway,” especially when it comes to plastic. A plague of public protests refusing this disposable lifestyle needs to spread in every shape, size and manifestation until the masses realize the truths of what these objects and actions are mirroring. Then together we can expose the recycling myth, create solutions, and demand that businesses take responsibility for the end life of their products.

In echoing Tiana Uitto (author of Plastic Manners and coconspirator of this stunt), “We want to make a call to eliminate single-use plastics from the face of the planet” and “embrace a culture of sustainability.”

Visit The Province for local coverage of the protest. For more information on the harmful effects of plastic pollution and ways to become a part of the solution, visit Plastic Pollution Coalition’s site.

Protesters against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the West Bank barrier wall take a more theatrical approach in Bil’in. On February 12, 5 Israeli, Palestinian and international demonstrators dressed as James Cameron-style Avatars marched towards the barrier, which has absorbed approximately 60% of this Palestinian village’s farmland, and were, per usual, met with tear gas and sound bombs. Though sporting blue painted bodies, pointy ears and long tails didn’t seem to faze the Israeli Defense Force, the tactics generated more media attention than usual for this weekly action.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared the barrier a violation of international law, and the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that sections of it imposed “undue hardships on Palestinians and should be re-routed.” 3 weeks ago Israel began reconstruction of the wall returning 30% of the land it previously confiscated. Though this sparked celebration, demonstrators and maybe even occasional ‘Avatars’ will continue their weekly action demanding justice and the return of all illegally confiscated West Bank lands as they’ve done for the past 5 years.

The first video I saw documenting this reenactment (edited with music and footage from the Cameron’s Avatar film) seemed to overdramatize and simplify the situation. The occupation and strategic seizure of Palestinian land is dramatic enough without music from a mainstream epic. I eventually found footage sans cinematic soundtrack, which helped me view the theatrics more objectively. While the demonstrators’ analogies may be quite blatant (the Israelis being the imperialist colonizers and the Palestinians the indigenous Na’vi), incorporating global pop culture into their weekly performance boosts morale of participants and generates more coverage for Bil’in.

With no freedom of movement, most people in the West Bank have no way to go to the cinema. Luckily Mohammed Khatib, one of the village organizers, scored a bootleg copy, which was used for costume reference and inspiration to enhance the demonstration. Once again, tear gas canisters, which have injured and even killed other weekly protesters here, were shot directly at the crowd in violation of IDF firing regulations. I don’t think millions of tickets will sell for this real drama. However, if you want front row seats, the villagers of Bil’in welcome you any and every Friday.

Photo from bilin-village.org.

(written for and originally published on artthreat.net)