Cold as I.C.E.

Art Collective Indecline and cartoonist Rob Rogers writ large.


Bay Area Protests Trump’s Child Detention Policy with Billboard and Projection
Hyperallergic
by Benjamin Sutton
June 21, 2018

A clandestine modification of a junk removal billboard and a nighttime projection of a political cartoon called out the president’s family separation policy.

Is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) advertising its brutal practice of separating migrant families? If you were driving along Interstate 80 in California’s East Bay last night or early this morning, you might have seen what appeared to be a billboard for ICE flaunting its inhumane expertise — “We make kids disappear” — alongside the Munchian image of a shocked and screaming child.

The ignoble advertisement is in fact the work of satiric and shadowy public art collective Indecline, whose members scaled the billboard (which formerly promoted 1-800-Got-Junk?’s ability to “make junk disappear”) in the night and transformed it into a provocative indictment of ICE. At the time this article was published, a spokesperson for Indecline said that the modified billboard was still in place.

Read more here.

Trials & Tribulations for Russian Art Collective Voina

Voina Art Collective Donates Banksy”™s Money to Political Prisoners
by DJ Pangburn
Death + Taxes
March 28, 2011

When Voina Collective members were imprisoned for a prank involving overturning police cars, Banksy donated money for the cause. Voina then paid some of the money forward to other political prisoners.

Guerrilla art pranksters Voina are holding firm in their belief that high-concept, high-risk tactics are necessary, especially in a place as given to authoritarian tendencies as Russia.

When we last looked into the group in December, members Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev had been imprisoned for a stunt in which several Moscow police cars were overturned. Banksy heard of their beatings and imprisonment, and donated $130,000 to the group from a print sale, then paid their bail of $10,600. Once released, they were followed and beaten by mysterious men who claimed to be police.

An unknown percentage of the sum donated by Banksy was then donated to Voina”™s political prisoner friends, according to the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. According to the Voina website, one of Vorotnikov”™s cellmates, Old Man Serioga, was released on March 26th.

Read the rest of this article at Death+Taxes.