The Cuban government has returned artist Tania Bruguera’s passport, having held it for the past six months.  Despite its return, the artist has expressed her desire to remain in the country.  “My argument has never been about leaving Cuba; my argument is about working so there is freedom of expression and public protest in Cuba,” she says.  “People should feel free to say what they think without fear of losing their jobs or university standing, of being marginalized or imprisoned.” (more…)

Ai Weiwei has opened a series of new exhibitions in Beijing, signaling a relaxation of the capital’s ban on the showing the artist, while foreign travel is still off limits.  “The decision-making process is opaque. I can only speculate that the authorities realize that they have created a situation that, sooner or later, has to be resolved,” says John Tancock, a longtime collaborator of Ai’s and an adviser to Chambers Fine Art. (more…)

The New York Times travels to the Havana Biennial this week, and notes the arrest of artist Tania Bruguera during the event, following the artist’s live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, an event that cast something of a pall over the first Biennial legally accessible to American visitors. (more…)

A group of cleaners protesting Sotheby’s low sick pay rates have been suspended from their posts, following their public demonstration during the auction house’s London sales last week.  “[A service rep] stopped them at the entrance and said ‘give me your passes, you’re no longer welcome at Sotheby’s – we’ve been instructed by Sotheby’s to not allow you on site’” says Petros Elia, the cleaner’s union general secretary. “Our argument is that Sotheby’s is massively, extremely wealthy company. Contractual sick-pay is not a crazy thing.” (more…)

Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner, the central installation at the artist’s recently opening Versailles Palace commission, has been vandalized with spray paint.  The work has already commanded harsh criticism for its subject matter and relationship to French history.  “It was lightly sprayed with paint,” says the estate management.  “The work is being cleaned.” (more…)

Climate change activists have concluded a 25-hour long protest against the Tate Modern’s sponsorship by British Petroleum, writing messages and critics on the Turbine Hall floor after facing down a potential use of police force that was not acted upon.  “It’s a back-down,” says Liberate Tate member and writer Mel Evans. “Maybe it’s a sign of how much the groundswell of public opinion has shifted that the Tate doesn’t feel like they can shut down this discussion.”

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Iranian artist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for her works depicting national politicians as monkeys and goats as protest over plans to outlaw voluntary sterilisation and restrict access to contraception.  “Atena Farghadani has effectively been punished for her cartoons with a sentence that is itself a gross caricature of justice,” says Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director for  Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa. (more…)

Last night’s Party in the Garden at MoMA was marked by vocal protests from museum staff, following museum proposals to reduce health care coverage during ongoing contract negotiations.  “A lot of us here are professionals,” says Luke Baker, an architecture and design curatorial assistant. “We’ve got master’s degrees. You know, we’re here for the long haul. We really want to make sure that working here, and giving as much as we give to the museum, that this is a tenable position for us and that we’re able to stay here.” (more…)

The retrospective of Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s work, previously pulled from Mexico City’ s Museo Jumex this past year, has found a new home at Palermo’s Museo Zac.  “Everybody who knows me, knows that I am an animal protector,” says Nitsch, responding to accusations of animal cruelty that some feel were responsible for closing the show.  “From my point of view, factory farming is the biggest crime in our society.”   (more…)

At the entrance to the Biennale’s Central Pavilion, via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

The Central Pavilion in Venice’s Giardini is the second site for All the World’s Futures, the main curatorial project around which the Biennale centers itself.  Featuring another series of artists spread out inside the exhibition space’s remarkable white facade, the exhibition continues its investigation of debris and late capitalism through a more playful, yet equally critical set of works from its counterpart at the Arsenale. (more…)

Tania Brugera is one of the 2015 Herb Alpert Award recipients this year, but is unable to attend the awards ceremony, due to the revocation of her passport by the Cuban government.  “The Alpert Award could not come at a better moment,” the artist wrote in a statement to the organization. “The Cuban government does not like my artworks because I’m proposing that our relationship with politics is one where the script is not written for us, but is something we create with responsibility and honesty out of the desire to engage in our political destiny.” (more…)

A protest last Friday over labor rights at its Abu Dhabi construction site led the Guggenheim Museum to close early last Friday.  Protestors threw pamphlets over the museum’s iconic spiraling walkway, and unfurled a banner saying “Meet Workers’ Demands Now” on the ground floor, forcing the museum to shut its doors. “We share their concerns about worker welfare in the Gulf Region, but these kinds of disruptive activities run counter to our objective of building the cooperation and good will necessary to further change on an extremely complex geopolitical issue,” the museum said in a statement. (more…)

The Financial Times profiles Iranian artist Shirin Neshat as she prepares to open a career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and Baku, Azerbaijan.  “As an Iranian in exile, she has always been very articulate about the idea of a condition of diaspora and, with that, the complexity of feeling connected to a culture, but living outside it,” says Director Melissa Chiu. “It’s a very personal approach to history, through Shirin’s own eyes.” (more…)

The soon-to-open new home of the Whitney Museum was the site of a protest last night, which sought to illuminate the museum’s location above a massive fossil fuel pipeline and vault operated by Spectra Energy.  “Today we are asking: How can a museum that literally covers up the dirty fossil fuel industry be a beacon for the future of art and culture?” an open letter from the protesters read. (more…)

Glenn Ligon, Come Out #5 (2014)

Regen Projects is presenting its fourth exhibition with Glenn Ligon, the prominent New York-based artist who has established himself as one of the strongest voices in American contemporary art.  Well, it’s bye-bye/If you call that gone, featuring three bodies of work, adopts its title from the lyrics of the blues song “What’s the Matter Now”, projecting Ligon’s interest in text as a mode of expression and an agent of collective identity. (more…)

Barbara Kruger Untitled (Business as usual) (1987), all images courtesy of Skarstedt Gallery

On view in London’s Skarstedt Gallery is an exhibition of early large-scale, black and white photographic works from artist Barbara Kruger, early entries in Kruger’s ongoing project to challenge the visual language and power structures of consumerist culture and print advertising, always under the understanding that her works will themselves enter the marketplace as commodities.

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Charles Atlas, Terri’s Option (2015), all images are by Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Luhring Augustine is currently presenting The Waning of Justice, the gallery’s second collaboration with the pioneer video and sound artist Charles Atlas, following 2012’s The Illusion of Democracy at the gallery’s Bushwick location.  One of the foremost experimentalists in multimedia, Atlas has pushed the limits of time-based art arguably more than any other artist, challenging the ephemeral natures of both performance and dance incorporated alongside his video work. In doing so, Atlas, not a performer himself per se, has collaborated with legendary names such as Leigh Bowery, Douglas Dunn, Michael Clark and most famously Merce Cunningham, whose partnership with Atlas resulted in video documentations of the late artist’s illustrious performances at levels that adopt further conceptual and contextual levels through Atlas’s frame. (more…)

Banksy recently traveled to the war-torn Gaza Strip, where the artist has created a new series of works, documented on his website.  Pieces include an immense kitten drawn on the wall of a demolished building, and a crying figure inside the doorway of another leveled site, both documented in a video made during the artist’s time in Palestine.   (more…)

A banner placed in an Oscar Murillo installation was forcibly removed by a museum security guard at the Centro Cultural Daoiz y Velarde in Madrid this week.  The sign, which Murillo had taken from protestors against the museum’s high price tag and public funding, was installed in a work playing on the intersection of aesthetics and protest, and was eventually placed back on view after the artist complained.  “This is a work in motion,” the artist said. “What I do depends on the things happening around me.” (more…)

A group of artists including Tomma Abts, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Anish Kapoor, and Jeremy Deller have issued a statement condemning Cuba’s treatment of artist Tania Bruguera, following her performance several weeks ago in Havana.  “In her work Tania Bruguera frequently addresses issues embedded in Cuba’s social, political and economic history. But her aim is not a question of direct political action but to open our eyes to the injustices and social issues in the world and to expose the mechanisms of power and protocol that shape human behavior,” the letter reads. (more…)

Following her arrest over a performance in Havana, Tania Bruguera has claimed that Cuban authorities are closely following her every movement.  “I can move around Havana, but I have a car following me everywhere I go,” the artist tells the Miami New Times. “I know they are listening to my calls, because recently, during a phone conversation with a friend, I mentioned I was going to pass out fliers that the government might find alarming. Then, 20 minutes later, a government blogger wrote, ‘Tania is on her way to distribute inflammatory leaflets here.'”  (more…)

A group of protestors, working under the name Liberate Tate, showered the Tate Britain with fake pound notes this weekend, continuing the series of protests over the museum’s British Petroleum sponsorship.  “It’s time for the arts to draw a line,” says one protestor.  “Oil companies are a whole category of unacceptable partners for public arts, like tobacco and arms companies.”  (more…)

Employees at The National Gallery in London have planned a five day strike in response to the museum’s privatization of their positions, which union general secretary Mark Serwotka claims “risks damaging the worldwide reputation of what is one of the U.K.’s greatest cultural assets.” (more…)

The recent arrest of artist Tania Bruguera after her performance in Cuba has raised a number of questions regarding the freedom of artists in the country, the New York Times reports.  “You never know how far you can go,” says well-known novelist Leonardo Padura.  “Sometimes it seems as if spaces open and then close again.” (more…)