A landmark vote in the Dáil (National Assembly of Ireland) on Thursday July 12, 2018 means that Ireland is set to become the first country in the world to divest public money from fossil fuel assets
The Fossil Fuel Divestment Bill, introduced by independent TD Thomas Pringle, will force the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund to sell off its investments in the global fossil fuel industry. In June 2017 these stood at €318 million, across 150 companies.
“This means the Bill is both substantive and symbolic,” Mr Meehan said. “It will stop public moneyu being invested against the public interest, and it sends a clear signal, nationally and globally that action on the climate crisis needs to be accelerated urgently, starting with the phase out of fossil fuels.”
The Global Legal Action Network helped to draft the bill and Gerry Liston, one of its legal officers stressed the need for urgency, saying:
“Governments will not meet their obligations under the Paris Agreement if they continue to financially sustain the fossil fuel industry. Countries the world over must now urgently follow Ireland’s lead and divest from fossil fuels.”
Shirin Neshat is perhaps the most famous contemporary visual artist to emerge from Iran. Born in Qavin, one of the most religiouc cities in Iran, her work, predominantly in film and photography draws on her own experiences as an exile from Iran, to explore with great sensitivity Islam and gender relationships and the widening political rift between the West and the Middle East. ——————- Journalist Peter Bradshaw wrote of Neshat’s debut feature film "Women Without Men" in his 2010 film review in the Guardian:
"The Anglo-Iranian comic Shappi Khorsandi recently revealed that Jon Snow had told her about a conversation he had once had some years ago with the then prime minister, Tony Blair.
The premier had asked Snow, plaintively, why Iran hated the British so much. Snow replied hesitantly: "Well, you know, because of Mossadeq …" – that is, the left-leaning Iranian leader, toppled in 1953 by a coup instigated by the British and American governments because of his determination to nationalise oil. Blair replied blankly: "Who?"
Perhaps watching this excellent movie would be a way for Blair, and the rest of us, to brush up on British and Iranian history." ——————-
In this presentation, Neshat talks about her journey as an artist in exile, with particular reference to her feature film "Women Without Men"
"The story I’d like to share with you today its my challenge as an Iranian artist. as an Iranian woman artist. As an Iranian woman artist living in exile.
Well it has its pluses and minuses and the dark side, politics doesn’t seem to escape people like me. Every Iranian artist in one form or another is political. Politics has defined our lives.
If you’re living in Iran you’re facing censorship, harassment, arrest, torture, at times execution. If you’re living outside like me, you’re faced with a life in exile. the pain of the longing and the separation from your loved ones and your family.
Therefore we don’t find the moral and emotional, psychological and political space to distance ourselves from the reality of social responsibility.
Oddly enough, an artist such as myself finds themselves also in the position of being the voice. The speaker of my people, even if I have indeed no access to my own country. Also, people like myself, we’re fighting two battles in different grounds.
We’re being critical of the west, perception of the west about our identity, about the image that is constructed about us, about our women, about our politics, about our religion. We are there to take pride and insist on respect. At the same time we’re fighting another battle that is our regime, our government, our atrocious government who has done every crime in order to stay in power.
Our artists are at risk. We are in a position of danger. We pose a threat to the order of the government, but ironically this situation has empowered all of us because we are considered as artists central to the cultural political social discourse in Iran. We are there to inspire, to provoke, to mobilize, to bring hope for our people.
We are the reporters of our people and are communicators to the outside world. Art is our weapon. Culture is a form of resistance. “
Iranian Artist Shirin Neshat talks about life as an artist in exile, and her debut feature film: “Women Without Men”
“I envy sometimes the artists of the West, for their freedom of expression. For the fact that they can distance themselves from the question of politics. For the fact that they are only serving one audience, namely the Western culture
But also I worry about the West because often in this country, in this western world that we have, culture risks to be a form of entertainment.
Our people depend on our artists and culture is beyond communication.
My journey as an artist started from a very personal place. I did not start to make social commentaries about my country. The first one that you see in front of you is actually when I first returned to Iran after being separated for a good 12 years. It was after the Islamic revolution of 1979. While I was in absence from Iran, Islamic revolution had descended on Iran and entirely transformed the culture from Persian to Islamic culture.
I came mainly to be reunited with my family and to reconnect in a way that I found my place in society, but instead I found a country that was totally ideological and that I didn’t recognize anymore. More so I became very interested as I was facing my own personal dilemmas and questions I became immersed in the study of the Islamic revolution, how indeed it had incredibly transformed the lives of Iranian women. I found the subject of Iranian women immensely interesting in the way that the women of Iran historically seemed to embody the political transformation. So in a way, by studying a women, you can read the structure and ideology of the country.
So I made a group of work that at once faced my own personal questions in life and yet it brought my work into a larger discourse, the subject of martyrdom, the question of those who willingly stand in that intersection of love of god, faith but violence and crime and cruelty. For me this became incredibly important and yet I had a neutral position towards this.
I was an outsider who had come back to Iran to find my place, but I was not in a position to be critical of the government or the ideology of the Islamic revolution. This changed slowly as I found my voice and I discovered things that I didn’t know I would discover, so my art became slightly more critical, my knife became a little sharper, and I fell into a life in exile.
I am a nomadic artist. I work in Morocco, in Turkey, in Mexico. I go everywhere to make believe it’S Iran. Now I’m making films.
Last year I finished a film called "Women Without Men". Women without Men returns to history, but another part of our Iranian history. It goes to 1953 when American CIA exercise a coup and removed democratically elected Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh. The book is written by Iranian woman Shahrnush Parsipur’s , a magic realist novel. This book is banned and she spent 5 years in prison. my Obsession with this book and the reason I made this into a film is because it at once was addressing the question of being a female, traditionally, historically in Iran and the question of four women who are all looking for an ideal, a change, freedom and democracy.
While the country of Iran equally as another character also struggles for an idea of freedom and democracy and independence from the foreign intervention. I made this film because I felt it was important for it to speak to the westerner about our history as a country. All of you seem to remember Iran after the cultural revolution. Iran was once a secular society and we had democracy and this democracy was stolen from us by the American government, by the British government.
The film also talks to the Iranian people in asking them to return to their history and look at themselves before they were so Islamified. In the way we looked, in the way we played music, in the way had intellectual lives, and most of all, in the way that we fought for democracy. These are some of the shots I create for my film. This is some of the images of the coup and we made the film in Cassablanca, recreating all the shots.
This film tries to find a balance between telling a political story but also a feminine story. Being a visual artist indeed I am foremost interested to make art. To make art that transcends politics, religion, the question of feminism and become an important universal work of art.
The challenge I had was how to do that. How to tell a political story but an allegorical story. How to move you with your emotions but also to make your mind work. This is some of the images and the characters of the film.
Now comes the green movement, summer of 2009 as my film is released, uprising begins in Iran. What is unbelievably ironic is the period that we tried to depict in the film, the cry for democracy and social justice repeats itself now, again in Teheran. The green movement significantly inspired the world. It brought a lot of attention to all those Iranians who stand for basic human rights and struggle for democracy. What was most significant again for me was once again, the presence of the women. They are absolutely inspirational for me.
If in the Islamic Revolution the woman portrayed was submissive and didn’t have a voice, now we saw a new idea of feminism in the streets of Teheran. Women who were educated, forward thinking, non traditional, sexually open, fearless and seriously feminist. These women, and those young men united Iranians across the world, inside and outside.
I then discovered why I take so much inspiration from Iranian women: that under all circumstances they have pushed the boundaries, they confronted the authorities, they have broken every rule, in the smallest and the biggest way and once again they proved themselves.
I stand here today to say that Iranian women have found a new voice and their voice is giving me my voice and it is a great honour to be an Iranian woman and an Iranian artist, even if I have to operate in the west only, for now."
Bank holiday, an extra day off, a Royal Wedding, a Prince and a Princess… so much for people to watch on TV and in the news. Street parties and celebrations.
It would be difficult to find a better time to “slip a little something in for the weekend…” and rest assured very few people will notice…
Well then, how about a little inoffensive piece of legislation that will never do anyone any harm, like banning the use of herbal remedies. Who uses herbal remedies anyway? It’s a term that sounds so quaint and antiquated, like something you read on an old newspaper cutting in your great grandmother’s scrap book.
It’s the Twenty First Century now, we should all grow up and start behaving like Modern Adults. 21st Century Citizens and all that, and we all know that you don’t use “Herbal Remedies”.
You go to your Drug Store, Chemist or supermarket and buy proper medicine, created in pristine, clean laboratory conditions, with no nasty “natural” “dirty” bits that probably creep or crawl into anything not made in test tubes and glass bottles. We really have come a long way since people did things like that. Right?
Well don’t worry because all the kind, caring pharmaceutical companies and drugs manufacturers have been heroic enough to stand up for your health and mine, because they really care about us, and to stop the damage Herbal Remedies could do to us, they have just banned hundreds of them…
Now products have to meet “safety, quality and manufacturing standards, and come with information outlining possible side effects.”
This ruling puts as many obstacles as it can in the way of herbal remedy manufacturers, and even individuals wishing to use product directly from nature’s pharmacy. The big multi-national pharmaceutical companies have the resources to bypass these obstacles, but small and medium sized businesses will be forced to close.
Herbal remedies have been used by qualified practitioners for hundreds and even thousands of years, and the effects and side-effects of them have been observed and documented. They are part of the wisdom of mankind.
Yes, herbal remedies can have negative side effects if used incorrectly. When something does go wrong it is likely to hit the headlines and receive massive press coverage.
However, natural herbal remedies have far less negative effects than most of the “modern” synthetic un-natural drugs, and far less coverage is given to these negative effects. Billions of dollars of profit make it worthwhile for giant multinational pharmaceutical companies to lobby continuously to create a positive image for their products and to build a negative one of “natural remedies” which are not controlled by them, and therefore stand in the way of their profits.
What they do not publicise is that they are promoting many drugs which do huge amounts of damage, are often prescribed unnecessarily, and in most cases have only a few years of observed side-effects, run in their “clinical trials”, unlike many of the “herbal remedies” which have been studied for centuries by healers.
And yet this law or European Directive has been brought in because they suggest they are worried about the “side-effects” of “herbal remedies”.
Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s artwork “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle” was unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, by Mayor Boris Johnson on Monday 24th May 2010.
It is the first of the Fourth Plinth commissioned artworks to make specific reference to Lord Nelson, whose column dominates Trafalgar Square and to artistically explore the symbols associated with the square which commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar. It is also the first commissioned artwork by a black British artist to appear on the Fourth Plinth.
The sculpture is a scale replica (1/30) of HMS Victory, in a bottle measuring 4.7m long and 2.8m diameter. Its 37 fully rigged hand-stitched canvas sails are set as they were at the Battle of Trafalgar. The ship is minutely detailed, modelled in oak, hardwood and brass with miniature lifeboats and even 80 tiny cannon.
The artistic difference here is Shonibare’s use of traditional African print textiles instead of plain canvas. African print textile have been a key material in Shonibare’s work which explores Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Globalization and the ambiguity inherent in British history and its national identity.
These fabrics, versions of which are seen widely across Africa were inspired by traditional Indonesian batik designs which the Dutch East Indial Company discovered, mass-produced and sold to the colonies in West Africa.
‘The cloth is worn in Africa and bought in Brixton, but it’s actually Dutch Wax, made in Holland. The prints on the sails are mine, however, I had to redesign them in order to avoid any copyright issues by adding anchors and changing the pattern in small ways.’
—+—
Yinka Shonibare was nominated for the 2004 Turner Prize, and has a studio and gallery near London Fields.
“Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle” by Yinka Shonibare is on view on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square from May 24 2010 until the end of summer 2011.
Yinka Shonibar MBE: “Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle” – Trafalgar Square
an exclusive interview with Art21
“I want people to enter a secret world, a fantasy world. For me that’s what art means, it’s that world that you can enter that’s different from your everyday world.
All artists are kind of transgressive in a way. My job is to kind of make, or challenge if you like the Status Quo. Some people call it “thinking outside the box.”
My identity will always be central to how I am perceived and so that’s in a sense why I chose to sort of just look at it head on. When I came to Britain I learnt that being black meant that you were supposed to be somewhat inferior. I didn’t quite understand that concept at all.
But of course now I understand it better and the concept of colonialism and slavery. My work is a way of somehow thinking about that and thinking why… why has Africa been so held back, and also why are the people of African origin in Europe and America… why do they have such a raw deal?”
(Choosing materials for the sails):
“I certainly would like something like this… contrasted with something like that.”
“I want the formal strategy to be part of meaning of the work, so from using the textiles, the fabric, and what that actually means… You know they’re not just textiles they’re the sort of historical content there.
It then becomes difficult to separate what something looks like and what it expresses.
Art-making is a form of Alchemy in a way because you are trying to turn the mundane into gold. You’re really trying to make gold from nothing. I think that when it works very well is when you manage to turn the ordinary into the extra-ordinary, and that’s what keeps me doing art, because I keep chasing that, seeing how I could turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.
Environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai was born in Ihithe, a village in the Central Highlands of Kenya in 1940, where she began her education. She later studied as a boarder at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri, becoming fluent in English. Completing her education there with the highest grades in her class, she was granted admission to the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, Loreto Girls’ High School in Limuru.
She was one of about three hundred Kenyans chosen to study at American Universities, in September 1960 under a program funded by the then United States Senator, John F. Kennedy through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. This initiative was to become known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa.
She studied in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, where she first experienced environmental restoration as environmentalists in the city were pushing to end the city’s air pollution.
Having completed her studies in America, she returned to Kenya to a job as research assistant to a professor of zoology at University College of Nairobi.
She arrived to find her post had been given to somebody else, something she believes was because of gender and tribal bias.
After a job search of two months, Professor Reinhold Hofmann, from the University of Giessen in Germany, offered her a job as a research assistant in the micro anatomy section at University College of Nairobi.
In 1967, Hofmann encouraged her to study further in Germany, in pursuit of her doctorate. She studied both at the University of Giessen and the University of Munich
FIRST EAST AFRICAN WOMAN TO RECEIVE A PH. D.
In 1971 when she was granted a Doctorate of Anatomy at the University College of Nairobe, she became the first East African woman to receive a Ph.D.
During the 70s she became involved in various civic organizations including the Kenya Red Cross Society, the Kenya Association of University Women, the Environment Liaison Centre and the National Council of Women of Kenya. Through her experience with these various voluntary organizations she realized that the root of most of Kenya’s problems was environmental degradation.
THE GREEN BELT MOVEMENT IS BORN
On June 5, Maathai led a procession of the National Council of Women in Kenya (NCWK) from Kenyatta International Conference Center in downtown Nairobe to Kamukunji Park on the outskirts of the city where they planted seven trees in honour of community leaders. This was the first “Green Belt” of what was to become the “Green Belt Movement”, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights.
2004: FIRST ENVIRONMENTALIST TO WIN THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
In 2004 she became the first African woman and the first environmentalist to win the to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for: “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced:
“Maathai stood up courageously against the former oppressive regime in Kenya. Her unique forms of action have contributed to drawing attention to political oppression – nationally and internationally. She has served as inspiration for many in the fight for democratic rights and has especially encouraged women to better their situation.”
