ACAR – VA Award: Past Winners

Body Freedom for Every(Body) combines visual activism, public art and community engagement via an ambitious cross-country road trip, merging art and activism on hyper local community levels. This project is an innovative travelling exhibition inside a 27-foot medium duty box truck. Body Freedom for Every(Body) is focused on threats to bodily autonomy and addresses the themes of reproductive justice, queer liberation, and trans joy. The Body Freedom for Every(Body) truck has toured through over a dozen US cities. At each stop, the truck doors open to turn the cargo bay into a gallery space.

This is the first time that the IVSA have made an award to a collective, rather than an individual. The awards committee felt that Unmute Gaza’s grassroots yet international campaign was worthy of recognition as a best practice example of how to achieve an international impact with a collectively realised and participatory form of visual activism.

TreaAndrea is a dedicated and innovative visual scholar whose anti-racist academic and community-grounded work has made a significant impact on a range of audiences. TreaAndrea Russworm is a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and afterschool program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press).

Gina Kim’s powerful work has added a new dimension to visual activism in the global context of anticolonial and feminist movements. Her recent virtual reality work, Tearless (2021), is a significant contribution to memory activism and foregrounds issues of ethical representation in the age of immersive media. Tearless is the second of Kim’s trilogy on the ‘US comfort women’ who were mobilized for sexual servitude in South Korea’s camp towns that surround US military bases.

Annalisa’s participatory video ‘Decolonizing the City: Visual Dialogues in Padova’ represents a public visual sociological approach to confronting and reflecting on Italy’s colonial past by building counter histories coming from racialized people with family migratory backgrounds.