Squatting is the action of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied area of land or a building, usually residential, that the squatter does not own, rent or otherwise have lawful permission to use. The United Nations estimated in 2003 that there were one billion slum residents and squatters globally. Squatting occurs worldwide and tends to occur when people who are poor and homeless find empty buildings or land to occupy for housing. It has a long history, broken down by country below.
Bridget Louise Riley is an English painter known for her op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.
The Kunsthaus Tacheles was an art center in Berlin, Germany, a large building and sculpture park on Oranienburger Straße, in the sub-neighborhood of Spandauer Vorstadt in the Mitte district. Huge, colorful graffiti-style murals were painted on the exterior walls, and modern art sculptures were featured inside. The building housed an artist collective from 1990 until 2012.
Jannis Kounellis was a Greek Italian artist based in Rome. A key figure associated with Arte Povera, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
ABC No Rio is a collectively-run non-profit arts organization on New York City's Lower East Side. It was founded in 1980 in a squat at 156 Rivington Street, following the eviction of the 1979-80 Real Estate Show. The centre featured an art gallery space, a zine library, a darkroom, a silkscreening studio, and public computer lab. In addition, it played host to a number of radical projects including weekly hardcore punk matinees and the city Food Not Bombs collective.
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. Her work is noted for its intensity and its blunt, unapologetic humanity, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art. Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict herself both pregnant and nude and pregnant.
Berghain is a nightclub in Berlin, Germany. It is named after its location near the border between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain in Berlin, and is a short walk from Berlin Ostbahnhof main line railway station. Founded in 2004 by friends Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele, it has since become one of the world's most famous clubs, and has been called the "world capital of techno."
Otto Piene was a German-American artist specializing in kinetic and technology-based art, often working collaboratively. He lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Germany; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Groton, Massachusetts.
The Brooklyn Rail is a publication and platform for the arts, culture, humanities, and politics. The Rail is based out of Brooklyn, New York. It features in-depth critical essays, fiction, poetry, as well as interviews with artists, critics, and curators, and reviews of art, music, dance, film, books, and theater.
The 491 Gallery was a squatted self-managed social centre and multi-disciplinary gallery in Leytonstone, London, England, that operated from 2001 to 2013. Taking its name from its street number, 491 Grove Green Road, the former factory was home to a community-led art organisation and served as an exhibition space for a diverse range of artists of different origins working in varied media. It contained a range of art and music studios, which were used to host workshops, classes and musical rehearsals. The building was subsequently demolished in 2016.
Studio Olafur Eliasson was founded in 1995 by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Based in Berlin, the studio currently comprises about 90 people, from architects, craftsmen, and specialised technicians, to art historians and archivists. Working closely with the artist, the studio team engages in experiments; develops, designs, and produces artworks, exhibitions, and architectural projects; and communicates and contextualises Eliasson's work. Further architectural projects include the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, London, with Kjetil Thorsen; Your rainbow panorama, for ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2011; and the Harpa concert hall & conference center in Reykjavik, Iceland, for which Studio Olafur Eliasson, together with Henning Larsen Architects and Batteríid architects, received the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.
Alan W. Moore is an art historian and activist whose work addresses cultural economies and groups and the politics of collectivity. After a stint as an art critic, Moore made video art and installation art from the mid-1970s on and performed in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech series. He has published several books and runs the House Magic information project on self-organized, occupied autonomous social centers. His partial autobiography was published in 2022 in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest as Art Worker: Doing Time in the New York Artworld. Moore lives in Madrid.
Mequitta Ahuja is a contemporary American feminist painter of African American and South Asian descent who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Ahuja creates works of self-portraiture that combine themes of myth and legend with personal identity.
The Narrows Center for the Arts is a non-profit art and musical performance venue in Fall River, Massachusetts, USA. It was founded in 1995 for the promotion and enjoyment of the visual and performing arts. It comprises two visual art galleries, a performance theater, and visual artist studios.
Sol Kjøkis a Norwegian-born, NYC-based visual artist and founder of NOoSPHERE Arts, a nonprofit exhibition and performance venue on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. She lives and works at The Mothership NYC, the arts collective she founded in Brooklyn in 2005. In 2015, she started Last Frontier NYC, a new collaborative arts platform for international artists and performers, calling it "a campfire where the creative tribe can share its stories".
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
MMX Open Art Venue was an art gallery in Berlin, founded in 2010 as a one-year art experiment and reincarnated as re:MMX in 2012. The MMX project, which included the works of more than 200 international artists, was noted as the revival of the concept of artist collectives in Berlin.
Henri Lamy is a French figurative painter. Born in 1985 in Lyon, he started painting at an early age after developing a fascination for facial expressions and people who were considered as not fitting in society. His work is characterized by heavy usage of lively colors and highly creative composition, as well as inventive usage of the palette knife. He began his artistic career as a member of the artistic squat 59 Rivoli, an art residence located in Paris, France. His work has been exhibited in many cities around the world such as Paris, Lyon, Geneva, Manila, Tokyo, and Hongkong.
59 Rivoli is an art gallery in Paris, France. Formerly an artist squat that had occupied the space since 1999, it was legalized by the city from 2006 onwards. The venue became known for its parties, exhibitions, and performances.
