 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(October 2018) |
 'The Gender & Power Issue' | |
| Editor | Chantelle Fiddy |
|---|---|
| Categories | Activism |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Website | http://www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk |
Ctrl.Alt.Shift was an initiative politicising a new generation of activists for social justice and global change. It was a project of UK aid and development charity Christian Aid.
Ctrl.Alt.Shift was founded by Katrin Owusu and published the first issue of its magazine in June 2008. The magazines continued until 2010 and the website until mid-2011. It has published issues focusing on 'HIV & Stigma' and 'Gender & Power'. The magazine was edited by blogger and columnist Chantelle Fiddy who also helped edit the website. The website featured regular columnists and staff writers such as Dwain Lucktung, Eva Baker, Russell Myrie and Bibi van der Zee alongside user-generated content.
In November 2008, Ctrl.Alt.Shift launched the 'Nothing to Declare' project – a series of demonstrations with the intention of exposing the stigma created by HIV travel bans. The project was co-organised by activist pressure group Plane Stupid, with grime star Tinchy Stryder lending his support outside the Russian embassy. The protests targeted the London embassies of Russia, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, and were covered by CNN. [1] On 8 March 2009, International Women's Day, Ctrl.Alt.Shift marched through Guildhall in London to raise awareness of the 50 million women missing in India due to female foeticide. [2]
Ctrl.Alt.Shift garnered widespread media attention for its involvement in a number of arts-based cultural interventions, each of which has focused on a different area of social injustice in developing countries.
In November 2008, it held a showcase of dance, film and music based on the stigma surrounding HIV/Aids at Sadler's Wells, [3] London. Nitin Sawhney and Carlos Acosta were mentors and there was a performance by JME of Boy Better Know. [4]
In early 2009 a photo competition run in conjunction with VICE magazine focused on Gender, Poverty and Power. Nan Goldin acted as an ambassador and Alexa Chung, Alex Sturrock, Ben Rayner, and Andy Capper were mentors. The winners were exhibited in February at the Association of Photographers in London. [5]
In March 2009, Ctrl.Alt.Shift launched an art exhibition at BALTIC [6] which focused on war and conflict in Colombia and Latin America as a whole. The exhibition took place over two floors of the building and featured work produced by 12 students and recent graduates from Newcastle University's LifeWorkArt programme. It also featured specially commissioned works from south London photo-artist Matthew Stone and installation artist Graham Hudson, [7] who acted as project mentors. Urban sculptor and photographer T-Magic, street artist Benjamin Wachenje and BALTIC freelance artists, Alison Unsworth and Paul Merrick also featured, and David Shrigley was Creative Ambassador.
On 14 May 2009, Ctrl.Alt.Shift premiered five short films: "1000 Voices", "HIV: The Musical", "Man Made", "No Way Through" and "War School". [8] The films were directed by 7 young, talented, up and coming film makers; Tim Travers Hawkins, Joe Patrick & Tim Woodall, Fern Berresford, Ben Newman and Shelia Menon & Alex Monro who were helped out by established directors Aoife McArdle, Chris Harding from Shynola, Kinga Burza, Paul Andrew Williams and Jim Threapleton. The films were scored by the likes of Young Knives, The Thirst, Chipmunk, Shy Child, Metronomy, Denis Jones, and Jesca Hoop, and featured performances from Adam Buxton, Julian Barratt, and Martin Freeman. [9] The poster art for the films was featured in Creative Review. [10]
Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption is a 2009 comics anthology edited by Paul Gravett which features short graphical stories looking at examples of corruption in the real world. It includes contributions by such creators as Pat Mills, Bryan Talbot, Dave McKean, Woodrow Phoenix, Peter Kuper, Dylan Horrocks, and Dan Goldman. An exhibition was held at the Lazarides Gallery in London in 2009 — in conjunction with Gravett's Comica festival — to mark the launch; the exhibition included examples of misguided previous attempts to produce worthy comic books. [11]
Paul Gravett is a London-based journalist, curator, writer, and broadcaster who has worked in comics publishing since 1981.
Escape magazine was a British comic strip magazine founded and edited by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury. Nineteen issues were published between 1983 and 1989. Eddie Campbell, Phil Elliott and Glenn Dakin were amongst the many cartoonists published within its pages. Escape Publishing also released a limited number of graphic novels in the period 1984–1989, some co-published with Titan Books.
Aesthetica Magazine is an internationally recognized publication focusing on art and culture. Established in 2002, the magazine provides bi-monthly coverage of contemporary art across various disciplines, including visual arts, photography, architecture, fashion, and design. With wide distribution, it has garnered a readership of over 311,000 globally.
Shannon Okey is an American writer and knit designer.
Shadi Ghadirian is an Iranian contemporary photographer. Her work is influenced by her experiences as a Muslim woman living in contemporary Iran, but her work also relates to the lives of women throughout the world. Through her work, she critically comments on the pushes and pulls between tradition and modernity for women living in Iran, as well as other contradictions that exist in everyday life. She explores the topics of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women. Ghadirian gained international recognition through the series Qajar and Like Every Day in 1998 and 2001. She is living and working in Tehran.
Robert Gallagher is a commercial and editorial photographer currently based in Los Angeles, California. He has been awarded four times in the Communication Arts Photography Annual, named one of the 'Top 25 Photographers of 2016' by Creative Quarterly and is archived in The National Portrait Gallery in London.
NOMAD was founded in 2002 as an independent formation and registered as association in 2006. It targets to produce and experiment new patterns in the digital art sphere by using various lenses of other disciplines. The core of the formation consists of designers, engineers, architects, curators and writers. The infrastructure is based on technical and theoretical levels to provide collaborations with affiliations of artists. NOMAD's production network aims to build strong connections across territorial borders through digital culture oriented projects. The main goal of these projects is to establish a productive communication channel that enables access to new resources of information. The core development team consists of Basak Senova, Emre Erkal, Erhan Muratoglu.
Jamie Adenuga, known professionally as Jme, is a British grime MC, songwriter, record producer and DJ who was born in Hackney, and raised in Tottenham. He is the co-founder of the crew and label Boy Better Know. He also serves as a sole owner and director of an associated company, Boy Better Know Limited, which he incorporated in 2008. He was previously part of the grime collective Meridian Crew and later Roll Deep alongside his older brother, Skepta.
Norman Seeff is a photographer and filmmaker. Since moving to the United States in 1969, his work has been focused on the exploration of human creativity and the inner dynamics of the creative process.
Indrani Pal-Chaudhuri is an Indian artist, film director, and photographer.
Ctrl+Alt+Del (CAD) is a gaming-related webcomic and animated series written by Tim Buckley. The name of the comic refers to the Windows command Control-Alt-Delete. Premiering on October 23, 2002, the comic's focus has gradually shifted away from single strip gags towards longer story arcs and greater continuity through the use of video game references. Ctrl+Alt+Del currently is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Jesse Evan Freidin is a fine art photographer. He is best known for creating a series of photos of dogs dressed in costumes like those worn by Lady Gaga for his series 'The Doggie Gaga Project' 2010 His recognizable black and white fine art dog photography gained him major recognition, and was exhibited across the country. In 2017 his first book of dog photography was published by Lyons Press, called 'Finding Shelter: Portraits of Love, Healing and Survival.' This book was a #1 Best Selling New Title on Amazon when first published. His second book was published by Lerner Books, called 'When Dogs Heal: Powerful Stories of People Living with HIV and the Dogs That Saved Them.' It received a star from the School Library Journal and Booklist. His photography is part of over 150 private collections and has been exhibited in galleries nationally, along with being featured in The New York Times, Inside Edition, Live! With Regis and Kelly, NPR, People Magazine, The Huffington Post and many more.
Chantelle Fiddy is a British journalist, columnist, event promoter and music industry professional. She is well known as a commentator on London's grime scene and as a social activist as the former editor of Ctrl.Alt.Shift. She is currently contributing editor at RWD Magazine and urban editor at Mixmag. Her work has also appeared in i-D, Dazed & Confused, Sunday Times Style, The Guardian and The London Paper. She has also worked in television and radio. She was a featured presenter in Channel 4's 'Generation Next' series and has appeared as a guest on BBC Radio 1's Review Show. She also presented a 40-minute documentary on Lady Sovereign for BBC 1Xtra. Fiddy is one of the tastemakers who puts together the BBC's 'Sound of' List. In 2013 Fiddy starred in the BBC documentary series VIP People, with pop star A*M*E, and went behind-the-scenes on how to make a fanzine and how to become a successful recording artist. Fiddy is soon to feature in the latest Channel 4 style series by Ewen Spencer. After moving into music management in 2013, Fiddy has worked on the careers of Duke Dumont, Arkon Fly and Kelli-Leigh among others.
Gideon Mendel is a South African photographer, based in London. His work engages with contemporary social issues of global concern. It was his work as a 'struggle photographer' during the final years of apartheid in the 1980s that first brought attention to his work.
Andrew Esiebo is a Nigerian photographer. He has covered personal projects and assignments on primarily Nigeria and West Africa but has gained international recognition.
Mark Neville is a British social documentary photographer.
Ralf Obergfell is a German-born artist, author, film producer and activist known for his long-term projects dealing with youth, change and transformation of his subjects over extended periods.
Ruth Catlow is an English artist-theorist and curator whose practice focuses on critical investigations of digital and networked technologies and their emancipatory potential. She is also the Director, with Marc Garrett, of the Furtherfield gallery, commons space, and online arts-writing platform based out of London, which the duo founded in 1997.
"Loss", sometimes referred to as "Loss.jpg", is a strip published on June 2, 2008, by Tim Buckley for his gaming-related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. Set during a storyline in which the main character Ethan and his fiancée Lilah are expecting their first child, the strip—presented as a four-panel comic with no dialogue—shows Ethan entering a hospital, where he sees Lilah weeping in a hospital bed after suffering a miscarriage. Buckley cited events in his life as inspiration for the comic.
Comica, the London International Comics Festival, was a comics festival held in London. Organized by Paul Gravett, the festival generally took place over a number of weeks. In the beginning, the festival's main venue was London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA); thus the name, "ComICA".