Cirque du Soleil is a Canadian entertainment company and the largest contemporary circus producer in the world. Located in the inner-city area of Saint-Michel, it was founded in Baie-Saint-Paul on 16 June 1984 by former street performers Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix.
A vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, often contrasting symbols of wealth and symbols of ephemerality and death. Best-known are vanitas still lifes, a common genre in Low Countries of the 16th and 17th centuries; they have also been created at other times and in other media and genres.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
Kà is a show by Cirque du Soleil at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kà describes the story as "the coming of age of a young man and a young woman through their encounters with love, conflict and the duality of Kà, the fire that can unite or separate, destroy or illuminate."
Street art is visual art created in public locations for public visibility. It has been associated with the terms "independent art", "post-graffiti", "neo-graffiti" and guerrilla art.
Melbourne, the capital of Victoria and the second largest city in Australia, has gained international acclaim for its diverse range of street art and associated subcultures. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, much of the city's disaffected youth were influenced by the graffiti of New York City, which subsequently became popular in Melbourne's inner suburbs, and along suburban railway and tram lines.
Benjamin Flynn, known professionally as Eine, is an English artist based in London.
The Bristol underground scene was a cultural movement in Bristol beginning in the early 1980s. The scene was born out of a lack of mainstream clubs catering for the emergence of hip hop music, with street and underground parties a mainstay. Crews formed playing hip hop in disused venues with sound systems borrowed from the reggae scene: City Rockers, 2 Bad, 2 Tuff, KC Rock, UD4, FBI, Fresh 4, and The Wild Bunch were among them. These names were the precursors to the more well known names that came from this scene. It is characterized by musicians and graffiti artists. The scene was influenced by the city's multiculturalism, political activism, and the arts movements of punk, reggae, hip hop, hippies and new age.
Sartorial Contemporary Art (2005–2010) was an artist-run gallery founded by Gretta Sarfaty Marchant, artist and curator, as a project-led space in central London, England. Originally based in an 18th-century Georgian house on Kensington Church Street. Sartorial Contemporary Art moved to Kings Cross in October 2008 where it has built a reputation for embracing newly emerging artists.
Viva Elvis was the seventh resident Cirque du Soleil show on the Las Vegas Strip. It resided at the Aria Resort & Casino and premiered on February 19, 2010. The show closed on August 31, 2012. Cirque du Soleil partnered with Elvis Presley Enterprises to produce this show, similar to how they partnered with The Beatles' Apple Corps Ltd to produce the resident show Love at the Mirage.
Exit Through the Gift Shop: A Banksy Film is a 2010 British documentary film, directed by street artist Banksy. It tells the story of Thierry Guetta, a French immigrant in Los Angeles, and his obsession with street art. The film charts Guetta's constant documenting of his every waking moment on film, from a chance encounter with his cousin, the artist Invader, to his introduction to a host of street artists with a focus on Shepard Fairey and Banksy, whose anonymity is preserved by obscuring his face and altering his voice, to Guetta's eventual fame as a street artist himself. It is narrated by Rhys Ifans. The music is by Geoff Barrow. It includes Richard Hawley's "Tonight The Streets Are Ours".
Thierry Guetta, best known by his moniker Mr. Brainwash, is a French-born Los Angeles-based street artist. According to the 2010 Banksy-directed film Exit Through the Gift Shop, Guetta was a proprietor of a used clothing store, and amateur videographer who was first introduced to street art by his cousin, the street artist Invader, and who filmed street artists through the 2000s and became an artist in his own right in a matter of weeks after an off-hand suggestion from Banksy.
Inkie is a London-based painter and street artist, originally from Clifton, Bristol. He is cited as being part of Bristol's graffiti heritage, along with Banksy, 3D and Nick Walker.
Steve Lazarides is a British-Greek Cypriot publisher, photographer, collector and curator. He is noted as one of the first figures to help popularise street art, and as an authority on the latest trends in underground art.
FAILE is a Brooklyn-based artistic collaboration between Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller. Since its inception in 1999, FAILE has been known for a wide-ranging multimedia practice recognizable for its explorations of duality through a fragmented style of appropriation and collage.
Dismaland was a temporary art project organised by street artist Banksy in the seaside resort of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England. Prepared in secret, the pop-up exhibition at the Tropicana, a disused lido, was "a sinister twist on Disneyland" that opened during the weekend of 21 August 2015 and closed on 27 September 2015, 36 days later. Banksy described it as a "family theme park unsuitable for children." The aesthetic of the "bemusement park" was potentially inspired by the "Dismayland" series of paintings created by American artist Jeff Gillette, who also participated in the exhibition.
Hanksy is the pseudonym for street artist and parodist Adam Lucas, who is based in New York City. His artwork includes recreations of Banksy street art adapted to include the face of actor Tom Hanks.
Aiko Nakagawa, known as Lady Aiko or AIKO, is a Japanese street artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is known for her ability to combine western art movements and eastern technical, artistic skills, as well as for her large-scale works installed in cities including Rome, Italy, Shanghai, China and Brooklyn, New York.
"Turf War" was the first major exhibition by artist Banksy, staged in a warehouse on Kingsland Road in London's East End in 2003.
The Walled Off Hotel is a boutique hotel designed by anonymous London-based artist Banksy alongside other creatives and notable academic Dr.Gavin Grindon. It is located in Bethlehem, 40 kilometres (25 mi) from Ben Gurion Airport. Established in March 2017, and initially set out to only be a temporary exhibition, the hotel has since attracted nearly 140,000 visitors, thanks in part to its location opposite to the portion of the Israeli West Bank Barrier separating Bethlehem from the holy site of Rachel's Tomb. The hotel is considered to be a key piece of social commentary on the Palestinians affected by the Israeli-Palestine Conflict and billed as having "the worst view of any hotel in the world".
