How are leftist artists and activists to produce an effective political intervention in the fields of imagery and institutional critique?

The Plataforma de Reflexión sobre Políticas Culturales (Platform of Reflection on Cultural Policies, PRPC) was created in 2004 as a critical reaction to the celebration of the first edition of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville (BIACS 1, October 1 – December 26, 2004).

Graphic photographs of Iraqi prisoners abused and tortured by US soldiers in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 were first published to global outrage in April 2004.

© AP Archive via GtresOnline

Anti-war protestors regarded the bombing of Lebanon by Israeli planes in July 2006, many of them supplied by the US arms industry, as an extension of US interests in the Middle East and of the country’s global “War on Terror”.

The US-led coalition “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, begun on March 19, 2003, was followed by a full-scale invasion. President George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” and the official reason for coalition military action was the claim that the Saddam Hussein Government was hiding weapons of mass destruction. This later proved to be false.

A Lithuanian-born son of secular Jewish socialist parents killed by Fascists during World War Two, Rudolf Baranik emigrated to the USA in 1938.

In this series, Martha Rosler photo-montaged news images of the Vietnam War from Life magazine with domestic interiors from the magazine House Beautiful — images of soldiers, corpses and the

A prolific art historian, writer, critic, and curator, Lucy Lippard’s activism in a variety of cultural forms dates from collaborative anti-Vietnam War protests and 1970s feminist practices in, for example, the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC),

An infamous massacre perpetrated by US troops in Vietnam was kept a military secret for more than a year. The first public acknowledgment was a small report in The New York Times on September 7 1969, confirming that First Lieutenant William L. Calley had been charged with the murder of civilians in Vietnam.

This artists’ collective and archive developed organisational skills from precedents such as the Heresies Collective, which avoided the Art Workers’ Coalition’s (AWC) disorganisation.