'A beautiful, deeply affecting and powerful marriage between art and activism' - KHALED HOSSEINI, bestselling author of The Kite Runner 'These are vital conversations. Everyone should eavesdrop on them'- KAMILA SHAMSIE, author of award-winning bestseller Home Fire Conversations From Calais is a global art movement that captures moments between volunteers and refugees in poster form. Pasted on our city walls these posters amplify marginalised voices and bear witness to those who are often ignored. Features essay contributions by Osman Yousefzada, Gulwali Passarlay, Nish Kumar, Joudie Kalla, Waad Al-Kateab, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Ai Weiwei and Inua Ellams. 'Showcases what the world so desperately needs more of right now: heart, hope and humanity' - EMMA GANNON, author & podcaster 'These conversations remind us that the only difference between ourselves and anyone else is circumstance' - OLIVE GRAY, actor

This study examines the waves of graffiti that occur before, during, and after a conflict-important tools of political resistance that make protest visible and material. Graffiti makes for messy politics. In film and television, it is often used to create a sense of danger or lawlessness. In bathroom stalls, it is the disembodied expression of gossip, lewdness, or confession. But it is also a resistive tool of protest, making visible the disparate voices and interests that come together to make a movement. In Conflict Graffiti, John Lennon dives into the many permutations of graffiti in conflict zones-ranging from the protest graffiti of the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson and the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, to the tourist-attraction murals on the Israeli Separation Wall and the street art that has rebranded Detroit and post-Katrina New Orleans. Graffiti has played a crucial role in the revolutionary movements of these locales, but as the conflict subsides a new graffiti and street art scene emerges-often one that ushers in postconflict consumerism, gentrification, militarization, and anesthetized forgetting. Graffiti has an unstable afterlife, fated to be added to, transformed, overlaid, photographed, reinterpreted, or painted over. But as Lennon concludes, when protest movements change and adapt, graffiti is also uniquely suited to shapeshift with them.

In The City as Subject, Carolyn S. Loeb examines distinctive bodies of public art in Berlin: legal and illegal murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, post-reunification public sculptures, and images and sites from the street art scene. Her careful analyses show how these developed new architectural and spatial vocabularies that drew on the city’s infrastructure and daily urban experience. These works challenged mainstream urban development practices and engaged with citizen activism and with a wider civic discourse about what a city can be. Loeb extends this urban focus to her examination of the extensive outdoor installation of the Berlin Wall Memorial and its mandate to represent the history of the city’s division. She studies its surrounding neighborhoods to show that, while the Memorial adopts many of the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art she examines, it truncates the story of urban division, which stretches beyond the Wall’s existence. Loeb suggests that, by embracing more multi-vocal perspectives, the Memorial could encourage the kind of participatory and heterogeneous construction of the city championed by the earlier works of public art.

Street-cool visual artist-cum-nightlife guru, Andre Saraiva, whose life dovetails into graffiti subculture, chic jet-setting, and the fashion world, presents an autobiographical visual diary of sorts, a revealing window into the worlds he inhabits. Chances are that while you ve been strolling through the streets of Paris, London, New York, or Los Angeles, you may have caught a glimpse of Saraiva s signature graffiti of Mr. A on a random street wall. Or you may have seen him in the Banksy film, Exit Through the Gift Shop; spied him in the front rows of the Paris Fashion Week shows; or seen him at one of his many chic nightclubs. Graffiti Life is a never-before-seen look at the artist s many spheres through which he effortlessly moves: street culture, contemporary art, graphic design, photography, fashion, and nightlife. This visual journey is an interactive and striking object itself, with a vibrant pink cloth cover, Saraiva s distinctive handwriting in foil, and seven pop-ups he designed. It follows Saraiva s art/life trajectory, and includes his Instagram-worthy tags on the streets of Paris; countless silk-screened posters; paintings and sculpture; creative collaborations with Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Colette, and more.