A recent news article in the New York Times drew attention to Vadim Mikhailov, a protest artist who works with textiles.
Repurposing cloth, carpets, costume and the like has long been the stock-in-trade of those who protest against what they perceive as injustice: Brazilian-Swiss artist, Eva de Souza, for example, or Korean-born Aram Han Sifuentes from the USA.
Vadim Mikhailov is Russian, living in St Petersburg, and he creates sculptures using found objects. Once symbols of pride (and propaganda in the Soviet era), carpets find a new life as juxtapositions of anti-war sentiment meet designs that once depicted a more harmonious world. Dresses in shapes and colours so evocative of Russia-of-the-past live on, redecorated and repurposed as a message against loss of culture and the homogenisation of everyday life. This is protest art that is subtle and beautiful yet carries a macabre, deadly punch.