I  recently had an encounter with the work of two artists who deal with issues of dispossessed people. Coming from two different parts of the world, to them, poverty, human rights and war are not abstract ideas to be handled at arms length with a conventional formal vocabulary, so they seek new strategies to communicate the palpable suffering that can only be given a human face with deep engagement.

Their art is not afraid to take a position and yet at the same time it is neither didactic nor a pontification. It is an intelligent visual communication that compels us not to turn away from the damaging contradictions of our time.

The current exhibition at Power Plant Gallery in Toronto shows Walid Raad’s images which were taken by the artist as a 15-year-old through a telescopic lens, during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. They are of a sky ablaze with falling bombs and explosions and triumphant conquerors on tanks. Marks of age visible in haziness and scratches remind us of a conflict that today, has added many recent chapters to the life of a resilient city that has been repeatedly built and destroyed.

In the 25 intervening years, Raad has become an internationally recognised artist whose main focus has been to document, via video and photographs, the contemporary history of his beloved Lebanon. To facilitate this, he adopted a unique artistic strategy and in 1999 founded a fictitious foundation, Atlas Group and built its archives on Lebanon which has won international acclaim and kept alive the issues of the Lebanese people.

At the Taiwan Biennale some years ago I saw Raad’s first installation, under the name of Atlas Group. The photographs on display were of mangled car engines, the only part that survives a car bomb. This brought attention to over 3600 car bomb blasts that took place in Lebanon from 1975-91. As the work examines the events, experiences, forms, objects and effects that surrounded the explosion of car bombs, in it is woven the complex and unconventional nature of the Arab conflict in the Middle East and the relentless trauma of its victims, survivors and witnesses.

The concerns of Mumbai-based artist Sharmila Samant in the two video pieces screened in Toronto focus on the insidiousness of corporate greed. “Art to me is the conscience, a kind of awareness and a reflection of my experiences,” she confesses.

Her first video investigates the high rate of suicide deaths among young cotton farmers of India’s Gujrat province which, in recent years, has multiplied due to unbearable debts. The causes of crop failure are traced to the introduction of Monsanto seeds that makes the plants more vulnerable to disease and its bio-genetic make-up deprives them of seeds for future harvests. In documentary style, the artist interviews cotton crop experts and follows them to funerals of farmers who are mostly under 40 years of age, allowing the emotions and hardship speak to the audiences.

As we hear people speaking in the field, at funerals and at village gatherings, the hopelessness in their voices is enough to ring an alarm to set up citizen and state protective mechanisms for the farming communities.

Taking impressions of this experience further, Samant at the 2007 Sydney Biennale created ‘Against the grain’ an installation of 1000 cobras crafted out of the traditional style of paddy art of Bolangir. The group is mounted on stands that are installed on a floor covered with raw cotton fibre, made by Devgunia women and children with the skills they use to make small objects from waste from the harvested grain. The artist worked closely with the community to adapt their fine skills to make the cobras.

The cobras were specially selected for this installation for its deadly poison finds a parallel in the way the soil is poisoned with excessive pesticides needed to sustain a harvest with Monsanto seeds and the high rate of suicide among farmers using this seed with the most readily available poison, pesticides.

In the second video, Samant looks at the lives of the evicted dwellers of shanty towns outside Mumbai that have been destroyed to build high rise buildings. Told through the eviction stories of young children who talk about their loss of possessions and experience of homelessness against a backdrop of huge machines breaking and throwing debris of what was once their home. One little girl says that she liked to see huge bulldozers at building sites till she saw them destroying her neighbourhood. This single act of corporate indifference to human life recorded in the video, dispossessed hundreds of thousands of people and rendered a hundred thousand children without schools for a year in Mumbai.

Their strategy to collapse the boundaries between mass media and art offers a wider outreach to both the artists. However, unlike television news, these reflective pieces do not have a short shelf life. Their deliberate directness neither de-personalises the narrative nor loses meaning in translation, something the slick new media jargon has begun to do with its empty spin.

The extensive screenings and exhibitions made possible by easy transportation of DVDs are now joined by video streaming on the internet that captures audiences beyond art events with whom issues are shared to build worldwide solidarity.

These works unsettle us with their human stories of increased destitution, human rights abuse and dispossession behind the deceptive statistics of economic growth. Using art as a critique of the capitalist and expansionist agenda of the 21st century, the artist works with the skills of historians as urban and war debris is carefully gathered, documented and archived.

Will this art make a difference is the oft asked question? One can only be optimistic that the sensitising of audiences with information will create the critical mass when people will begin to make connections between the lavish life a minority enjoys and the increasing deprivation of even basic amenities for the majority.