TEDGlobal: JR uses art to show the world its true face
A Paris-based street artist, who uses various spaces across the world as his canvas, was awarded a prize, worth $100,000, by the TED group.
JR, a semi-anonymous French street artist, uses his camera to show the world its true face, by pasting photos of the human face across massive canvases.
After winning the TED Prize earlier this year, he started a new project, insideoutproject, that is apparently taking the world by storm.
His art has been ‘exhibited’ in slums around Paris, along the separation wall between Israeli and Palestinian lands, and across Brazil’s favelas.
I spoke to him at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland.
In post-revolution Tunisia, JR and his crew of Tunisian artists, started pasting up photos of regular people where portraits of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali used to hang, as Al Jazeera reported in March.
Where Tunisians once saw images of the same person for decades, they now see smiling faces of other citizens. Portraits were also put up on Ben Ali’s former palace and on the charred police cars in the village where the revolution began.
Tunisia was the first country to take up his insideout project, and the project has spread all over the world. Here is a trailer of the project.
The images in this picture gallery are from Flickr user yoyolabellut, and are used under a creative commons license: