A Man Wins the Award for Unsung Women Heroes
The French artist JR is the winner of the 2011 TED Prize. This award was founded with the purpose to underline the exceptional gamut of talent and resources among the TED community. TED is an abbreviation for Technology, Entertainment and Design, founded in 1984 as a conference whose goal is to gather people from various professions. From its beginnings the TED conferences became known worldwide due to the inspirational spirit and optimistic atmosphere they foster. TED’s major mission is promoting ideas worth spreading. Bill Clinton, Jamie Oliver and Bono Vox are all listed among previous TED Prize winners.
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Read on for more about the artist:
JR is a photographer and one of street art’s biggest “stars”, constantly exhibiting in “the world’s largest gallery”, i.e. on the streets of numerous cities. His artistic expression is a mash-up of art, action and provocation while emitting messages of freedom, identity, involvement and restrictions.
His career started when he found a camera in a Paris subway station. In his first noted projects in 2001 and 2002, JR wandered through Europe and photographed people whose messages he would later convey to the world. The artist’s first big-format billboards started to show up on the streets of Paris and Rome in 2003. The project that drastically caught the public’s attention was “Portrait of a Generation“, a series of extremely large billboards stuck on walls and buildings in the most prestigious parts of Paris, in which he portrayed the homeless and canaille of the outskirts and dubious Paris districts. The illegal project became officially recognized and legal when the Paris City Hall wrapped its own building in JR’s photos. The portraits he exhibited with his business partner Marc were deemed the most highly controversial illegal exhibit ever realized. Namely, they set up huge portraits of unnamed Israelis and Palestinians which are looking at each other FACE2FACE in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities on both sides of the protective fence.
One of his more recent projects, which you had the chance to see on October 21st at the Zagreb Film Festival at the Tuškanac Cinema “Women are Heroes”, developed after a long worldwide journey on which JR embarked on in 2008. It emphasizes the issue of women’s dignity, women who are often victims of conflict. In the film, JR provides an insight into the lives of several exceptional women, pays tribute to them as they keep on smiling in hopes of a better life amid the hardships. An excellent documentary, filmed from the slums of Rio de Janeiro and Nairobi to the streets of Cambodia, it offers a new look into their struggles and expectations. Displaying their portraits as massive installations on the walls of their neighborhoods JR sublimates their exceptional destinies and sheds light on the strong and poignant personalities who more often than not stay unsung heroes.
He is currently working on the “Wrinkles of the City” Project which questions remembrance of the city and “Unframed” which interprets renowned photographers and photos, documenting their works in museums and archives and exhibiting them to the general public as large-format pictures on the cities walls.
His original art marked on the walls of Paris, the Middle East, Brazil or Africa, bears witness to the life of the ”little” people, who often live a life of mere survival, and reveals that other side to the rest of the world, often untold and unbeknownst to the majority of people.
JR is, as are many other street-art artists, anonymous and never explains his big works, leaving room for the spectators to experience and comment.
