JR (b.1983, France) - Women Are Heroes - India, Africa (Kibera), Brazil (2008-2010)
“I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions.” says JR in the interview published in Beaux Arts Magazine. For the project Women Are Heroes, JR slipped into fantasmatic places, the ones you see on TV when there is violence, the ones you might go close to but never enter and that you will not find on any tourist guidebook tour. Women are Heroes introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future. In seeking what is common in their gaze, JR tried to get closer to what is universal: the human being. (Excerpts from the book Women Are Heroes, 2009)
View also the video JR expo Paris de Women Are Heroes
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JR - The Wrinkles of the City - Shanghai (2010)
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JR - The Wrinkles of the City - Los Angeles (2011)
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JR - JR x José Parlá (2012)
In 2012, JR collaborates with Cuban-American artist José Parlá on the latest iteration of The Wrinkles of the City: a huge mural installation in Havana, undertaken for the Havana Biennale, for which JR and Parlá photographed and recorded 25 senior citizens who had lived through the Cuban revolution, creating portraits which Parlá, who is of Cuban descent, interlaced with palimpsestic calligraphic writings and paintings.
