For all its creative passion, Abu Dhabi has never really gotten into street art. We’ve seen the odd cack-handed tag daubed on walls around Tourist Club Area, but otherwise, the concept of anonymous, disposable, public artwork has never really gripped the capital’s imagination.
However, that could be about to change. Following on from a stint at Paris’s Pompidou Centre, a new art installation that allows members of the public to capture and print out large-scale black and white posters of themselves is coming to Abu Dhabi. Known as the Inside Out Project, the interactive show is a collaboration between revered French street artist JR (don’t ask what it stands for – nobody knows) and TED, a non-profit, ideas-focused organisation that last year awarded JR its annual $100,000 (Dhs367,256) prize, in recognition of his impact on the world’s collective creative consciousness.
The concept is a pretty simple one. Head down to the photo booth (location to come, but if it’s anything like the Pompidou Centre’s cabine photographique, you’re looking for a 20-ish foot high cuboid covered in benday dots), get in line, smoulder for the camera and then collect your A1 print. Next, head out into the street, find a boring-looking wall (you’ll want to avoid your local mosque or police station) and slap your lovely mug up there for all to see. For newbie guerrilla artists, there are even tutorial videos on the project’s website (www.insideoutproject.net) to show you how to make your own paste and apply it to your surface of choice. The fun doesn’t stop there, though – you can then take a snap of yourself with your portrait and upload it to the site’s photo wall, joining a community of over 10,000 who have already done the same.
But who is this man who’s campaigning to have our fair city wallpapered with jumbo-sized passport photos, and why should we do what JR says? Well, in art circles, the enigmatic Frenchman is a pretty big deal, and generally considered to be to posters and paste what fellow street art pioneer Banksy is to the spray can. While little is known about the man himself beyond those two initials, his work first caught the world’s attention back in 2005, with debut project 28 Millimetres. Having photographed residents of Paris’ run-down Clichy-sou-Bois suburb – the epicentre of the riots that became world news back in 2005 – JR turned the images into posters and pasted them throughout some of the city’s most bourgeois districts, bringing affluent Parisians face-to-face with those at the opposite end of the social scale. It was also this project that first sparked the artist’s interest in the Arab world as subject matter, with JR telling French arts magazine Beaux Arts, ‘I would like to bring art to improbable places, create projects so huge with the community that they are forced to ask themselves questions. I want to try to create images of hot spots such as the Middle East or Brazil that offer different points of view from the ones we see in the worldwide media, which are often caricatures.’
He’s since gone on to be featured by some of the most high-profile art galleries in the world, with a huge mural (taken from 28 Millimetres) adorning the exterior of London’s Tate Modern for its first ever exhibition of street art.
So, there’s your motivation – a chance to make the world see there’s more to the UAE than sand dunes, forts and gold vending machines. And even if it doesn’t bring about a cultural revolution, at least you can say you were there when street art finally came to Abu Dhabi.
Inside Out is coming to Abu Dhabi late September. For more information, visit www.insideoutproject.net or call TDIC on 800 8342.
