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23/10/2010

JR

18Gallery at Bund18, Shanghai

The Wrinkles of the City / Les sillons de la ville / Los Surcos de a Ciudad /城市肌理, is a world scale project. For this project, JR starts by doing portraits of elderly people who represent the memory of the city he picks for its interesting past. Conjunctly JR interviews each person as they are the witnesses of all the changes the city went through. Then these portraits, printed in monumental sizes, are pasted in the very same city in various places that inspire JR and also represent the city heritage. For memory can stumble and fall, disappear any minute as the elder leave us, JR shows us that it is important not to forget what the elder have to pass to the young ones. Without judging, JR just gives us bits of History pages in an artistic, yet poetic, social and above all human way.JR takes his Wrinkles of the City project to Shanghai where the last century has been full of ups and downs : from the Japanese occupation, the establishment of the Communist Party, The Liberation, World War II, the end of the foreign concessions, the victory of Mao Zedong over the General Tchang Kaï-Chek’s troops, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward to the actual development of the city ...

Recently awarded by the famous TED prize for his street action, JR defines hismelf as photographer who works on the borders of art and activism. To him the streets are one big art gallery and the city is a playground for larger-than-life shows. Since 2001, from Paris to Los Angeles via Montfermeil-Clichy-sous-Bois (France, Jerusalem), JR has presented many of his giant pasted photos in street shows. JR began photography in 2000. He began by photographing graffiti artists in action, then decided to invest himself the walls of his own city; Paris.
In 2004, he worked on his series 28 millimeters. The first chapter was called Portrait of a Generation and made the cover of the New York Times. Giant portraits of young people from Parisian suburbs were shown in their own towns, and then to raise consciousness, were brought back to the center of Paris and were shown in the European House of Photography and Art Center in City Hall.After that in 2007 he added a second chapter to his series 28 millimeters - Face2Face, Israelis and Palestinians - Portrait of Twin Brothers. JR made portraits of Israelis and Palestinians who had the same job to show them literally face to face on both sides of the “separation/ security” wall in Israel and in several Palestinian and Israeli towns.
Then in 2007 JR initiated his project Women Are Heroes, which was shown in 2008. By photographing women in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Southern Sudan and Kenya, JR pays tribute to these conflict areas and shares their stories of dignity. He exhibited portraits in their home countries and in spectacular exhibitions in several cities around the world. The project led JR in Brazil was done on the scale of an entire favela (Portuguese for slum) and then pursued in Cambodia and India.

Women Are Heroes was also the subject of a film made by JR, selected at the Cannes Film Festival for the Critics' Week in association with the Official Selection.

Since then, JR has started a new series of works involving Wrinkles of the City, imprinting the cities’ memories through the testimony of their elderly inhabitants. Each pasted portrait is like a layer, thick with paper and glue, which is then superimposed on the facades. The superimposition of the portraits and their wrinkles shows the city’s creases, highlights traces of history, sometimes even in a painful way for a city that has also lost certain aspects of its own youth.

Opening Cocktail: Sunday October 24th, 2010 from 6 to 9PM

18Gallery
Bund18,18 Zhongshan East Road (E1), 4F, Shanghai
open everyday from 11AM-11PM

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