Urban Dramaturgy: The Global Art Project of JR

"WELCOME TO THE INSIDE OUT PROJECT. A collaboration between the artist JR, the TED prize, and you."

The excerpt above is on the home page of Inside Out (www.insideoutproject.net), a large-scale participatory art project "that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work."¹ The premise is straightforward: you upload a black-and-white portrait of yourself, along with a statement regarding the social change you desire, or what you stand for, or what you care about in this world. Your uploaded digital image is made into an oversized poster and sent back to you, for you to exhibit (paste) in your local community, anywhere that is public, no permit necessary. As the Website explains:

People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.

The artist behind this global art project is JR, the recent TED prize winner now turned international art star, thanks largely to this TED glory and its subsequent media frenzy. A self-proclaimed "artivist"—somewhere between an artist and an activist—and a "photograffeur"—somewhere between a photographer and a graffiti artist—who still goes only by his initials ("if I had to disclose my real name . . . it would deviate from the people and the meaning of my work"), JR is renowned for illegally pasting oversized portraits of individuals in cities across the world. He has "exhibited" his projects in conflict zones and extremely poor neighborhoods, among them Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya; Providencia in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Clichy-sous-Bois in the outskirts of Paris, France; and the Israel/Palestine border. All of these were part of a larger project titled 28 Millimeters, whereby JR took portraits with a 28mm lens, forcing him to photograph his subjects from very close up, and simultaneously gaining their trust to do so.

For Portrait of a Generation for example, the first of his 28 Millimeter series, which he initiated in 2005 after his first "guerrilla" exhibition in the streets of Montfermeil in 2004 and after the riots that spread throughout France, JR worked in collaboration with friend and colleague Ladj Ly, a local filmmaker, to respond to the desires of the youngsters from this working-class suburb of Paris to be photographed, and pasted the oversized images in buildings throughout the neighborhood. Portrait of a Generation eventually grew to feature photographs of the youths making grimaces. Responding to the riots' mass media coverage of these first and second-generation immigrants as alienated, criminal, and dangerous, JR and his collaborators appropriated these negative images by exaggerating how others viewed them, becoming somewhat comic, grotesque, and quite effectively, charming and approachable. JR glued the giant images in the fancy central district of Paris, where the cités residents were often not welcome, and where they could not afford to live.

It was a way to break the subjects' isolation, if only through mediated means, and activate them in different environments. The images, in their new setting, performed an alternate city: one filled with tensions its citizens did not necessarily want to confront. "I pasted huge posters everywhere," explains JR, "in the bourgeois area of Paris, with their name, age, and building number." In 2006, one year after the riots came to an end, but not necessarily the tensions that had sparked them, the "official" exhibition of Portrait of a Next Generation was displayed in the city hall of Paris, forcing onlookers to contemplate the distinctions, discriminations, and inequalities that had fueled such anger in the first place.

The second of JR's 28 Millimeter project was Face2Face, completed in 2007 and considered by many as one of the largest illegal urban art exhibits in the world. It covered the entire surface of the Israeli West Bank Barrier with paired portraits of Palestinians and Israelis that held the same job and made a similar expression for the camera. Working with his collaborators as well as on...