This work is a photographic print of a street scene in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 2021, documenting a large-format, black-and-white pasting installed onto a building wall as part of the artist’s Inside Out Project. The photograph depicts two eyes looking outwards into the local surroundings, with the subject’s unflinching eye contact bringing an aura of challenge and triumphant visability.

 

The Inside Out Project is a large-scale participatory art project that allows people from around the world to receive a print of their portrait and to billboard it as a support for an idea, a project, an action and to share that experience. The public visibility of large-format, black-and-white photographic portraits of community members deliver messages of personal identity, empowering the community to stand up for what they care about and turn the world ‘inside out’.

 

In the first eight years of the project, more than 400,000 people had participated in Inside Out in more than 150 countries, through mail or gigantic photobooths, and in 2013 a documentary film, Inside Out, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, revealing the working process behind the project and its global participation.

 

The Inside Out Project reflects JR’s investment into public space, personal expression, and histories of graffiti and flyering. Describing the streets as the largest gallery in the world, JR’s work invokes critical questions around ownership, commons, freedom, identity and limits.

 

JR exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors, from the suburbs of Paris to the slums of Brazil to the streets of New York, pasting huge portraits of anonymous people, from Kibera to Istanbul, from Los Angeles to Shanghai. In 2011, he received the TED Prize, after which he created Inside Out. His recent projects include a large-scale pasting in a maximum security prison in California; a TIME Magazine cover about Guns in America;  a video mural including 1,200 people presented at SFMOMA; a collaboration with New York City Ballet; an Academy Award-nominated feature documentary, co-directed with Nouvelle Vague legend Agnès Varda; a huge installation on the Panthéon in Paris; the pasting of a container ship; the Pyramid of the Louvre; a monumental mural in la Diego Rivera in the suburbs of Paris; giant scaffolding installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics; an exhibition on the abandoned hospital of Ellis Island; a social restaurant for the homeless and refugees in Paris; and a gigantic installation at the US-Mexico border fence. As he remains anonymous, JR leaves the space empty for an encounter between the subject/protagonist and the passer-by/interpreter. That is what JR's work is about - raising questions.