Located in one of France’s youngest and poorest regions, the city of Roubaix also is called home by a mix of immigrant populations from the global south who integrated into a vastly different culture than the one from which they came. Street Artist YZ has made women from these cultures the center stage of her large wheat-pasted portraits for about a decade, and we have published her campaigns of solid pillars of their communities several times.
YZ. Urbain.Es. La Condition Publique. Roubaix, France (photo courtesy of the artist)
In recognition of her participation in the women-centered exhibition URBAIN.ES here, curated by Magda Danysz, YZ says she conducted interviews of her subjects from Kabul, Vietnam, Tunisia, Cameron, and the Ivory Coast before creating their large-scale portraits. She says she considers her work as that of a documentarian. She says it’s a complex mix of conforming to the new culture and desiring to honor the traditions and habits of the old one. What has she learned, aside from the immigrant stereotypes of Roubaix that outsiders sometimes have about them?
“This is of particular importance when questioning identity issues in a country where the insistence on integration often prioritizes the cultural ‘smoothing’ over cultural identity,” she says.
YZ. Urbain.Es. La Condition Publique. Roubaix, France (photo courtesy of the artist)
Here are a few selections from YZ’s installations from her ongoing project “Empress,” which “explores the cultural diversity of different communities throughout the world, questioning ideas of consumerism and conformity.”
Click HERE to read our previous article about this exhibition.
YZ. Urbain.Es. La Condition Publique. Roubaix, France (photo courtesy of the artist)YZ. Urbain.Es. La Condition Publique. Roubaix, France (photo courtesy of the artist)YZ. Urbain.Es. La Condition Publique. Roubaix, France (photo courtesy of the artist)
In addition to addressing a common narrative, thematically curated group shows can draw attention to contrasts in style and present something that unified to the visitor. A new women-centered project opening at the end of the month in Roubaix, France, aims to draw similarities and differences among a variety of street artists to create a dialogue about how women are depicted in public space.
Guerrilla Girls. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)
Using new and borrowed art pieces, curator and art dealer Magda Dansyz fills a 15,000 square foot exhibition space at La Condition Publique, a culture factory that inhabits an historic former wool and cotton processing facility and is now a venue for artistic creation. “I have been working for a year now about the place and representation of women in the public space through the light of street art practices,” she says about Urbain.es and the nearly 30 artists whose work is here.
They span perhaps 40 years of street practice from risk-taking activists to self-promoters leveraging activism as a brand builder, to more subtle artworks in the public sphere that raise incisive questions about perceptions of women in society.
YZ. Empress Ozoua, 2022. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)
“In a variety of forms, the exhibition presents in situ works, original art pieces lent by the artists or private and public collections, as well as documentary testimonials retracing historical urban performances,” says a text from the organizers. Exciting highlights include the inclusion of works by true old-school billboard activists like the Guerrilla Girls who for decades have been confronting art institutions for systemic sexism, the 1970/80s NY graff writer Lady Pink who painted trains in a male dominated subculture, and Yseult YZ Digan, whose painterly depictions of women represent a quieter tribute to the strength and steel of women that appears through many cultures, often overlooked.
Artistes I Artists Yseult YZ Digan, eL Seed, Guerilla Girls, Maya Hayuk, Icy and Sot, Invader, Mark Jenkins et Sandra Fernandez, JR, Kubra Khademi, Lady Pink, Madame, Miss.Tic, Miss Van, Mode 2, Robert Montgomery, Eko Nugroho, Obvious, Quik, Edmond Marie Rouffet, Magda Sayeg, Saype, Swoon, T-Kid, Aya Tarek, Amalia Ulman, Zevs
Icy & Sot. Emancipate 2020. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)Swoon. Dawn and Gemma 2014. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)Mark Jenkins & Sandra Fernandez. The Secret, 2022. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)Mark Jenkins & Sandra Fernandez. The Secret, 2022. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)Mark Jenkins & Sandra Fernandez. Urbain.Es. Magda Danysz in conjunction with La Condition Publique of Roubaix in France. (photo courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery)
URBAIN.ES
Exposition collective sous le commissariat de Magda Danysz Group Show curated by Magda Danysz
Du 31 mars au 24 juillet 2022 From March 31st to July 24th, 2022
Click HERE for more information and a complete preview of the artworks.
It’s BSA Film Friday! Now we present the best of the year, according to you. We bring you new videos each week – about 240 of them this year. The beauty of the experience is that it can feel quite random and exhilarating – rather like the serendipity of finding new Street Art.
You helped us decide who made it to the top 15 – and we feel proud to see some of these because we liked them too. When we take videos on the road to different cities and countries doing our BSA Film Friday LIVE we also like to share these in classrooms or theaters or lecture halls with locals, students, city leaders. Nothing can beat seeing faces light up, a person thrilled to finally get the sense of something, better understanding the scene, helping people with a new way to look at art in the streets.
The best part is many of these videos encourage you to create, to co-create, to actively participate in public space with meaning and intention. As a collection, these 15 are illuminating, elevating, riveting, strange, soaring, secretly otherworldly, and achingly beautifully human.
Special congratulations go out to artists/directors Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk who landed on the list two times this year, including the number 1 position. Their work is about the intersection of art and theory and life, how to create it, to see it, and how to re-see your world.
We hope you can take some time to enjoy some of the best Street Art videos from around the world and on BSA this year.
“Listen, my only request…. When you’re done doing your thing, do an Italian flag with my daughter’s name on it,” says a guy who is shouting up from the street to the roof where two Hungarian graff writers are preparing to hit a wall with a giant rat in Jersey. That rat looks fantastic as it basks in the blinking glow of the marquee for Vinny Italian Gourmet on the streets in the Newark night below.
That scene alone can stand as their American iconic moment for the US Tapes, but Fatheat and TransOne documented a number of golden moments on their trip this winter to New York, Wynwood, LA, and Las Vegas. Travel with them as they try to square the television mythology of modern America with the one they are encountering in all its ridiculous free-wheeling self satisfied unreflective emotional consumerist funkified freedom*. Standby for sonic blasts from the cultural pulp soundbook and prepare for a celebrity visit.
Slyly they observe and sample and taste and catalogue the insights by traversing the main stage and the margins, smartly not taking it too seriously, finding plenty of places for wide-eyed wonder and wiseguy sarcasm. Steeped in graffiti history with mad skillz themselves, this is all an adventure. Generous of heart, they also share it with you.
“And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced.”
~ from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra
Every day since the shootings of artists and journalists at the Charlie Hebdo offices on January 14, 2015, dancer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier has made sure to dance for a minute or more. It sounds like a good idea.
“Without editing or effects, in the place and state of mind I find myself that day, with no special technique, staging, clothing, or makeup, nothing but what is there,” she says on her website.
“I dance inside or outside, in public or private places, alone or with others, strangers or people I know, sometimes friends.
I dance as protesters demonstrate, to effect a living poetry, to act through sensitivity against the violence of certain aspects of the world.
This is the solution I found: an action to my own measure, a concrete, repeated action that may redraw lines, disrupt the design, shake up the norms.”
Here she is in Paris on Esperance Street in front of a mural by Street Artist Seth.
All the subversive drama of a terrorist cell, all the color of Mardi Gras, all the pomp and ceremony of an Olympic triathlon. Wielding the long-handled roller like a javelin in the hands of Järvinen, weight lifting multiple backpacks full of paint cans, climbing and jumping walls with speed and dexterity, the 1UP team goes for the gold.
Debuting today on BSA is the flaming new 1UP crew video directed by the ingenious Selina. Slicing the streets with the drone camera like a hot knife through butter, she follows the unruly yet highly organized vandals from overhead in a manner more melodic than menacing as Miles lines up one shot after another in this instantly classic continuous thread of aerosol mayhem.
Passing the aerosol can like a baton, this relay race puts 1UP over the finish line while many rivals would have just blasted out of the blocks. But will those Olympian circles turn into golden handcuffs before the closing ceremony?
A quick overview to catch you up on the 7 most recent pieces attributed to Banksy in Paris. He’s said to be creating work more attuned to the plight of migration, but others have observed it is a return to the classic Banksy sarcastic sweetness that has characterized the clever sudden missives he has delivered since he began. See Butterfly Art News’ coverage here: Paris: Banksy for World Refugee Day
It’s an Italian movie directed by Luchino Visconti in 1960, yes. It is also the name of a crew of Berlin graffiti/installation artists whose satirical interventions play on issues propriety and property – and on social experiments that dupe the media, the public, and banks.
Did they really set up an apartment inside the subway? Is that really the tracks and wall of a metro inside a gallery? Is that Wagner playing in the mobile war arcade set up in the Christmas market? Are those hand grenades being lobbed by children? Is the bank facade blinking red every 20 seconds?
Rocco und seine Brüder (Rocco and His Brothers) have you engaged. Now you have to answer the questions.
The Uruguayan Street Artists/muralist Florencia Durán and Camilo Nuñez are “Colectivo Licuado” and here in the middle of Oviedo in Northern Spain to create a new mural for the Parees fest this September. As is their practice they study the culture that they are visiting and create an allegory that is familiar to the community, if still rather mystical.
In this case they visit Colectivo Licuado & Nun Tamos Toes for a visit of great cultural exchange – sharing sketches, songs, and learning the history of women’s roles in traditional Asturian culture. The resulting mural project is collaborative in nature and powerful in person.
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
Chernobyl is a nuclear disaster that figures profoundly into the modern age – and for centuries into the future.
Today not so many people talk about this man-made horror that killed a Russian town and chased out its survivors in 1986 just 90 kilometers northeast of Kiev. Called the most disastrous nuclear accident in history, it evacuated 115,000 and spread a radioactive cloud around the Earth, with European neighbors like Scandinavia, Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France and the UK detecting the effects of radiation for years afterward. Three scientists at The New York Academy of Sciences have estimated that over time the number of people killed by effects from the meltdown was almost a million.
Because of the nature of radiation, Chernobyl has been estimated to not be safely habitable for about 20,000 years.
A short documentary today taking us through last autumns On October 7th in Marseille, France in collaboration with Galerie Saint Laurent and Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo as they presented Matière Noire. A massive collection of individual installations that took over the top floor of an exhibition space normally used for shops, Borondo’s influence in the selections is throughout, a story told in three acts on Projection, Perception and Interpretation.
“When I was just a baby, my Mama told me, ‘Son, always be a good boy, don’t ever play with guns.’ But I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash sings with some bravado in Folsom Prison Blues on an album released 50 years ago this year. Street Artist Shepard Fairey honors the album and here in Sacramento, California to raise consciousness about the outrageously high rate of incarceration here. “The United States has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of it’s prisoners,” he says, making you question the system in the Land of the Free.
No. 5
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk/”Wasteland Wanderers”
This week we feature a couple of new film pieces from the Ukraine based duo of Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoschuk which fairly present an insightful treatise on a particular flavor of Post-Graffiti. Think of it as a two volume textbook and your professors will guide you through the darkness into the light.
A Dilogy.
“The place tells you what to do,” is a poetic and truthful phrase uttered in “Night” on the relationship a vandal has to an abandoned factory, school, home, medical facility; it is spacial and alchemical.
It is also personal, says the female narrator. “The presence of their absence,” is something that every Wasteland Wanderer will be familiar with, the knowledge and feeling that others have been there before you. The work is undeniably affected, even created in response.
“I’ve started a new series called ‘On the Road’ which looks at life behind the scenes in street art culture,” Doug Gillen tells us about this debut episode. Look forward to Doug’s unique perspective on Street Art festivals, art fairs, and studio visits as he expands to the world of urban contemporary.
Not typically who you think of as a Street Artist, here we see Add Fuel and Doug talk about his first book and you see examples of work from this tile maker who infuses traditional Portuguese techniques and pattern making with pop-modern cultural references and cartoon archetypes.
He has a hat, sunglasses, and he has been creating huge black and white photo installations of people wheat-pasted to the sides of buildings for how long? Surprising to us that Jetsonorama is not more of a household name in Street Art circles – his work is solidly tied to biography and human rights, uses his own photography, and routinely elevates humanity – and has been doing it for some time now.
Why isn’t he in huge museum exhibitions?
Today we have a new video giving you a good look at the work and the artist along with the genuine connection and presence that he has with community, taking the time to share their stories.
“The speed of ruin is just something else,” says Street Artist Vegan Flava, and it’s an exasperating realization. Extrapolated to thinking about the enormous war industry, and there is such a thing, you realize that pouring money year after year into ever more sophisticated and destructive weaponry only results in broken bridges, buildings, water systems, vital infrastructure, lives.
Construction, on the other hand, can be arduous and time consuming, takes vision, planning, collaboration, and fortitude. Like great societies.
How quickly they can be eroded, destroyed.
But since Vegan Flava is creating during this destructive enterprise, you get a glimpse into his creativity, and sense of humor. Similarly the psychographics of this story and how it is told reveal insights into the artist and larger themes.
“A drawing, an idea on a piece of paper, can swiftly grow into something larger, thoughts and actions leading to the next. But creating something is never as fast as to tear it to pieces. The speed of ruin is just something else,” he says.
No. 1
MZM Projects – Kristina Borhes & Nazar Tymoshchuk /”Aesthetic of Eas”
“We wanted everything to occur naturally in this movie. We wanted to achieve spontaneity,” say film makers Kristina Borhes and Nazar Tymoshchuk about their up close look at graffiti writer/abstract painter EAS. In this new film they have captured the creative spirit in action as unobtrusively as they could, allowing the artist to speak – in a way he never does, they say.
Today on BSA Film Friday we’re proud to debut this new portrait by three artists – one painter and two film makers – to encourage BSA readers to take a moment and observe, inside and outside.
Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.
Now screening :
1. Street Vendors in Abidjan with YZ Yseult Digan
2. The Yok & Sheryo: Public Silo Trail. Albany, Australia
3. “Chile Estyle.” Trailer
4. Faith XLVII Talks About Her Installation for “Beyond The Streets”
BSA Special Feature: Street Vendors in Abidjan. YZ Yseult Digan
“I pay attention to the intensity of the gaze and the posture, so the passerby is challenged and seeks to question the project.”
A sociological experiment and intervention on the streets by the French Street Artist YZ takes place in Abidjan and camera work in the crowds allows you to appreciate the action on the street. A city of 4.7 million people and the economic capital of Côte d’Ivoire, the city has a lively culture of street vending that is unregulated and often populated by children.
YZ speaks with the folks she meets who are vending, who she refers to as “girls” although many are women. Her goal is to better understand them, she says, and to create a Street Art campaign of their portraits.
“I realized that their situation was very different from the men. So I wanted to know more about them. So I started the project ‘Street Vendors’,” she says.
The Yok & Sheryo: Public Silo Trail. Albany, Australia
The Yok & Sheryo brought a clever creature across an enormous four tower wall in Albany, Australia as part of a public art program funded by private interests like BHP, the Anglo-Australian multinational mining, metals and petroleum company. The Public Silo Trail is bringing artists like HENSE from the US and Phlegm from the UK to paint Artworks on grain silos, transformer boxes and all sorts of unexpected infrastructure to connect a series of regional towns.
“Chile Estyle.” Trailer
“Every social movement creates a cultural response,” says an organizer from the late 1960s who helps us trace the origins of Chilean Street Art and graffiti to the murals that became a crucial part of public discourse here. “We painted all of Chile for the Allende election campaign.” The trailer for the upcoming movie now in post production features a highlight of INTI and many open discussions of the evolution of graffiti and muralism simultaneously, eventually leading to the fascination for murals that currently reigns.
Faith XLVII Talks About Her Installation for “Beyond The Streets”
Faith leads you to the abandoned spaces and investigations of lives and stories that she often conducts when looking for the ideal places to make her art. “There is almost a holy, sacred feeling in that silence,” she says as she traverses places and stories and brings them together for an alter of sorts in the new exhibition now in Los Angeles called “Beyond the Streets.”
Elfo is a graffiti writer and social commentator whose work intentionally sidesteps traditional notions of style or technical lettering. This …Read More »
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