JR

After Paris, Abu-Dhabi, Tel-Aviv and Ramallah, Inside Out, the participatory art project of JR came to Vevey for Festival Images. The idea was simple: To give everyone a platform in the public space to send a message in an artistic way. In a former department store, visitors could have their portrait taken lying down in a photo booth designed specifically for the Vevey chapter of the project. The picture then swirled down from the third floor of the building and the visitor was invited to paste it on the walls of the Town of Images.

For his new Unframed project, Festival Images and the Musée de l’Elysée invited JR to explore the collections of the Vaud institution – a first for the artist who usually works with his own material. Displayed in monumental format in the public space, the photographs of Nicolas Bouvier, Robert Capa, Mario Giacomelli, Helen Levitt, Man Ray and Hans Steiner, usually preserved in museums, took on new meaning on the facades of the Town of Images. For example, an image of the Cairo mosque captured by Lehnert & Landrock in the 1920s displayed on a 40-meter-high silo, hinted at the 2009 popular referendum forbidding the construction of new minarets on Swiss territory.