Art challenges Tunisian revolutionaries

Al Jazeera reports:

A crowd has gathered to ponder the black-and-white photographs which have been pasted across the face of building that was, until recent, the local offices of the former president’s much-loathed party.

“I have no idea what these photos mean. Do you know?” Meddeb Nejeb, a high school teacher, asks Al Jazeera.

He might be yet to grasp the meaning of the photographs, but Nejeb wants to know more.

For the artists behind what is one of the most ambitious contemporary street art projects to vibrate the Arab world, the artwork is about replacing the once all-pervasive presidential photography with mosaics of ordinary, anonymous Tunisians who rose up against their government.

The group are using street art to kick-start conversations and to challenge their compatriots to see the familiar in a new, post-revolutionary, light.

In the spirit of people-power, the project, titled “INSIDE OUT: Artocracy in Tunisia”, features a hundred ordinary Tunisians, putting their images where only presidents once hung. The portraits were taken by six Tunisian photographers, in collaboration with the renowned French street artist known as JR and other international artists.

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