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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

JR: Eye to the World

June 4 – July 3, 2021
5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ, United Kingdom

In 2004, in response to major riots, the French photographer JR installed huge images of young African immigrants in the suburbs of Paris. A year later he traveled East, where he fixed cheerful photographs of Israelis and Palestinians arm-in-arm along the dangerous Israeli-Palestinian border. Over the years, JR’s black-and-white photographic canvases and installations have turned up in all kinds of places—Paris’s Marais, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, and the U.S.–Mexican border. In this exhibition, selections from several bodies of work by JR are on display. Each portrait holds myriad stories about borders, politics, and cultural identity. —E.C.

JR, “The Wrinkles of the City, Los Angeles, Jim Budman,” 2011 © JR, Courtesy of Pace Gallery.