Free Plus
2023
A project in collaboration with the Constantnow during the Wecandancefest festival.
For this project, I asked the audience to join me in the process of painting. While I used all colors but no white, the audience painted with white only.
Names, hearts, shapes, slogans, and all kinds of other symbols that we usually see in public spaces were scattered in white color all over my canvas and I could feel all the active and passive impressions of thousands of participants; between 30,000 visitors, I estimate that 500 people worked on the two canvases, and what a wonderful achievement that is.
On the second day, I felt that this process is like a metaphor for the life of an artist — one who continues to work for decades with all this intense pressures from the outside. Imagine you’re working on your canvas for 2 hours, and one drunk person comes and smears ‘I LOVE MONIKA’ all over your work. So huge! They leave to dance, and you‘re staying there with some words on your beautiful shades of green, and you don‘t know what to do with it.
It's like our life, isn‘t it? The art market, government and new laws, academies, parents and friends, capitalism, and so on.
The project happened with the support and invitation of the Constantnow and the Smakgent.
https://smak.be/en/news/freetown
https://www.theconstantnow.com/bio
Photos by @fateme_towhid
