It was by no means too late to leave the room. No matter how desperately I needed to be at the ‘tunnels’, I overheard that painful breakup story for too long to act indifferent in front of the man at the other side of the thin drywall, who had just confessed “I’m here because my heart is broken; my relationship hasn’t ended yet, but I can see the end approaching.”
I was already hunching in embarassemnt at my side of the press room. Although from there neither the artist or the interviewee could see me invading their privacy, like I had invaded the privacy of three more heartbroken people before him.
“A Collective Heartbreak” is how Addam Yekutieli – aka Know Hope – has inflected this year’s theme of Nuart Festival: Power in the Public Sphere. He addressed complex, current issues through the familiar emotions that we all recognise –specifically: heartbreak.
And he did so by creating a dialectic exchange between private and collective, intimate and public, by humanising politics through the emotions that we all feel in our personal experiences.
From a series of interviews with locals, the artist extrapolated several aphoristic sentences and painted them on walls around Stavanger.
Then, he rearranged and connected them to even more phrases to shape a new collective story, which was projected onto a rectangular bucket of black ink for the Nuart indoor exhibition ‘Rise Up!’.
Each heartbreak opened a broader meaning and translated into something we can all relate to.
The individual struggle became universal.
>> While in Stavanger, I’ve updated my STAVANGER Street Art Guide: check it out!
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