Ronita Torcato

 The Alliance Française de Bombay has organised the premiere in Mumbai of the documemtary film, Women Are Heroes directed by the award winning French artist and photographer JR at Olive Bandra on Monday,June 30,2011. The film  was screened at Cannes  last year.

"In peacetime women are discriminated, in wartime they are targets," says JR, who has just received the 2011 TED Prize.   It is these women and their courage that he honours through outsized street-art work.

JR is creates what might be called ―pervasive art. Working with a team of volunteers in various urban
environments, he mounts enormous black-and-white photo canvases that spread on the buildings of the
slums around Paris, on the walls in the Middle East, on broken bridges in Africa, and across the favelas of
Brazil. These images become part of the local landscape and capture people’s attention and imagination
around the world.
The genesis of Women are Heroes is in this special project whose story was transformed into a film. In India, he photographed women who are caught between
traditional customs and modern day realities. In Kenya, JR found women who live in chaotic and
unstable conditions.Finally, in Cambodia, he documented the violence of the ultra violent expropriation against households headed by a matriarchal system that attempts to resist the face of real estate giants.

JR has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Biennale de Venice, Tate Modern Museum, and MOCA Museum in Los Angeles. Clearly, he's come a long way from the time he started taking photos when he found a discarded camera on the Paris metro at age 17.
He  believes art should be for everyone and exhibits freely in the streets to communicate messages via the walls. His oeuvre  mixes Art and Action, spotlighting commitment, freedom, and identity.

One of his most interesting projects took place in 2007, when he created Face 2 Face. This was the
biggest illegal photo exhibition ever, where huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians  ( a rabbi, imam and priest ) were posted face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on the both sides of the separation wall.  A
But through all these provocative and unusual exhibitions, JR is working on a wider and greater project
raising questions.
The 2011 TED Prize is  an award granting $100,000 and something much bigger: a wish to change the
world with the support of the TED community.