Sunday, March 22, 2009

Art after Crisis

Art After Crisis is a website by traveling writer Chris Keulemans. Ever since his first visit to wartime Sarajevo, he has been fascinated by the way artists reinvent their work, their city and their life after a period of war or dictatorship.
The next year, Keulemans will continue his trips through these cities. Sarajevo, Sofia, Algiers, Beirut, Prishtina, Tirana, Jakarta, Kabul, Buenos Aires, New York, Baghdad...
Along the way, all the material he collects will be on the site. Travel stories, audio interviews, video shots, the photographs of his girlfriend and co-traveler Riette Mellink. And of course, the new art of all these cities itself.
Each city tells its own story through the artists who live there. But it seems that art also follows universal patterns when reinventing the place it comes from: from the original euphoria through the emotional backlash to the emergence of truly new places and ideas. Check out the Beirut Metro Map, the Tirana pyramid, the erotic imagination of Jakarta, the Anne Frank of Sarajevo and all the others...

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