BRAZIL / ISRAEL: Multidisciplinar Artist ALANDER ESPECIE – Paintings, Installations and Macramé

The artist ALANDER ESPECIE is a sculptor, designer and installation creator whose practice of intensive work is based on traditional weaving and macramé with curiousity about how the search for ancestry and his own path intertwine. Born in Brazil and after having an art period with his design art, he moved to Isreal where he discovered abstract painting. A multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural artist. Check out the interesting interview and his great artworks!

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KUWAIT: Streetart Kuwait City – Urban Art in the Capital of the Arab Gulf Emirate

The city of Kuwait (in Arabic: الكويت al-Kuwait or مدينة الكويت Madīnat al-Kuwait) is the capital and also the largest city of the Emirate of Kuwait. Located on the coast of the small state on the shores of the Persian Gulf, the metropolis of about 3 million inhabitants is the cultural, political and economic center of the country. Of course as everywhere in the world and like in all places on this globe, urban art can also be found here. It may not be that much the typical graffiti letters, but beautiful murals and wonderful wall drawings definitely.

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ISRAEL: Zeev Engelmayer – Transformation into a Super Heroine – Becoming Shoshke

This is the story of Shoshke. A super heroine brought to life. And it’s probably one of the weirdest and funniest but above all most motivating stories here on this channel so far. The creator himself, namely the Israeli artist Zeev Engelmayer repeatedly takes on the role of his self-designed comic super heroine. Then he just becomes Shoshke in a special costume. An idea for an artistic performance has developed into an unbridled dynamic of its own and an independent character within Zeev’s psyche. That´s Shoshke. It´s not schizophrenic, more like a symbiosis. Zeev loves it and he frequently is setting her free. Because Shoshke makes always and every few days crazy but fabulous actions. Currently, according to Marker Magazine “She” is one of the 100 most influential people in Israel. And we need some more Shoshkes on this world! She fights for the good and important things. Take some time for this article. It’s going to be strange and complex, but for sure as well funny and super interesting.

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ISRAEL: Painter and Muralist Tamir Shefer – Iconic Mayan Comic Masks

At the beginning of the year, the artist Tamir Shefer from Tel Aviv visited Frankfurt for the fantastic exhibition „Echos” at the Kunstverein Familie Montez. Works by him and nine other artists were shown, five of them from Israel, five from Germany. Tamir paints on canvases but also has a special preference for streetart and large-scale wall design in urban spaces. In the gallery rooms of the exhibition, he even painted some works directly and freshly on the interior façade. Of course we interviewed the creative artist!

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ISRAEL: Photographer Dana Arieli – The Phantom Project

If you really want to get over a trauma you have to deal especially with the painful parts and even more difficult is to accept and admit own failures and unpopular reasons or relations. To ask questions and open a discussion about it is a start and can be done in many different ways. As well with a kind of informative and artistic help to sociocultural psychotherapy. The photographer and historian Dana Arieli from Israel captures the relics of the past and highlights the different aspects of dealing or not-dealing with its remains. As a history professor she is continuously introducing ancient times and gone moments to the present.

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OMAN: Adventurous Wadi Shab

A wadi is a valley or river that often leads to water only after heavy rains. Surprising flash floods can be caused by distant thunderstorms that fall in the correspondingly large catchment area of the wadi. The stay in Wadis with steep banks, but also in very wide wadis can become life-threatening in such cases. We went on a exploring tour to see some of those wadis, in summer time there is definitly no danger, maybe you could fall asleep and drown while relaxing in warm chilled basins and swimming pool like valleys of the wadis. One of the those famous and fantastic wadis is Wadi Shab, which we visited on our journey.

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TURKEY: Painter Ali Zülfikar – Terrified faces

Faces speak volumes. From the facial expressions and behavior of the people one can read very easily emotional expressions, but we perceive this mostly in dynamic movement. Reading a life story from an image is already more difficult. Here it is also up to the respective creator to design or record the whole accordingly. The Turkish-born painter Ali Zülfikar is master in this field.

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OMAN: Sultanate Streetart

With this country we were really faced with a whole new challenge. Find graffiti and street art in Oman? … Hmmm … is there anything like that? First of all, we can say that so much can be found in architectural art and in a beautiful natural landscape. But with murals it looks more difficult. The whole sultanate consists almost entirely of desert and in the cities everything is kept very „uniform“ and regulated. Nevertheless, Oman is one of the more open and liberal countries on the Arabian Peninsula, worth a visit. And we still found some graffiti stuff, but then you have to look very carefully.

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ISRAEL: Streetart Florentin

Florentin is actually a part of Tel Aviv, we wrote already about its street art. But Florentin deserves a special part about the graffiti and the particular surrounding. The walls are covered with nice artwork and the extraordinary mix with the industrial buildings is phenomenal. It is as well a very interesting place if you want to directly observe and study some kind of half-functioning but still developing gentrification. Some streets are in perfect hipster manner, there are chick bars and nice cafes, a lot of alternative and different styles. But just around the corner there is as well the factory quarter, between dirty roads and market streets all over. Its a fantastic mix. There the stylo cafes, on the other side is one car repair shop next to each other with a scrap head in front of the place. Just the architectural commingling is fantastic.

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ISRAEL: Streetart Tel Aviv

We sneaked away again during the cold months. Overwintering somewhere far more in the south, definitly very recommendable. Of course we brougth a nice collection of street art pictures and graffiti material from the place we went to: Israel. As well we went for an interview to the since 10 years existing Montana can shop in Tel Aviv. The country has a lot to offer and is worth an explorative visit.

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