Free art idea #61

Halim Madi
Wrong for years
Published in
2 min readMay 21, 2018
Side by side pictures of the same person “stunningly beautiful” with clothes on and “disappointing” when naked

This piece is part of an ensemble called “The story of flesh”.

The story of flesh is a body of work looking at flesh as a medium for narrative. Our love handles, our muscles, our visible or invisible veins, our scars, the hair we’ve lost, the white hair that remains and spreads, the wrinkles and the sun marks all tell our story in their own way.

In this piece, the artist is to take pictures of people who look “stunningly beautiful” with their clothes on and “disappointing” with their clothes off.

  1. This series is meant to break a basic conditioning: When we see a handsome man or a beautiful woman in a commercial or in real life, an automatic expectation around what their bodies might look like arises. We’re often disappointed when we don’t see bulging muscles, popping veins a certain breast size or shape, a six pack abdomen and instead, love handles, soft bellies or basic musculature.
  2. This series is meant to re-calibrate down the importance of body image and the weight of expectations around body appearance as they relate to beauty. Hence, the artist is to take the photos in the highest definition possible. The surprising power of HD is the pixel density’s ability to draw human attention and somehow impose respect for the potential person in the photo. Pixel density is, today, a status signal.

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