72hrs: The Project

BEIRUT: With two professional cameras, a webcam recording every movement and live feeds all over Gemmayzeh’s main street and also a handy cam capturing the audience’s feedback, Kiki Bokassa locked herself in a glass room gallery on Saint Nicholas Stairs and painted continuously for 72 hours non-stop (Friday, April 24, 2009, 10 am until Monday, April 27, 2009, 10 am).
Bokassa wanted to offer a chance to watch a painter in action where the artistic progress and journey on canvas was played live on screen. People were also given the chance to stand outside the gallery’s window and witness hours in the artist’s life in a living space designed for the event.
After the event, Kiki Bokassa will pay tribute to a 1964 Yoko Ono performance. In one of the city theaters, she will wear a painted dress, and ask spectators, each in turn, to cut a piece of this dress (made during the 72-hour performance). The cutting of the painted dress is intended as a pacific protest against all forms of violence anywhere in the world. Half the dress will represent human life, the other half, our environment.

Just a brief profile of Kiki Bokassa:
Born in Paris in 1975, Marie-Ange J.B. Bokassa (alias Kiki) is an autodidact artist of Lebanese and Central-African backgrounds. Kiki has over the past years participated in several exhibitions in Lebanon and overseas. Her paintings are displayed in private collections from the Arabian Gulf to the American Midwest, through metropoles such as New York.
She is also a writer and an active member in society, directly involved in a wide-range of humanitarian causes to which she devotes much of her time. In 2005 she started engaging in several humanitarian efforts, including the creation of non lucrative children’s books and activities such as “Let Me Tell You A Story” publication and “Paint for Peace” workshop. She also holds reading sessions under the umbrella of the Ministry of Culture, and works as an art educator periodically, by training children and volunteers in public schools and public spaces all over the country.

(For further info check this out)