BBC International

Campus Mural by 'Israeli Banksy'

Published: November 21, 2009

A street artist known to admirers as the Israeli Banksy has left a mural at a Surrey university campus after a visit to students.
Know Hope, 23, renowned for displaying cardboard cut-out figures in Tel Aviv, spent four days at the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham.

He held a three-day workshop for students as part of a project involving a visit to Tel Aviv by five students.
The documentary they made about the artist was screened during his visit (more)

No Longer Empty, a nonprofit artist collective that temporarily takes over abandoned NYC buildings, is founded on the concept of art in strange places. But when you show up at its current exhibition tonight (51 Bergen St between Court and Smith Sts, Brooklyn; nolongerempty.com), don’t be surprised if there’s more action going on in the elevator than in the rest of the building.

Starting at around 3pm, Giuseppe Stampone, who has scribbled verses from Dante’s Divine Comedy over the elevator shaft walls, will film an hour-long video of Julia Kent playing her cello while in the elevator. Though audience members cannot cram inside during filming (for obvious reasons), Kent will give a more traditional performance at 7pm on the main floor (more)

Italian artist, Giuseppe Stampone transformed the former freight elevator into a major installation which evokes Charon's boat. The boat of Homeric legend carried the souls of the dead across the river Styx which divided the world of the living from those of the dead. Stampone's version carries the visitor through Dante's Divine Comedy:–from the hell of the first floor the elevator follows Dante's writing through purgatory up to the paradise on the third floor with Dante's verses transcribed on the whole expanse of the shaft's walls, replete with illuminated letters. The soulful sounds of Julia Kent's cello accompany the visitor throughout this epic journey.

Julia Kent is a Canadian cellist, best known as an original member of all-cello group Rasputina. She left Rasputina in 1999 and has played cello with a variety of artists and ensembles since then, most notably Antony and the Jonsons. She released her first solo album, Delay, in 2007 (more)