Beauty for a Better World

At the moment we're all in a dark place due to the COVID-19 virus, a lot of creative people are self-isolating, many of us are anxious and/or lonely and all of us can use a bit (or preferably, a lot!) of beauty to cheer each other up. We therefore propose to re-baptize this forced ‘self-isolation’ to ‘self-retreat’ and to start looking for beauty as a much-needed creative response and antidote to the current situation. 

In the summer of 2001, creative platform for social change Beauty Without Irony was founded, which - inspired by the HIV virus - four years later gave birth to the successful global activist campaigns for Designers Against AIDS. At the time we asked hundreds of artists, designers and other creatives to send us a photo, video, poem, music or other work that represented pure beauty to them.  Read more about our history in this interview in i-D Magazine:

https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/59bgva/beauty-without-irony-is-the-charity-using-fashion-to-make-the-world-a-better-place?

Our goal was simple: inspire people and make them forget about their daily problems for a while. And it resulted in a beautiful exhibition, a digital platform and later the ‘DAA First Decade’ book, one half of which featured the beautiful images sent to us by creatives for Beauty without  Irony.

See the book here:

https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/artsthread-wp-uploads/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/28093927/DAA_BOOK.pdf

At the moment we're all in a dark place due to the COVID-19 virus, a lot of creative people are self-isolating, many of us are anxious and/or lonely and all of us can use a bit (or preferably, a lot!) of beauty to cheer each other up. We therefore propose to re-baptize this forced ‘self-isolation’ to ‘self-retreat’ and to start looking for beauty as a much-needed creative response and antidote to the current situation.  We can all dig out work of our digital archive, or create something new from what we have in the confinement that we are currently subjected to.

We plan to do a curated innovative digital platform exhibition with all the works of beauty as an antidote to the uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 challenge and if possible to also make a book or dedicated magazine afterwards to help fund the new activist ‘Creatives for a Better World’ online platform that we were preparing to launch when the virus hit us. 

Will you help us and join in this curated collective response? And can you ask other true creatives from around the world to take part as well? All you need to do is look in your archives to find something that represents what YOU think is beautiful.  Anything goes, so you can submit images, photography, artwork, illustration, poetry, video, music and visual gif artwork ... Or you can of course also create something entirely new, or make a re-edit of unpublished personal work, if you prefer that.

Register, join this Beauty For A Better World art project and upload your work. Here's how:

https://www.addictlab.com/storage/app/public/work/pdf_file/BWI_2_1585745615.pdf

In case of technical problems, please contact: jan@addictlab.com for assistance.

Let’s bring pure beauty back!

Kindest regards,

Ninette Murk (creative director)

Jens Laugesen (advisor & editor)

For your work and description: please allow us to understand the personal story and creative ideas behind the work. What is/are the name(s) of submitting creative/s and/or artist/s? Who participated in creating the submitted work? What is the story behind the submitted work? Why did you submit this piece of work specifically?

For further use: we will contact you to get a signed consent form to confirm that you own the copyright for the submitted work and that you will allow the Charity Project ‘Beauty for A Better World’ to publish the work in the context of the planned on/off line exhibition, book/magazine edition, online social media campaign and/or press.

Useful links: