The Creative Art of Eli Rezkallah and His Amazing Visual Project on Sexism

I want to introduce you an amazing visual artist-Eli Rezkallah. He has amazing works but especially his one project on gender roles really impressed me.
He was born in Beirut in the 1990s, the times when there was a civil war going on Beirut. He remembers that he and his family did not feel the destruction of the war intensely since they were living in a secluded oasis. His recalls that his family would dress up, put on make-up, throw parties and have fun just to live life as if nothing was happening. However, they had nowhere else to go other than their secluded oasis, so Eli Rezkallah needed to create his own fantastic and colorful visual world to escape that grey reality. He started to publish a visual magazine called "Plastik"(the first visual publication in the Middle East), and later it won many awards such as the “best publication in the middle east” at the Dubai international printing awards.

Let's see some of his works:

If anyone is interested in his 6 minute short but very interesting biography, here is the link also:

IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
I learned about Eli Rezkallah thanks to this project, which is a project that questions modern day sexism by reversing the female and male characters in ad campaings from 1950s and 60s.

I think this is a simple but really powerful way to question modern day sexism and gender roles. Yes, we progressed a lot since the 1950s and nobody dares to launch these kinds of sexist ad campaigns anymore, but the reversed photos still look weird for us since we can't yet think of a man who is not leaving the kitchen, serving his wife or being beaten by her. Because the modified photos still don't feel right, we can't argue that we are fully done with sexism in our modern world.