Mind the Heart! Project 2009 - ongoing
What / who is Mind the Heart?
Mind the Heart! (est. 2009) is a worldwide art project by Israeli artists Maya Gelfman & Roie Avidan (poet and photographer).
In the past decade, the project has reached more than 100 cities across 5 continents:
from New York to Bangkok, Sydney to London, from the Israel National Museum and the National Cathedral
in Washington D.C. to orphanages in Kenya and Uganda.
The project works at the intersection of art and social awareness. It engages the public domain with the aim of getting both the artists and the audiences to be fully present, to ‘be here now’. This is achieved through tangible street art but expands on that to working in nature and public interactions. The works are made with soft materials that clash with the concrete jungle. They deal with the power of choice, the cyclical nature of things, acknowledging wounds in order to heal, and interconnectedness.
The "Serendipity Experiment" 2017-2021
In 2017, Gelfman & Avidan chose to forgo their established life in Tel Aviv for the sake of creating a new artistic experiment.
They gave away their possessions and took a 21-year-old van as a home and studio. Then they invited strangers to dictate their schedule, route, and next encounter, while creating site-and-time-specific works that reflected those experiences.
The experiment took 4 years, 100,000 km, and 45 States, 12 lectures, 8 exhibitions, hundreds of works and thousands of human interactions, all across the USA.