MIXING GENDER ICON, 2025
Arzhel Prioul
mural, street art
This former hotel, previously converted into an emergency shelter, closed its doors permanently in March 2025. While vacant now, its manager remains onsite for security as the building awaits demolition.
Along the river-facing façade, life-sized pictograms of people cut from brown kraft paper are pasted along the walkway. These figures remix standardized signage like restroom icons, pedestrian symbols, and safety figures into new configurations. Some wear dresses, others pants. The signs blur across gender, body, and role. Heads and torsos are mismatched. The anonymous becomes specific. The generic becomes uncanny.
The paper figures act as ghosts or stand-ins for the many lives that passed through the building, first as a hotel, later as a shelter. Migrants, workers, tourists, and families—these temporary occupants are given a poetic form that is both visible and barely there. The brown kraft paper holds a kind of vulnerability, like a paper lantern: ephemeral, grounded, handmade.
Installed against a wall of concrete and glass, the icons mirror the bodies of passersby and create a quiet dialogue between past and present. They do not shout. They remain flat, silent, staring back.
The silhouettes along the façade attempt to recall the human presence that once animated its corridors.
Gallery
About the Artist
Arzhel Prioul’s work is grounded in the poetic détournement of public signage. Through the re-appropriation of pictographs, logos, and institutional visual language, he reclaims space from the dominant forces of consumerism and bureaucracy. His practice treats branding not as a neutral language but as a tool of containment, one that prescribes behavior and identity. Like a kind of graphic Robin Hood, Prioul removes these signs from their original context and transforms them into gestures of collective agency. By embedding his works into the built environment, he interrupts passive visual consumption and instead offers a renewed, inhabitable narrative.
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