filmed by JEJ for FACADES TV

A night to raise awareness & funds to fight cardiac desease.

This red carpet event gala dinner is the second annual 'Generous People Ball' held in Cannes for the benefit of The Heart Fund.

Attended by the likes of Tom Bernard (Sony pictures co-founder), Leonardo Dicaprio, Victoria Silvstedt, Paris Hilton, and various athletes/sportsmen, other actors and actresses, and models... 

filmed by JEJ for FACADES TV

Cash & Rocket tour - Chopard closing dinner

Arizona Muse, Natalie Imbruglia, Michelle Rodriguez, Chloe Green, Ashley Graham, Jo

Wood, Jodie Kidd, Selita Ebanks, Yasmin Mills,

attend finale party which concludes tour through four European cities in luxury cars.

Hotel Martinez, La Croisette, Cannes, France

20 images below all shot by MC

(bigger images of selected art works are to be found in FACADES' Art Section 'Art for Peace')

Turning guns into gold for world peace is an unlikely mission for a British soldier in Afghanistan. But watching teenage Afghan soldiers decorate their AK-47s “putting glitter tape and roses on them” gave Bran Symondson, serving in the reserve force in 2009, the idea to give decommissioned Kalashnikovs to top British artists to turn into art and then auction them for world peace organisation Peace One Day. With its founder Jeremy Gilley, Jude Law and Damien Hirst on board, it could hardly fail to succeed, and raised over £400,000.

The results were the most talked about unprecedented high profile art event of the Summer, AKA PEACE, a benefit auction of de-commissioned AK-47s re-imagined by 23 globally recognised artists including, along with Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Sam Taylor-Wood and Jake and Dinos Chapman, presented by Peace One Day and auctioneers Phillips de Pury. It was preceded by a dramatic, theatrically lit and designed ICA exhibition labelled by The Sunday Times “The Gun Show” with the only message for mankind that matters, to stop the wars invented by the arms industry and start working for peace. It was a triumph for Bran Symondson, who is also a photographer and Amnesty International Media Award Winner, and one of the 23 artists. His own gun “Commodities” was “covered in Dollar Bills, the currency of the world, with the spoils of War loaded into the magazine.” 

But to be an artist, and be given an AK-47 assault rifle from a war torn region of the world that has been used to kill, decommissioned or not, proved quite shocking. Even for Laila Shawa from Gaza, Palestine  “the most fought over country in history,” who like Bran Symondson has experience with handling AK-47s for self-protection, it proved a challenge. “While cleaning my gun I found lumps of congealed blood in the barrel which made my decision compelling to turn it into a gilded jewelled object that can only be useless and cover it in butterflies which represent the souls of the victims who were killed by this gun.”

You can see Laila Shawa’s “Where Souls Dwell” along with 5 others on the northbound Northern Line platform at Old Street, and Bran Symondson’s gun on the southbound Bakerloo Line platform at Regents Park, displayed as posters of photographs by Bran Symondson currently being exhibited in the London Underground by Art Below. www.artbelow.co.uk