For Aghiad Malik, a refugee from Syria, blood had only ever symbolised one thing: death. “It was a nightmare, seeing red on the streets,” he says. “Even to think about blood was horrific.”
But soon it will have another meaning. He is one of around 5,000 people whose blood will be used to create Odyssey, a new work by British artist Marc Quinn that will be displayed outside the New York Public Library from next September . The not-for-profit work intends to shine a spotlight on the refugee crisis while raising $30m (£23m) for charities working to alleviate it.
Odyssey has been three years in the making. What started as a sketch on the back of a chocolate wrapper in 2015 has since developed into a fully realised concept: a pair of cubes, each containing a tonne of frozen blood. One cube will contain the blood of refugees, the other the blood of non-refugees, including celebrities such as Kate Moss, Jude Law and Sir Paul McCartney. But the public will not be told which cube is which, leaving them to ponder the essential similarities we all share as human beings.
“The fundamental point of the sculpture is that under the skin, we’re all the same,” says Quinn, who will also be unaware which cube is which. “You will see two sculptures made from blood but you won’t know who they’re from.”
If the idea sounds simple, then the practicalities have been anything but. To draw blood from 5,000 people, Quinn will set up mini-laboratories in several cities across the world starting from January. He says that he has had to go through medical ethics boards and taken legal advice to make sure everything is conducted with the same professional standards as a clinical trial. Donors will only be required to give as much blood as they feel able to, and the project will be open to all ages and with all kinds of blood conditions.
Taking the project on tour will bring more practical concerns. As the cubes are likely to get damaged if transported as they are, the work will need to be melted down, recast into smaller cubes and refrozen, before being melted down again at the new location and cast once more as large cubes.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
