Not for Sale
Hady Sy
Hady Sy, who was born in 1964, is French, with a Lebanese mother and a Senegalese father, and is proud of his background, particularly as his father, an eminent theologian, raised his children to show respect for others, for their religions and their cultural differences.
But as a young student in Beirut in the grips of civil war, he had to cope with increasing rivalry, violence, hatred and even death.
Since the time when he was taken hostage and threatened with execution, he has seen the image of the deadly weapon pointed at his temple, and has been going over and over the image in his mind.
Hady Sy has used all his talent as an artist to serve a cause, speaking out against murders committed in the name of blind religious fanaticism.
Preview
In his project Not for Sale, he has presented what could be seen as a detailed inventory of the most common and most deadly weapons used in wars ever since World War I. He adopted a scientific approach and the process took him to Interpol, the crimes department with the Belgian police, the medical imaging department at Henri Poincaré hospital in Garches near Paris, and the Cuigniez Clinic. He has built up a catalogue (almost a sales catalogue) of these weapons, complete with a detailed analysis of their main features and achievements, going so far as to take X-ray pictures of them, so as to include an inside view of both the mechanisms and misdeeds they can produce. By moving into the very heart of these weapons, from the American M1 used by the GIs when they landed in Normandy, to the AK47, the Kalashnikov that has inspired such awe in recent wars, Hady Sy exposes the terror they produce, doing so as a means of annihilating such terror.
Agnès de Gouvion Saint-Cyr, Inspector- General for Photography (French Ministry of Culture)
Commissioned by the French National Center for Visual Arts (Ministry of Culture and Communication).
The X-rays were made jointly with the criminal police office in Brussels, Belgium, the medical imaging department (Professor Vallée and Dr. Le Breton) at Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Garches, the French National Army Museum, and Cuignez Clinic.
