Biography
Shahak Shapira (Hebrew: שחק שפירא, born 1 April 1988) is a German-Israeli artist, comedian, author and musician. He is currently based in Berlin, Germany.
In early 2017, Shapira launched the controversial online art project "Yolocaust", combining selfies from the Berlin Holocaust Memorial with footage from Nazi extermination camps. After noticing numerous instances on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tinder and Grindr of people posting smiling selfies with the memorial as a backdrop, and photos of themselves doing yoga or otherwise jumping or dancing on the memorial's stone slabs, Shapira decided to ironically point out the jarring disconnect of taking such inappropriately cheerful pictures in such a somber setting. The project gained worldwide attention, a video about the project by the online news channel AJ+ was viewed 78 million times on Facebook.
In August 2017, Shapira sprayed 30 homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and racist tweets outside Twitter's German headquarters in Hamburg after the social network failed to remove the offensive hate posts from its platform. Explaining his project, named "#HeyTwitter", in a YouTube video, Shapira claimed to having reported around 300 tweets to the company within six months, receiving only nine responses from the company, each rejecting the suggestion that the tweets were a violation of the company's terms of service. After the majority of tweets were not removed, Shapira used washable chalk-spray to take the hateful tweets into the real world and confront Twitter, gaining worldwide attention to his project and Twitter's hate speech policies.
He released the comedic, urban music style song "Humussexual" 2019 along with a music video.
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