“Through Different Eyes”, a performance art project piece Copenhagen-based theatre company Global Stories, has been pulled from the Malmö Festival in Sweden after more 200 Swedes signed a petition accusing the project of racism.

The project invited festival attendees to have their appearance altered with make-up and costuming in order to assume a different race or gender, in hopes that participants would gain perspective from their new experience.

“We apologise if people feel aggrieved and we have taken the criticism seriously. This part of the programme took an unexpected turn and we have decided to cancel it,” Malmö Festival organiser Pella Ström wrote on the festival’s website.

“Through Different Eyes” project leader Morten Nielsen felt that the intent of the project was to celebrate diversity, rather than marginalize people of color, he told Danish publication The Local,

“This is a project that celebrates diversity. We work with make-up artists and provide all kinds of transformations: from white to brown, brown to white, man to woman and woman to man. We are also looking in to transforming from young to old to address the age discrimination,”

Nielsen also pointed out that the performance piece might have been interpreted as a “blackface project” due to Swedish media only using images of white participants in darker make-up.

The Local also reports that,

Ström told Berlingske that the cancellation of the project was a sign that Sweden “has advanced much further in the debate on integration and equality than Denmark”.

This controversy comes at an interesting time; the Swedish government recently announced plans to remove all references to race from the country’s legislation, a plan that legislator hope to fully implement by 2015. See some images from the project, taken by Anna Andrea Malzer of Global Stories, below.