Art Works

Political Marks

How are political icons created? What is the role of graphic design within social and political systems? These were some key questions I tried to explore as part of my Masters studies.

It turns out that during the days of ancient Rome, emperors’ images and faces were carved in marble and stone, and were placed in the squares of cities and roads, thus effectively “marking” their territories, in a process that resembles the branding process. The same thing happened with stamps, when states associated with empires painted a profile silhouette of a king or leader in one of the corners of the stamp. I summarized my research on this subject in a book called Political Marks.

One of the outcomes of the study was to create six profiles of contemporary leaders, whom I called: “Modern Emperors”: Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany), Barack Obama (44th U.S. President), Benjamin Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister), Vladimir Putin (President of Russia), Xi Jinping (President of the People’s Republic of China) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (President of Iran). In my attempts I have designed fictitious postal-stamps with a political message. I placed the silhouettes of the leaders on stamps of countries that are officially not under their auspices, but in reality exercise great influence over them. Another outcome was to produce six wooden stamps, which give additional meaning to the word marking. The stamps and their use were exhibited in London and Tel Aviv.