In terms of appropriation, I was mostly interested in the everyday pictures we see on a daily basis like advertisements, posters, and political advertisements and turning them into pieces of art-work.
For my work, I chose the Hungarian government’s propaganda campaign against the Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. While it might be unheard in the UK, but the figure and especially the face of Soros became kind of iconic or anti-iconic in Hungary due to the current government’s attempt to demonize him through an excessive poster campaign and also trying to shut-down the Central European University founded by Soros in 1992 and passing legalizations to force non-governmental organisations to declare themselves “foreign-funded” making a very xenophobic atmosphere in the country.
The poster campaign includes the face of Soros printed on a poster with a text saying “Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh!” The posters themselves are put in metro-stations, or the walls of buildings as giant posters, and even on the floor of busses, metro-trains, and trams often more than one next to each other, just to illustrate how un-subtle this campaign is.
The Hungarian government is targeting Soros because he spent a lot of money on open society foundations and on civil organizations to help reduce the poverty in Hungary and in other post-communist countries in eastern-Europe.
Understandably many Hungarian Jews are upset and find this very anti-semitic mainly because Soros has Jewish roots and the posters are often becoming the targets of Anti-semitic vandalism and graffiti, and the posters on the floors of Budapest trams were deliberately placed so passengers would have to tread on Soros’s face which brings back many disturbing memories in holocaust survivors.
For my work, I took the face of Soros from the posters and printed it on different colored papers influenced by Andy Warhol’s prints of Marilyn Monroe to illustrate how much it pushed into people’s face and everyday life and how un-subtle this campaign is.
REFERENCES
BBC News. (2017). How a university became a battle for Europe’s identity. [online]
Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39780546 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
BBC News. (2017). Hungary vilifies financier with posters. [online] Available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe- 40554844 [Accessed 7 Dec. 2017].
Herszenhorn, D., Baume, M., Ariès, Q., Ariès, Q. and Bayer, L. (2017). Hungary’s Freudian
political fight: Orbán vs Soros. [online] POLITICO. Available at:
https://www.politico.eu/article/hungarys-freudian- political-fight- orban-vs- soros/ [Accessed 7
Dec. 2017].