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POLITICKIN’

Open Graphic Studio, Museum of the City of Skopje
November 2023

The Politickin’ Cycle is comprised of works in which the author—intentionally or not—deals with themes that have political background or are a commentary on certain imposed political and pseudo-political situations in our contemporary culture. In standard English, the term politicking designates any self-centered activity undertaken for political reasons or ends, irrespective of moral and legal principles. In other words, the Machiavellian “the end justifies the means”. It is either used neutrally in diplomatic lingo or more critically, in the sense of ‘playing politics’, ‘pseudo-politics’, or ‘quasi-politics’. But in African-American (Ebonics) slang, the same term politickin’  is used to denote wasting time in endless political discussions while real work is left undone and the status quo is left unchanged.

The works explore:

  • the concept of play in art, culture, and in every aspect of human existence—the concept of homo ludens;
  • the interchangeability of roles that the players accept, as shown, for instance, by the Stanford prison experiment (1971) at the Psychology Department of Stanford University;
  • the destiny of the visual language of graphic design in contemporary marketing, web-communication, and in our global market society in general;
  • the amortization of visual and graphic symbols that used to represent big humanistic ideas after the human politicking psyche had chewed, digested, and recreated them into something completely and oxymoronically opposite;
  • the opportunities of graphic design to be the right-hand discipline to the art of printmaking, and of the techniques of serial production and mass sales to be tools for spreading and glorification—instead of devaluation—of artistic messages and values.

The prints

Inside the printmaking studio