On-set graffiti: “Homeland is Watermelon” Photo courtesy of Arabian Street Artists.In the summer of 2015, operating under the tongue-in-cheek pseudonym the “Arabian Street Artists”, we hacked the award-winning American TV-series Homeland with graffiti. We were hired to decorate the set of a Syrian refugee camp with authentic “Arabian Street Art” and used the opportunity to critique the show with slogans like “Homeland is racist”, “Homeland is Watermelon” and “There is no Homeland”. The intervention went viral when episode two of season five aired and received worldwide media coverage – people from all over the world found their own reasons to celebrate it.
Our protest addressed wide-spread grievances on the dangers of stereotyping and catalysed a discussion led by the many people negatively affected by the propaganda machine of media and entertainment industries like Hollywood. In an op-ed piece for CNN, we wrote: “[w]hat makes the show dangerous is that it purports to be critical in questioning the motives of American foreign policy, while at the same time perverting the image of other cultures to one perpetuated by the military-industrial complex.” Reporting on the hack further demonstrated how endemic the problem of stereotyping is, as we were described interchangeably as variations of Arab and Muslim graffiti artists – our own diverse identities distorted to fit pre-packaged tropes determined by editorial biases of the numerous media outlets covering the hack.
Three years after our protest opened a world-wide debate, we discovered our own photographic documentation for sale at the Berlin Art Fair without permission or attribution. Nine images of our graffiti were screen-printed in gold by German-American artist David Krippendorff – an “homage” more suitable for the kitsch art markets of 19th-century Munich. He titled the work “This Show Does Not Represent the View of the Artist”, a variation on one of our slogans in singular form.
