I JUST WANT TO SEE HAPPY FACES Book 3
A serie of three books which tell the story of hiding violent news images, like torture or the tortured in dictatorships. I do, living in the western world hide those images. But the dictators themselves want to hide those images as well. Each one of us for their own reasons.
I made the choice to tell this story using three dictators who ruled around the same period of time, but on entirely different continents and societies. Mao Zedong of China conducted a communist regime, Idi Amin Dada Oumee of Uganda a military regime and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran a religious one.
In line with these three different people, societies and regimes I wanted to show that there is no difference, they all torture and they all try to hide the images.
These three books are all different, in terms of layout, size, paper, typeface and binding method. But in all three books there is a lot of hiding going on, each book in a different way. The red text that reoccurs in every book is written from the point of view of the dictator; what are his motives to hide?
Khomeini:
The literally encapsulation by the color black. I am hiding the book within its own pages. The black is a reference to the chador and the burqa (since the arrival of Khomeini and the start of the Islamic Revolution mandatory again) which literally hides a female.
Furthermore the images themselves are being absorbed by the amount of space. They somehow drown and are hidden in there own pages.
They are there and yet they don't get the attention that they should get.
Willem de Kooning Academy
June 11
Series of books
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