hot military hunks (2018)

​Installation, diptych, 80 x 100 cm (each).
​Magazine cut outs, passe-partout.

​Commissioned by WARP Contemporary Art Platform. 

How is it possible to create with existing imagery a completely new story? How can propaganda and biased journalism influence our daily views? This was the premise behind this piece ​commissioned by the WARP Contemporary Art Platform.

This piece is a homo-erotic visual fiction created through the détournement of the images found in the Nazi propaganda magazine Signaal. Homo-eroticism on this dyptich feeds from a similarities with common themes of gay male porn films, in which youth, whiteness, and virility are valued traits, as well as the dominant Greco-Roman body archetype.

Furthermore, there is a tension on the realization that the Greek heritage of male beauty and Nazi sexual politics overlap and permeate the desires of contemporary dwellers as well. Both images and title suggest what could be research engine results of popular online porno hubs. 

"One of the selected images showed half-naked soldiers playing chess at a beach. The artwork seemed to have diverted the meaning of the chess game; it subverted Nazi body politics by bringing to the fore their ambiguity towards homossexual desire. Paradoxically, the scenes both hid and underlined gay sexual dynamic. [...] The war setting became openly erotic, verging sometimes on the pornographic. Phallic forms were an important part of the scenes - the gun of a tank, a camera looking like a pistol... By discarding the parts of the picture that would take away from the intended message, the camera became a tool for telling 'scientific' truth. Above all, the artwork of Daniel Cabral gave evidence that the truth about sexuality was not a natural given, but that it depended on the ideological angle from which sexual politics was approached. [...]"

(Nezha Haffou, 2018)