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 for the exhibition Verknipt.
My contribution was a homo-erotic visual fiction created through the détournement of images of male soldiers found in the Nazi propaganda magazine Signaal (published from 1940 through 1945). The overall atmosphere of the installation counteracts the initial ideological and propagandist use of these images in fact turning them against themselves.
* This piece was originally exhibited under a different title. All exhibition material includes the original title, however it has been changed to the current one since 2019. |
1. Views of the installation at Warp Contemporary Art Platform, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium, 2018.
"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)
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