IRONIC ICONOGRAPHY

This project was created around the research conducted for my Honour's dissertation in 2009. In South Africa, at this time, the image of Che Guevara was incredibly popular in mainstream fashion, being used on T shirts, bags and other accessories. As a fairly polarising historical figure, I wondered why Guevara's image would be adopted by popular culture. Did the individuals wearing his image know who he was or anything about his ideology? Inspired by what I thought to be an absurd conflation of Guevara's socio-political views, modern capitalism and fast fashion, I created images conveying a blatant disparity of symbols. The archetypal 1950's American housewife - emblematic of the "ideal" Western and Capitalist lifestyle - wearing symbols and images of the most infamous Fascist and Communist leaders in history.

-Shari Tamar Akal