The U.S. television series “Homeland”—widely criticized as Islamophobic and racist—was hacked by three street artists who were hired to paint “authentic” Arabic graffiti for a film set depicting a refugee camp on the Syria/Lebanon border.
The artists staged an intervention by tagging the slogan “Homeland is racist” on the set, which is located just outside of Berlin. Because the production company could not or did not read the Arabic graffiti, the subversive message was featured in a key scene of Season V, Episode II that aired Sunday and depicts the character of CIA agent Carrie Mathison, played by actress Claire Danes.
“In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees,” declared the artists—Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and Stone—in a statement released Wednesday.
The artists painted numerous other slogans on the set, including: “This show does not represent the views of the artists” and “Black Lives Matter.”
The trio said they were hired after being approached in June by a German artist who had been contacted by “Homeland’s” production company that was looking for “Arabian street artists.”
In their initial meeting, the artists said they were “given a set of images of pro-Assad graffiti—apparently natural in a Syrian refugee camp. Our instructions were: (1) the graffiti has to be apolitical (2) you cannot copy the images because of copyright infringement (3) writing Mohamed is the greatest, is okay of course.'”
The artists wrote that they ultimately decided to take the job to seize on “our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.”
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