Decoding Dictatorial Statues

The body politic of public statues, from position to gesture, and the legacy of whose story is told and why

In the words of Hannah Arendt, "Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image." From South Africa to Charlottesville, heated discussions over statues, their removal and their vandalism frequently make the news. Decoding Dictatorial Statues, a project by Korean graphic design researcher Ted Hyunhak Yoon, is a collection of images and texts exploring the visual rhetoric of statues in public space. How can we decode statues and their languages, their objecthood and materiality, their role as media icons and their voice in political debates? The book responds to urgent concerns about the representation of our heritage by not only asking us to examine what history gets put on a pedestal, but to also consider the visual rhetoric of the statue itself.