Arabian Street Artists Infiltrate ‘Homeland’ with Subversive Graffiti

In a recent episode (Season 5, Episode 2) of Showtime’s hit series ‘Homeland,’ actress Carrie Mathison is escorted by a Hezbollah commander past a wall in a fictional Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon covered with Arabic graffiti. Scrawled across the show’s fabricated walls are phrases in Arabic such as: ‘Homeland’ is racist, There is no ‘Homeland’ and ‘Homeland’ is not a show.

Three artists, Cairo-based Heba Amin, Caram Kapp and Stone, take credit for the incendiary phrases. The group was first contacted in June by a friend who was active in the street art scene in Berlin. The production company that later hired them gave instructions to bolster the aesthetic authenticity of the ‘Homeland’ set on the outskirts of Berlin by tagging graffiti which supported President Bashar al-Assad of Syria; they were instructed to make their own writing apolitical.

The show has been heavily criticized in the past for their distortions of reality in the Middle East. The artists hoped to protest the false and misleading stereotypes in the series, admonishing ‘Homeland’s’ characterized portrayal of Muslims.

Amin told Washington Post, “it’s very important for us to address the idea that this kind of stereotyping is very dangerous because it helps form people’s perceptions of an entire region, a huge region, which in turn affects foreign policy. It was a way to claim back our image.”

The three artists’ were able to easily vent their political dissent because they stated that there seemed to be no stringent fact-checking on set. Additionally, they had noticed linguistic Arabic inaccuracies in the past. During the two day installation ‘Homeland’ set designers were so busy that the artists’ actions went unnoticed – their graffiti went unchallenged.

For more details take a look at NY Times article here.

Check out artist Heba Amin’s website here.