Mickey’s Keffiyeh (1992), 1992
In the group show, ‘Who is Signed on the Duck,’ exhibited at the Bograshov Gallery in 1992 which related to quotations and copyright issues, I showed in a single work two very different popular icons, on the one hand Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and on the other hand the Keffiyeh, emblem of Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat.
Mickey Mouse, Disney’s cartoon character created in 1928 was a mischievous antihero in Disney’s first movies. Chairman Yasser Arafat, born in 1929 symbolised the Palestinian uprising, was at the time a controversial figure among the Israeli public.
In the early 1990’s Yasser Arafat, together with Israel Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, while secretly negotiating towards the 1993 Oslo Accords, was constantly present in the medias. It was probably why I chose to do this work.
Creating a special stamp with Mickey’s head, I then stamped it 198 times on the Keffiyeh using the green and red colours of the Palestinian flag.
The result was a strange Pop artefact.
Eventually, the work was bought by New York art collector Jerome Stern a month after the show.