This Is What We Believe

2021 -
Fine Art Prints on Archival Paper

An investigation into how economic and financial imaginaries have been shaped by visual culture, tactics, and rhetorics associated with the promulgation of belief systems, This Is What We Believe traces the deployment of politico-economic theories and theorists as a form of para-liturgical materials through which statecraft is articulated and gesticulated by politicians. In a series of (de)composed profiles, where the image of world leaders and the thinkers that have most visibly influenced them began to blur into each other, the fragmented realities of political and economic manoeuvring is revealed when the images are viewed up-close against the seeming cohesive whole of the statesperson and the persistent spectre of their invoked ideologues when the prints are viewed from afar.

The title of this work draws from the reported utterance by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, in response to a centrist-leaning suggestion at a policy meeting, allegedly slammed a copy of Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty on the table.