Wish You Were Hereis a politically charged series created by Sam Jedig in 2003 — two years after 9/11 and two years before the Danish cartoon crisis. Each work in the series is based on a portrait of a holy man or woman taken from the paintings of Sandro Botticelli. These serene, idealized Christian figures — saints, Madonnas, and sacred youths — are overpainted with black masks and layered with real hate-filled quotes taken directly from Danish newspapers and mainstream media. The texts are fragmented and incomplete, but their tone is unmistakable: “out with the foreigners,” “soon Danish,” “they’ve declared war on us”…

These statements weren’t taken from extremist leaflets, but from the everyday press. Racism spoken in neutral tones. Xenophobia normalized through repetition. In the center of each image stands a sacred, silent face — now masked. Not by faith, but by fear. Not by ritual, but by rhetoric

The mask in this series functions both as suppression and projection. By veiling Botticelli’s Christian icons with the language of exclusion, Jedig confronts the contradictions at the heart of Western identity: love and fear, compassion and control, humanism and hostility. Wish You Were Hereexposes not a single enemy, but a cultural reflex — the ease with which “the other” is created, silenced, and erased.

See more works from Sam Jedig’s ongoing Mask Series exploring identity, visibility, and transformation.

Stalke Out Of Space · Stalke Galleri · Artstamp.dk

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