Propaganda Department

Overview

I founded Propaganda Department in 2009 as my own art and branding studio, and I have been its art director ever since. It borrows the look of vintage propaganda, in black, white and red, and turns it on power, surveillance and the media. The work comes out as prints and T-shirts, murals, stickers, posters and a few limited editions, and it has gone up in the streets of Novi Sad, Munich, Copenhagen and San Francisco.

The home page on a laptop and a phone: the studio's mark over a looping red animation.

It starts with Orwell

The studio grew out of George Orwell's books, and its names come from them: the Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, INGSOC, the Telescreen. It joins the craft of persuasion to streetwear, and its subject is control, manipulation and rebellion.

The look comes from three places: Russian propaganda posters, the street art of Shepard Fairey, and constructivism. The palette stays black and white, with red for emphasis. The studio asks the people who see its work to question the stories that authority hands them.

Beside Orwell runs a Conspiracy Theory Set, with themes such as chemtrails, a flat earth and Illuminati control.

The About page, with the studio's stickers and posters photographed in eight cities, from Berlin and Paris to San Francisco.

What the studio makes

The website sorts the work into Print, Street Art and Limited Edition. The Shop link in the menu leads to the studio's store on Threadless, where the designs are sold as prints and T-shirts.

Print

The Print section shows twelve designs, one full screen each, and every design opens on its own page with the story behind it. Half of them borrow from fiction about control. The Ministry of Truth puts an eagle with a bayonet under Orwell's ministry. Trust the Media borrows the bluntness of the 1988 film They Live. Under His Eye draws on The Handmaid's Tale and shows a shattered eye.

Others play with conspiracy theories. New World Order puts a flying saucer where the eye sits on the pyramid of the dollar bill. Chemtrails carries the line "Make Earth habitable again". Tear Gas reads "Controlling riots since 1914". Opposition, a knife wrapped in a rose, is signed "Opposing since 2009".

The Print page, from New World Order to Chemtrails.

Every print has its own page. The Ministry of Truth: an eagle gripping a bayonet, with a red banner of paradoxical slogans.

Street Art

Street Art collects what the studio puts on walls: murals, posters and stickers, in Novi Sad and abroad. Each piece has a page with the story of where it went up and why.

• We Were Pioneers. A mural in Munich, drawn the way one of our school teachers might have drawn the Yugoslav pioneers, the movement every child joined after first grade. At about 2 a.m., three quarters of the way through, the police stopped us: graffiti was banned on that wall. When I said we came from Serbia, the officer told me to finish it when there were no police around.
• Blinded. A poster in Nyhavn, Copenhagen: a smiling family in blindfolds, over Carstensen's line that when people are amusing themselves, they do not think about politics.
• Fight for Media Freedom. Put up in Ljubljana against political pressure on Slovenia's media. It inspired the Break the Muzzle T-shirt, and part of its proceeds goes to Global Citizen.
• Exhale. Posters of figures in gas masks, about the polluted air of Belgrade and Sarajevo, sent out to Serbia and Bosnia.
• In the Sign of the Octopus. A sticker on a mailbox in Pacific Heights, San Francisco.
• Tear Gas. Large stickers put up at night in Düsseldorf.
• Breche die Grenzen. A sticker of children's faces behind barbed wire, which I took to the Berlin Wall Memorial in November, 35 years after the Wall fell. "Break the borders" is aimed at Europe's new walls of policy and paperwork, which hold refugees in limbo.

Blinded in Nyhavn, Copenhagen, and Fight for Media Freedom in Ljubljana.

Two murals have their own pages in this portfolio. Power To The People was painted as the fifth wall of the Chain Reaction mural initiative in Novi Sad, and it was lost when its building was torn down. First Communion is a paste-up of two girls gossiping, drawn in the style of 1950s illustration. The mural is gone, and the image lives on as a label for one of the region's wineries.

The Power To The People page. Its image lives on in posters and on wine labels.

Limited Edition

Limited Edition holds four pieces. Two are wines. In 2022 Bjelica Winery asked to put Power To The People on the bottles of its Graffiti Collection, which the winery shares with Novi Sad's sister cities, among them Budva, Changchun, Dortmund, Modena and Norwich. First Communion later joined the same collection.

The third is a metal brooch. A friend who made jewellery needed a logo, so I designed it, and in return she helped me make a small run of brooches. They went at random into orders of Propaganda Department T-shirts.

The fourth is Vote, a poster for Serbia's 2023 election: a couple casting their ballots, over the line "Za manje zlo", for the lesser evil.

Limited editions: the Power To The People wine from Bjelica Winery's Graffiti Collection, and on the phone the Vote poster for Serbia's 2023 election.

My role

Propaganda Department is my own studio. I have run it since August 2009, self-employed, as its art director. I also do the work itself: the graphic design, the illustration and the murals.

How it is made

My tools are Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and CorelDraw.

For murals I use a paste-up method I worked out by studying the work of Shepard Fairey and his crew. I print the whole mural on A4 sheets with a home laser printer and tape them together on the floor. On the wall, spray adhesive makes the paper stick to any surface. Then comes the hardest part: cutting the paper on the wall with scalpels, so the print itself becomes the stencil, and spraying acrylic paint through it. The result has exact proportions and fine detail, and it needs no laser cutter or years of street experience.

First Communion going up: the printed sheets are pressed onto the wall before the stencils are cut.

Some passers-by called the method unfair, too technical and too accessible. I took that as the aim: a way of making large murals that anyone willing to prepare can use.

I have also tried augmented reality on a wall. For the Under His Eye mural I used the SketchAR iOS app: the phone's LIDAR sensor maps the wall, the app lays the image over it on screen, and I traced it by hand.

The website runs on Google Sites. Each print page links to the design in the Threadless shop, and the street pieces that became shirts carry a Buy T-shirt button.

In numbers

• The studio has run since August 2009.
• The Print section shows twelve designs.
• The Street Art section shows nine works, from Novi Sad to Munich, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Düsseldorf and San Francisco.
• Limited Edition holds four pieces: two wines, a metal brooch and an election poster.
• The About page shows the work in eight cities: Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, New York City and Budapest.

Related work

A third mural of mine has its own page: the Freemasonry Barbershop Mural, made for Čarolija Berberaj, a barber shop in Novi Sad, in the style of old Freemasonry illuminations.

Every page of the studio's site ends with "Made in Neusatz 2024AD" and a link to Neusatz, my world-building project about Novi Sad.

Gallery