Pin The Prick I
Joseph Stalin, 1902
The artwork combines 3844 glass head pins into one image. Some quite infamous 'pricks' in history started their careers as quite ordinary and often just young tugs. It raises the question: what if we –when they were youngsters– would have been able to pin them down as the infamous 'pricks' they would become later in life… It's a question we can ask ourselves. The least you can say is they have a blood red handprint all over them and should be depicted in a frame with the color of blood.
This one is depicting the quite infamous Joseph Stalin, who started off as a regular street tug and co-organiser of strikes and riots.
The artwork is based on a police photograph of Stalin, taken in 1902, when he was 23 years old.
In any recounting of the horrific deeds of Joseph Stalin, know this: You'd better settle in, because the list is long, painful to recite, and rife with incalculable suffering and death. Stalin grew his power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s after the Russian Revolution. He later became the unquestioned and de facto dictator of the Soviet Union and was shockingly ruthless when it came to killing his people.
Stalin clearly has his place among history's most murderous ideologues. The numbers of dead under Stalin's rule (what came to be known as Stalinism) are somewhat disputed, given the secretive and oft-times sketchy record-keeping during his terrorist reign. But through his direct order, millions in the Soviet Union died by execution, and more perished in labor camps. Millions more starved to death through his ill-conceived and often purposely cruel policies.
Building the artwork in pictures
