all done go home

Political revolutions usually end up destroying public monuments that celebrate and commemorate the deposed leaders. all done go home comes from a graffiti text sprayed on a pedestal that originally supported the sculpture of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad. In the course of the American military intervention in 2003, it had been taken down and replaced by a modernist work of art.

Drawing on the iconography of fallen heroes and decapitated sculptures, Antonis Pittas employs the visual language of road signs to connect them to the larger issue of a shared modernist dream and its failings. In autumn 1968, the Convention on Road Traffic was signed by 78 countries during the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Vienna. The conference also produced the Convention on Road Signs and Signals. All of Europe, most of Asia and parts of Central and South America (so basically all European powers and most of their former colonial territories), are until now, and only with slight adaptations, following the regulations agreed upon during that conference, including a unified system of signs and signals.

For Pittas, road signs represent one of the physical and most prominent visual forms of state control, following aesthetic shifts in the universal perception of basic geometry defined by the period of high modernism. all done go home merges the allusion to the history of road signs with the heritage of disgraced public monuments, in order to formulate a series of pressing questions targeting the current political climate of growing populism and increasing state control in response to real and imagined security threats.