DPRK

It is not exagerated to say that North Korea is one of the most isolated countries in the world. It is also the last under Stalinian regime. Here, the cult of personality, first of Kim Il Sung and now of his son Kim Jong Il, has reached unprecedented levels.

This feature is an extraordinary event : it not only shows a country which has been hidden from us for more than half a century but reveals a regime that has « staged » its political identity in a way that never ceases to bewilder. We are about to discover a place not frozen in time, but outside of time, a place, litteraly, like no other on earth.

No country, no regime, past or present, has ever conceived such an environnement of ubiquitous propaganda, not even those who instigated or experienced the marxist-leninists revolutions of the last century. Not even Nazi Germany.

Philippe Chancel’s photographs show us a public sphere orchestrated to the last and finest detail. Everywhere flags, murals, slogans glorify the party ; everywhere monuments, statues, portraits glorify its leaders, the « Great » one and the « Dear » one, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In this country where slogans read « Art is the Party », where the party’s symbol is the hammer, sickle and paintbrush, the political has been transfigured into an all-encompassing æsthetic – a totalitarian aesthetic for a totalitatian regime.