No-Necked Monsters: Bogus Norwegian Creates Brilliant Politi-Art

I bumped into these eloquent artworks while researching an article for MCV a couple of months back. They were attached to the end of the Y.E.A.H. HIV information page with the explanation:

Last month the Norwegian diplomat Charung Gollar was asked to present the UN with a graphic showing the main problems in the world in 2004, He presented a set of eight pictures entitled "The Power of Stars" and was applauded for the simplicity of his idea. In spite of having no pretension at all, his work was presented to participate on the Nobel Prize of Politic Marketing.

Unfortunately, this turns out to be a load of bollocks.

The actual title of the works is Meet The World and the artist, Icaro Doria had this to say via BrazilianArtists.net

The magazine Revista Grande Reportagem is a Hard Journalism magazine, on the same line as the Times. The idea was to bring across the concept that the magazine offers profound journalism about topics of real importance to the world of today.
This is how we thought of the concept Meet the World.

We started to research relevant, global, and current facts and, thus, came up with the idea to put new meanings to the colours of the flags. We used real data taken from the websites of Amnesty International and the UNO.

The campaign has been running in Portugal since January 2005. There are eight flags that portray very current topics like the division of opinions about the war in Iraq in the United States, the violence against women in Africa, the social inequality in Brazil, the drug trafficking in Columbia, Aids and malaria in Angola, etc.

With regards to the email presenting the campaign as being done by a Norwegian diplomat, this information is completely wrong. There is no Norwegian diplomat called Charung Gollar, there was no presentation in the UNO, and the campaign is not called ‘The Power of the Stars’. This was all invented and is going round the world via email.

That’s it, basically.

ICARO DORIA