Toppled is an image study about the fallen statues of Saddam Hussein based on a large archive of photographs that Göttke collected on the internet.A close reading of these images reveals an astonishing amount of information about what happened in Iraq, the attitudes of people interacting with the statues and the use of the statues photographs in the media.
We see the statues’ desecration and humiliation and their transformation from manifestations of Saddam’s totalitarian power into media icons for the defeat of his regime. The statues’ expulsion from the public sphere, the appropriation into his enemies’ museums, and their symbolic reinterpretation in anti-war protests is also becoming visible.
The work exists in different forms. In the image lectures Göttke draws out each time different aspects of the project, contextualizing the projects development as well. For the exhibition at Fotodok in Utrecht in December 2010 Göttke presented parts of the raw material - newspaper articles as well as two large series of digital images - as a base layer for the print-out of parts of the book. The final book is the most complete form, containing all details and the varied aspects of the images and adding theoretical themes from art history, image culture and media analysis.