(ongoing since 2007)
Stamps are small, official images. They record a nation’s victories, heroic moments, public achievements, and celebrated figures. They reflect what a country chooses to remember—what it wants to show and who it claims to be.
But what about what is lost? What about those who are not remembered?
On the back of these official stamps—on the glue side, where there is no limit to reproduction—I make my own versions. My own memory. Unofficial, fragile, and limited in edition.
Each stamp becomes a quiet contradiction: printed in series of one hundred, displayed alone, in pairs, or in groups of four. Together, they carry what I cannot be proud of—what has been erased, destroyed, or ignored. The murdered, the forgotten, the discarded pages of history. A visual archive of what the official stamps do not show.
This project has been ongoing since 2007. Parts of the series have been shown in the Thessaloniki Biennale, as well as exhibitions in Stockholm, Bruges, Karlsruhe, and a solo show in Bergen. In 2021, Kunsthalle 3,14 (Bergen) published a book dedicated to this work.
Jinoos Taghizadeh 